Profile: Author Dominic Sandbrook

Through a curious coincidence in programming, or perhaps by deliberate design, Jeremy Clarkson and Top Gear were immediately followed on BBC2 on a recent Sunday night by a second programme about the motor car presented by another Chipping Norton-based celebrity.

The historian Dominic Sandbrook, who is also well known as a newspaper columnist and critic, argued that the British car industry had been seen off by the 1980s as a consequence of management incompetence and the greater efficiency, imagination and flair of our German rivals.

He noted the irony that it was through British help that the principal German company, Volkswagen, was put back on its feet at the end of the Second World War.

As the author of an excellent series of books charting Britain’s progress in the post-war years, Sandbrook was ideally placed to sound off on the subject.

It is ‘his’ period, even though he was only born fairly late into it, in 1974. “Ten days before the October election,” readers are informed with precision in the brief biography on the jacket of his latest best-selling slab of history Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain 1974-1979, the first part of the title hinting at an engagement with popular culture (it’s the title of a mawkish Terry Jacks’ No 1 hit) that is a pleasing feature of his work. Its occasionally light-hearted tone — another one — is indicated by the last sentence of the biography: “He lives in Chipping Norton but, sad to say, has never been invited to join the infamous phone-hacking set.”

It seems undiplomatic to probe further in his interview with The Oxford Times. Besides, there is much else to hear about. He talks at his suggestion (though it would also have been the interviewer’s) at the Chequers in Chippy. This traditional pub is famous for its Fuller’s beers (indeed, is North Oxfordshire Camra’s 2013 pub of the year). Dominic chooses Coca-Cola, however, to accompany a fish-and-chip lunch.

Discussion starts with Seasons in the Sun (Allen Lane, £30) and its dedication to his mother, Hilary, who “died suddenly” (the acknowledgements say) in May 2011. The cause, Dominic explains, was a fatal stroke she suffered ten minutes before kick-off at a derby match between Wolves and West Bromwich Albion. The Sandbrook family are from Bridgnorth in Shropshire, where his father Rhys still works as a self-employed chartered surveyor, and Wolves are the local team.

“I was the fan in the first place,” says Dominic, “and my mother and father joined me in it, as sometimes happens.” One of two children (his brother Alex is a drama teacher in London), Dominic was educated at the local prep school, Birchfield, and later won a scholarship to Malvern College. Here the early interest he had taken in history, with Robin Hood, King Arthur and the like, developed into an obsession.

“I have always read history books for pleasure.” Looking back on what now might seem a guilty pleasure, he also admits to voracious reading of Jeffrey Archer’s novels — “they seemed like a window on to a more adult world” — and the detective novels of Agatha Christie which maintain a special place in his affection.

“By the close of them, as the murderer is about to be revealed, you are turning the pages with febrile enthusiasm, for the pure pleasure of finding out who dunnit.”

Professionally, too, he sees value in the books for the insights they give on 50 years of a changing Britain. Discussing novels leads Dominic to a subject that clearly exercises him considerably, what Shakespeare called “the bubble reputation”. He cites Iris Murdoch and Angus Wilson as novelists confidently forecast to last but now almost completely forgotten. “

It can be the same with politicians. Harold Wilson bestrode the politics of the 1960s and early seventies, but what mark has he left? Surprisingly little.”

Dominic went up to Balliol College, Oxford, in 1993 to read history and French. He was conscious of being in a student society changing from the political culture that had characterised the 1980s to a more ironic and cynical approach to life. “It was obsessed with class. Where you went to school mattered. I disliked that kind of thing. I had friends from all backgrounds.”

Determined to gain a first (he did), he largely eschewed extra-curricular activities that took him away from his books, though he expanded on what had been a schoolboy interest in theatre by appearing in two plays, in one of which (Jean Anouilh’s Becket) he played the title role.

“I was glad I did it,” he says. “I should have done more of that sort of thing.” He acknowledges its use in helping in the ‘performances’ he is obliged to give in his TV work, which besides the recent car industry programme has included a four-part BBC2 series The Seventies, broadcast last year, and a soon-to-be-seen three-part history of the Cold War. On the subject of addressing a distant, hidden camera in a busy city thoroughfare, he speaks with asperity born of experience.

“You can look as if you are on day release from the asylum.” He speaks, too, of “the skill required to talk to three million people as if you are talking to them individually”. After Oxford, Dominic studied for his masters at St Andrew’s University and then (“continuing my tour of our older universities”) he went to Jesus College, Cambridge, for three years’ work on his PhD.

His thesis was on Eugene McCarthy, who stood against Lyndon B. Johnson for the Democratic nomination in the 1968 Presidential election and so nearly defeated him that Johnson pulled out. This was published as his first book. Three years of teaching history followed, at Sheffield University.

The department was headed by Ian Kershaw, whose acclaimed two-volume biography of Hitler (at once popular and authoritative) suggested a course that Dominic’s own career might take. And it did. Moving to London, where he soon met wife-to-be Catherine, he embarked on his series of books about post-war Britain. Shrewdly masterminded by his agent Andrew Wylie (known in the trade as ‘the Jackal’) his career prospered from the start, with enthusiastic reviews for his first book setting the trend for the others that followed.

With Catherine appointed to a job teaching English at Oxford Brookes University, he moved with her to Chipping Norton in 2006. They married the following year at Balliol College. Catherine is now in the English department at Leicester University. Dominic, who works mainly from home, is able as a result to spend quality time with their son, Arthur, who is nearly two.

For the future, Dominic is keen for more work on television. He is also researching fifth book in his history of post-war Britain, which takes the story into the Thatcher years and, for the first time, a period within his memory. “It’s harder to write objectively about a period you remember so well,” he says. “But it’s incredibly exciting, too.”