Honorary Graduates

Orations and responses

Polly Toynbee

Oration given on 15 July 1999

Chancellor, the Senate of the University has resolved that the degree of Doctor of the University be conferred upon POLLY TOYNBEE.

The renowned Soviet cinema director Sergei Eisenstein is best known for films such as “Strike”, “Battleship Potemkin” and “October”; but few remember that he began his artistic career in the theatre. Indeed, he describes in his memoirs how, in the spirit of the new socialist realism, he staged a drama about the working class in the smelting shop of a huge steel mill, with the audience seated on sundry pieces of equipment. The climax of the drama came when the coking oven disgorged its molten contents. It was  the moment when the appreciative audience should have demonstrated its approval of the play. Unfortunately, wrote Eisenstein, the entire experiment was a colossal artistic flop!

It was a flop because the workers regarded what they were seeing as simply a routine part of their daily existence: intellectuals and party ideologues might enthuse about it, but not the workers themselves.

One was reminded of Eisenstein’s ill-starred experiment when reading a passage in Polly Toynbee’s book “A Working Life”, first published in 1971. In it, she describes the lives of working people in a range of occupations through what sociologists would term “participant observation”. This means that she herself took jobs, sometimes with and quite often without, the knowledge of management, and afterwards shared her experiences with a wider public. Had any of her co-workers afterwards read what she wrote, she or he would have found an account that accurately described her or his working life, yet at the same time made observations with which they may or may not have agreed, but which they would have recognised as being sympathetic and understanding about their predicament.

Polly Toynbee sat in on interviews that youth employment officers were holding in a Lancashire town. She herself worked on the production line of a factory that produced layered cream cakes. Later, she took a job as a hospital orderly, then worked in a car components factory. She spent some time in the scouring department of the Port Sunlight Soap Works, packing Vim and a lavatory cleaner that some here may remember, called Dot.

It was not just the perception of a middle-class young woman studying at Oxford that these were repetitive, stultifying, boring, monotonous jobs; from conversations with other workers, who were unaware of her true identity, it was clear that they thought so, too. However, unlike Polly Toynbee, they were destined to remain in such work for the rest of their lives, and, in her book, she raises very pertinent questions about the notion of the dignity of labour.

There was also a spell in the army, visits to a coal mine in Yorkshire and to a steel works in Rotherham. Which is where Einsenstein comes in ….

Steel is no longer made in the Rother Valley, but at that time there were still families where sons had followed fathers into the smelting shops for generations:  “A great deal of their conversation was about steel,” Polly Toynbee observed, “the old firm and the new methods that they had heard about. The drama and importance of steel had entered their blood” – in other words, the drama lay in their real work, and not in a fictionalised account, however realistic one attempted to make it.

In that early book, Polly Toynbee wrote about working lives without condescension, without idealisation, but with sympathy and sensitivity and, where appropriate, with indignation. And it is these characteristics that are present in all her work throughout a long and distinguished journalistic career.

Having joined The Observer newspaper in 1968, she stayed there until 1971, after which she was, briefly editor of The Washington Monthly and then it was back to The Observer, before becoming a columnist for The Guardian newspaper for the next eleven years.

Throughout this period, Polly Toynbee was covering a wide range of political and social issues in the daily and weekly press, but she also found time to write several books on sensitive topics that brought important questions before a wider public. Two deserve special mention. The first is a detailed portrait of the London Hospital at work; and the other, called Lost Children, is the story of adopted children searching for their mothers, a poignant issue that her book helped to bring into the realm of public discussion.

Polly Toynbee made a very brief foray into party politics, when she stood, unsuccessfully, in a parliamentary election in 1983; but she was soon back to full-time journalism and in 1988 she moved from The Guardian to the BBC as its Social Affairs Editor, where she stayed for the next seven years before going to The Independent in 1995. Three years later, she was back at The Guardian, where she remains still today as a versatile, often provocative, but invariably well-informed, hard-hitting columnist who produces two or three closely-argued articles each week on a wide variety of topics, but mostly on social and political issues.

It is a measure of the esteem in which Polly Toynbee is held by both her peers and the public that she was the recipient of the Catherine Packenham Award for Journalism in 1975, gained British Press Awards in 1977, in 1982 and again in 1986 (when she was named as Columnist of the Year). In 1996 she was voted Commentator of the Year by the BBC’s “What the Papers Say”, the same year in which she was named Magazine Writer of the Year, to be followed in 1997 by the George Orwell Prize.

Nor has distinction been confined exclusively to the realm of journalism: it extends to public life, too. She was appointed a member of the Home Office Committee on Obscenity and Censorship, to the Department of Health Advisory Committee on the Ethics of Xenotransplantation, and also as the sole lay member of the Department of Health inquiry into the failures of the breast-cancer screening programme in Devon. She is also a governor of the London School of Economics.

Life, however, has not always been kind to Polly Toynbee. Her husband, a journalist like herself, Peter Jenkins, died in 1992. Having combined motherhood, a successful career and marriage, she now had to cope with raising a step-daughter and her own three children, as well as with a full-time job – something that she has accomplished with typical fortitude and courage.

The social sciences at Essex, right from the University’s inception, have been concerned with the blight of poverty. If Polly Toynbee has a single issue close to her heart then that is it. She abhors any meanness of spirit, meanness of purse or meanness of imagination, that impede improvement in the lives of the less well-off and disadvantaged. So long as it is necessary, and so long as she is able, Polly Toynbee will doubtless go on combating bureaucracy and fighting on behalf of the poor. We wish her well in her endeavour.

Chancellor, I present to you POLLY TOYNBEE.