Tony Benn - 'Bogeyman' and Burford

When they gather, as they do each spring, to march through Burford, Tony Benn will be remembered at an event he rarely missed.

The beautiful Cotswolds town, deep in the Tory heartland of West Oxfordshire represented in the House of Commons by David Cameron, might have been an unlikely place to win the heart of Old Labour’s elder statesman.

But for one day in May, he would make a pilgrimage there to attend Levellers Day, a day to recall three radical members of Cromwell’s New Model Army who were shot in Burford.

It has long been a magnet for hundreds of left-wing activists and Civil War enthusiasts, along with those who just wanted to witness the rhetorical skills that would allow one of the great post-war Parliamentarians to link the story of the Levellers — who had wanted religious toleration and votes and legal equality for all free men — with the failures of modern day capitalism and threat of nuclear war.

Just as he would grin widely at his move from “the most dangerous man in Britain” to “national treasure”, so Mr Benn would recall how perceptions of Levellers Day and his involvement in it were to change with the passage of time.

During an interview at his home in Holland Park, he chuckled as he recalled the trouble that marked the beginning of Levellers Day in the mid-1970s, with the then Archbishop of Canterbury being dragged into the row.

The first one had been a low-key affair with just 80 people turning up to listen to the Communist Dudley Edwards.

But it was the thought of Mr Benn, the bogeyman of the left, pontificating from the pulpit of the church, that caused uproar and talk of blasphemy.

Mr Benn told me how the then local MP, Douglas Hurd, attempted to get the Department of Education to withdraw its grant to the WEA (Workers’ Educational Association) over its involvement.

When Mr Benn arrived early in the morning he found the distressed vicar in a plastic apron removing the words “Balls to Benn” from the side of the church.

“It was the most curious soundbite I have ever come across,” he said, refilling his pipe.

Mr Benn, who died last week aged 88, had been in an unusually nostalgic mood when we had met back in 2008.

He had been about to bring one of his ‘Audience with Tony Benn’ evenings to Oxford’s Apollo Theatre, which would be preceded by a speaking engagement at Oxford Labour Club.

Somehow our conversation moved to his early memories of Oxford, where he had read PPE.

He had arrived at New College, aged 17, while awaiting his call-up to the RAF.

After training as a pilot — he gained his pilot’s wings two months before the defeat of Germany — Mr Benn returned to Oxford in 1946, becoming President of the Oxford Union the following year.

Mr Benn’s one-time Labour colleague, who was to become one of his most bitter rivals, Roy Jenkins, would freely admit that failing to win the Presidency of the Oxford Union left him “almost as cast down” as the fall of France.

Mr Benn, however, attached little importance to this early achievement. He would never share the sentimental attachment to the Oxford Union that the likes of Michael Heseltine, Edward Heath or William Hague admitted to feeling.

But, for him, Oxford held the key to his future happiness and what he would become. For it was here he met Caroline, the woman he described as “by far the greatest influence on my life” and “the most powerful partner that anyone could hope to have”.

In 1948 a young American that Mr Benn had met in the United States, wrote to tell him he should meet a friend who was coming over to a summer school in Oxford.

He met the young woman from Cincinnati over tea at Worcester College.

“We met and talked, and over the next few days we met every day,” he would recall. “Our last time together was to have been August 11, when I had to return to London and she was going to France on her way back to Cincinnati, where she was due to enrol at the university for her MA degree involving a thesis on Milton.

“I realised that I would never see her again and that this was my last chance to propose marriage. So just after midnight, when we had had an evening together and I was walking her back to her lodgings, we passed the church where the Woodstock and Banbury Roads converge, saw three benches in front of it and suggested we sit for a moment, carefully choosing the centre one so I could always remember where I had proposed.

“Then I asked her to marry me and after a pause of five seconds she said ‘yes’, and we wandered joyfully through Oxford planning to have five children.”

Many years later he bought the bench from Oxford City Council for £10, putting it in his garden in front of her ashes.

The death of his closest political ally and wife of 51 years in 2000 had a devastating effect on Mr Benn, with the seventh volume of his memoirs giving a heart-rending account of her battle with cancer.

His links with New College would continue.

Sir Curtis Price, the Warden of New College, said: “He was one of the most famous of all our graduates and remained a loyal alumnus throughout his career. He often returned and was particularly pleased that two of his grandchildren, Emily and Daniel, followed him to New College and that at least one of them is thinking of a career in politics.”

He was altogether more ambivalent when it came to the Oxford Union.

“I work on the principle that the Oxford Union can get anyone they want — Bill Clinton and all the rest,“ he told me. “But many places cannot get speakers. When I go back it seems to be a throwback to the 1930s.”

But his attitude was to soften and fittingly he returned to address the Oxford Union only last year.

Though aged 87, he was not there to look backwards.

“All I want to do is open up the single question, how does your generation succeed in overcoming the problems that you face? Because you live at a time of mass unemployment and growth in nuclear weapons all over the world. Many of the problems are presented as if they are insoluble.”

By way of encouraging his young audience, he did however draw on his time there.

“When I came here 70 years ago as a 17-year-old, the problems were also pretty insoluble. At that time we were by no means sure we would defeat Germany in the war and we had the mass unemployment of the 1930s.”

Perhaps he had come to accept that the Oxford Union, like Burford, was ready to hear the messages he had been delivering for half a century.

Whether his student audience bought into his arguments for socialism is open to debate. But like those who marched through Burford with him on Levellers Day, they will not forget hearing one of the 20th-century’s last great voices of the left.