The Economist December 18th 2021 Holiday specials 27
britishsocialhistoryP OCOCK’S
P EN PALS
T
he letterscame every day. Sometimes a dozen,
often more. The librarians of the University of Sus
sex were accustomed to a steady trickle of outside in
terest: they were the keepers of Virginia Woolf’s papers
and Rudyard Kipling’s. But suddenly, in the early sum
mer of 1981, the post bags bulged. They all ended up in
one roomof the library, where mounds of correspon
dence already teetered on every surface. And still more
turned up. At Christmas, cards arrived, scores of them.
The postmarks fitted no pattern: one day London,
then Loughton; Lowestoft and Liverpool; Weybridge
and Whitby. Someone wrote from Kirkwall, the main
town on Orkney—25 miles off the north coast of Scot
land. The correspondents were all anxious to reach
one man, no matter that he only popped into the li
brary for an hour or two each week to paw through the
choicest epistles. “Dear Professor Pocock,” one neatly
typed missive opened. Another struck a more informal
tone: “Hi professor”.
The professor in question, David Pocock, was not
an obvious tribune of the masses. Sharp and sharp
tongued, a product of Cambridge and Oxford, he was
by then in his fifties and lived alone with his cat. He
had made his career studying Gujarati society and his
reputation on campus as the host of gatherings for fac
ulty and the brightest students. For his “black party”,
he covered the walls in crepe paper and served only
black velvet (Guinness and champagne) and caviar.
The lives of his letterwriters were rather different.
One was a nursery nurse from Rochdale in her early
30s; another a retired bus driver. There was a carpenter
from Cardiff, a housewife from Great Yarmouth and a
retired travel agent’s clerk from Orpington. Eric AlliB RIGHTON
The virtues of an unrepresentative sample