The enormity of my debt to Tony Benn - without whom ...

Writing the last two posts on Tony Benn has reminded me of the enormity of my debt to him, and I think it's time I went public on recording my thanks to him.

I'm not just talking about the rich source of videotaped data his speeches supplied for the research on which my first book on public speaking (Our Masters' Voices) was based, grateful though I am to him for that.

But he played a much more direct part, albeit unwittingly, in changing my life for good - many years before I ever got interested in public speaking.

My first proper academic job

First of all, he was responsible for providing me with two whole years of gainful employment at a crucial and formative stage in my career.

Harold Wilson had appointed Anthony Wedgewood-Benn, as he was still known in the mid 1960s, to be Postmaster General, a job that included responsibility for the country's publicly owned telephone system.

The Labour government was under pressure to supply free and/or subsidised telephones to the elderly - but then as now, research is always cheaper than action because it provides an 'respectable' way of postponing hugely expensive demands on the public purse. So Postmaster General Benn decided set up a two year project to look into the problem.

Conveniently for him, one of his friends and neighbours at the time was a leading expert on old age and poverty, Professor Peter Townsend, who'd recently been appointed to the first chair in sociology at the new University of Essex - where, conveniently for me, I'd just started research for a PhD on the sociology of suicide.

So a two-year Post Office research fellowship was set up at Essex to investigate 'communication and isolation in old age' and, if I hadn't been lucky enough to get the job, it's unlikely I'd have ever have got anywhere near to completing the doctorate, let alone embarking on an academic career.

My first encounter with conversation analysis

But it wasn't just the two years of salary that came my way thanks to Mr Benn, but the initial work on the project led to a discovery that would have a much more profound impact on my life's work. Dorothy Smith had just moved to Essex from Berkeley, where she'd come across a young graduate student called Harvey Sacks, who'd recently finished a PhD based on tape-recorded telephone conversations on a helpline at a suicide prevention agency in California.

This held out the prospect of being able to kill both my research birds (into telephones and suicide) with a single stone. The only trouble was that, insofar as anyone in British sociology had heard of Sacks in 1968, his work was already being written off as far too methodologically innovative, daring, eccentric and controversial to be acceptable by the mainstream of the discipline.

Fascinated though I was by it, I didn't have the guts to try to sell the idea of doing something similar to my Post Office sponsors or to my senior colleagues at Essex - so I ended up playing safe and did a thoroughly boring, though worthy enough, survey of a national random sample over 65 year-olds.

Meanwhile, Harvey Sacks, along with Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson were beginning to attract wider recognition as founders of the new field of conversation analysis. So, by the time I eventually finished my PhD thesis, the gist of the final chapter concluded with the modest proposal that all hitherto existing sociology, from Durkheim's Le Suicide onwards, was methodologically flawed and that the future lay with ethnomethodology and conversation analysis.

At the time, I didn't have much of a clue as to how you would actually get to such a promised land, let alone what the results would look like if ever you got there. But it eventually took me into research aimed at applying the methodology of conversation analysis to more formal settings like court rooms and, eventually political speeches and public speaking more generally.

And all because of Tony Benn

If Tony Benn had never been Postmaster General and if he hadn't known Peter Townsend, none of this would ever have happened - which is why I'm so thankful to him for his hidden, but nonetheless profound and far-reaching, impact on my life and work.

An example of rhetorical virtuosity from rhetoric denier Tony Benn

Readers from outside the UK have probably never heard of Tony Benn, and quite a few here will be too young to remember just how effective an orator he was. So, having looked at his 'rhetorical denial' in the previous post I thought it might be useful to show a video illustrating his rhetorical virtuosity in action.

This particular clip comes from a Labour Party conference in the early 1980s, when he was at the height of his powers and a prime mover in his party's electorally disastrous lurch to the left after Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979 (on which, see also HERE).

It shows how he was so in tune with the way the audience was reacting that a slight response to his news about that day's record stock market fall was enough to prompt him to break off from what he was going to say and launch into an impressively constructed contrast, each part of which ends with the phrase ‘the wealth of the nation’:

BENN: For a moment between debates the stock market had its biggest fall was it within living memory 30 points – and uhh that is an indication that indeed it was rather appropriate that ITN was swinging
[A] from the stock market where they’re gambling with the wealth of the nation
[B] to Brighton where we represent the people who create the wealth of the nation.

ICONIC GESTURES
The sequence also provides more examples of the way 'iconic gestures' come before the word(s) to which they relate, as discussed in earlier posts (HERE and HERE): Benn's swinging hand movements get under way quite a while before the word ‘swinging’ comes out of his mouth – whereupon his hands start moving to his left just before the words ‘stock market’ and to his right just before he say’s the word ‘Brighton’.

Then the slightest pause after ‘create’ followed by the coordinated downward movements of his head and hands are reminiscent of the precision with which an orchestral conductor brings in the whole of the chorus on time – and the audience starts applauding just before he's finished repeating ‘the wealth of the nation’.

SURFING APPLAUSE
But, as was typical of Benn, he didn’t stop there but carried on trying to ‘surf’ the applause - not that he says anything more important than "and that is also-" and "now uhh-") while the applause is still preventing his words from being heard - for more on which, see HERE andHERE).

HISTORICAL CONTEXT
One point of interest is that, as the applause gets under way, the camera switches away the from the audience to focus on Benn's former Labour cabinet colleague and arch-enemy of the day, Denis Healey, who had just narrowly defeated Mr Benn in an election for the party's deputy-leadership - but who seems to be thoroughly enjoying this particular line.

Another is the fact that a stock market fall as pitifully small as 30 points was treated as such dramatic news in those days!

Rhetorical denial and the mysterious case of Tony Benn

About a year ago, I wrote a post on 'rhetorical denial' - a term I use to refer to the way in which outstanding orators don’t always like their technical ability being noticed or analysed by others - and will sometimes use a rhetorical device or two to deny that they're any good at public speaking.

The classic example comes from the forum speech in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, during which, having used pretty well every rhetorical device known to man in one of the most famous speeches in English literature, Mark Antony uses yet another contrast to tell us that he's not much good at speaking in public:

I am no orator as Brutus it, but just a plain simple man.

You can read a fuller discussion of this and other examples HERE, where I also had this to say about how one of the most accomplished political speakers of his day (25 years ago) had reacted to my book Our Master's Voices:

THE CASE OF TONY BENN

'(The book) included a chapter on charisma, part of which used the rhetorical ability of Tony Benn, then at the forefront of the Labour Party’s lurch towards the far left, as an example of how technical skill at oratory can get politicians into prominent positions. Apparently, he didn’t like this at all, and went around telling people that audiences didn’t applaud him because of how he said things but because they agreed so much with what he was saying.

'Years later, both of us appeared on the same television programme, for which I had recorded a piece illustrating the main rhetorical techniques with video clips from political speeches. When asked what he thought of this, Mr Benn replied “Well, it’s rubbish”' - and continued with the rather powerful simile that you'll hear in the clip below.

My point, and the point that people like Benn fail to grasp, is that less accomplished speakers (i.e. most of us) would have had to struggle to come up anything as neat as this off the top of our heads in an interview - though we can learn to get better at using such techniques once we know what they are.

Unfortunately, we weren't both in the same studio at the same time, so I never got the chance to debate the issue with him face to face.

I've just unearthed a clip of some of the relevant excerpts from Channel 4's The Talking Show(c. 1993) which includes part of Benn's rhetorical denial and my response to it - which I wouldn't want to change much if I had the chance to have another go at it today (other than the ravages of hair loss and other signs of old age that have set in during the past 16 years).

In the original post, my question was whether Barack Obama's brilliance at oratory would lead to any rhetorical denial from him or his aides(which it didn't).

The question in the months between now and the general election is whether we'll hear any rhetorical denial from the Cameron camp, given that he's the most technically proficient orator among the current crop of British political party leaders.

Road signs of the week

Today's Liberal England blog has a picture of the 'Road Sign of the Week' featuring an exclamation mark above the word 'Badgers', plus a link to an even more mysterious one with a solitary exclamation mark on its own.

It reminded me of the first time I ever managed to get anything published in Private Eye. After decades of trying to extract £10 from Lord Gnome, I sent in a picture of the advice on the village sign at Silverstone in Northamptonshire.

As each next issue came out with no sign of my photo, I became increasingly depressed at yet another failure to get something into print.

Then, in the week of that year's British Grand Prix, it turned out that they hadn't lost it after all, the picture appeared in their 'I spy' slot and my cheque from Lord Gnome arrived (and adorned the wall of our loo until it was too late to pay it into the bank).

Since then, however, I think Northamptonshire CC must have changed their village signs, because I'm pretty sure that my version bore the even more suitable legend 'Please drive slowly'.

Brain drain again?

There's an interesting piece in today's Daily Telegraph claiming that the brain drain from the UK to the USA is getting out of hand and that our universities need more money to help them stem the tide.

It brought back a couple of memories from my former life that make me wonder whether American academic salaries and working conditions really are any more tempting than they were 25 years ago.

In 1984, I spent a semester as a visiting professor at an American university, where I was paid per week exactly the same as I was paid per month (at the top of the readership scale) in Oxford - and I only had to teach for three hours a week.

After Margaret Thatcher had been prime minister for about ten years, I also remember being stunned by a press report claiming that the number of British academics who had migrated to the North America since she had come to power was greater than the number of Jewish intellectuals who had fled in the same direction from Nazi Germany during the 1930s.

It's too long ago for me to be able to recall which newspaper published the story, or how they'd worked out the numbers.

But I haven't forgotten getting the point into one of Paddy Ashdown's leadership speeches at a Liberal Democrat conference - where it produced a collective gasp and fulsome burst of applause from the audience.