Idle speculation, of course, but occasionally I’ve fantasized that the great historian Richard Cobb and I chanced to be sitting together on a tram in Toulouse in 1946, when I was 4 and he was in his late twenties and just about to be demobbed. He’d have been on his way to visit a young woman he’d met at the British Fortnight organized in the city by the British Council. I’d have been riding the tram for the thrill of it, in the care of its conductress, who was a lodger in my maternal grandparents’ boarding-house behind Place du Capitole, as were my mother, sister, newly born brother and I, dispatched from England for a few months while my father, no longer able to support us properly, looked for a permanent teaching post.
The account of Cobb’s association with Toulouse – on the romantic front, ultimately fruitless – is set out in a few pages of the last of his three memoirs, The End of the Line (1997), which in a tumbling succession of episodes paints a vivid picture of his life between the mid-’30s and the late ’70s and ends with a poignant farewell written just two days before his death. My prompt to revisit this memoir was Slightly Foxed’s recent reissue of Still Life, the first of the trio, an affectionate evocation of the Tunbridge Wells Cobb had known as a boy in the 1920s. Though it was written half a century later, he appears to have forgotten very little. All sorts of things are noted; nothing seems too trivial.
So, recalling that The End of the Line was equally rich in detail, I reached down my copy, obtained some years ago via an Internet search. It had spent its active life based in a Yorkshire library; its foot edge had been stamped ‘Kirklees Cultural Services’ to deter the light-fingered. The dust jacket, surprisingly undamaged, shows part of Terence Cuneo’s painting Bon Voyage
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Subscribe now or Sign inIdle speculation, of course, but occasionally I’ve fantasized that the great historian Richard Cobb and I chanced to be sitting together on a tram in Toulouse in 1946, when I was 4 and he was in his late twenties and just about to be demobbed. He’d have been on his way to visit a young woman he’d met at the British Fortnight organized in the city by the British Council. I’d have been riding the tram for the thrill of it, in the care of its conductress, who was a lodger in my maternal grandparents’ boarding-house behind Place du Capitole, as were my mother, sister, newly born brother and I, dispatched from England for a few months while my father, no longer able to support us properly, looked for a permanent teaching post.
The account of Cobb’s association with Toulouse – on the romantic front, ultimately fruitless – is set out in a few pages of the last of his three memoirs, The End of the Line (1997), which in a tumbling succession of episodes paints a vivid picture of his life between the mid-’30s and the late ’70s and ends with a poignant farewell written just two days before his death. My prompt to revisit this memoir was Slightly Foxed’s recent reissue of Still Life, the first of the trio, an affectionate evocation of the Tunbridge Wells Cobb had known as a boy in the 1920s. Though it was written half a century later, he appears to have forgotten very little. All sorts of things are noted; nothing seems too trivial. So, recalling that The End of the Line was equally rich in detail, I reached down my copy, obtained some years ago via an Internet search. It had spent its active life based in a Yorkshire library; its foot edge had been stamped ‘Kirklees Cultural Services’ to deter the light-fingered. The dust jacket, surprisingly undamaged, shows part of Terence Cuneo’s painting Bon Voyage, a 1950s scene in Calais docks, where the SS Invicta has just arrived from Dover and is disgorging its passengers, each one smartly dressed, jeans and T-shirts and sneakers being then still unheard of. Doubtless, this beau monde is heading for Paris, as a less dapper Cobb had been on his late-teenage sorties from England. Cobb spent 1935 mostly in Paris, but he made a short and disastrous trip to Vienna. His stay was brought abruptly to an end when he was arrested and beaten up for the seditious activity of distributing Quaker leaflets, and then booted out of the country. He returned to England and proceeded to Oxford University for three years to read History. Not long after, the war began. Cobb was keen to do his bit, but he failed his medical and as a civilian was sent to work in the Air Ministry. In due course, though, he did join the army, which then proceeded to move him around the country – Essex, Huntingdonshire, Northants, Hertfordshire, Shropshire, Monmouthshire, the New Forest. His principal function, it seems, was to teach English to the Polish military and the Czechoslovak Independent Brigade Group. In the swathes of leisure time he had, he went exploring on his bike. During one particularly fallow period, he managed to slip away to a Chepstow hotel where over several evenings he sat in one of its big, sad leather armchairs and read War and Peace cover to cover. Back at base, his life was spoiled by an obnoxious captain ‘with eyes like boiled cod and a black moustache with points at the end’. Following the D-Day landings, Cobb saw active service in Normandy, but it wasn’t long before his more tranquil life resumed, in north-eastern France and then Brussels, where he eked out the remainder of the war teaching English in various institutions, including the Hairdressing Academy. On his own admission this suited him far better than soldiering. To my mind Sergeant Cobb belongs in an Evelyn Waugh comic novel (the boiled-cod captain too) rather than the officers’ mess, for which he kept up strenuous efforts never to become eligible. In an officer’s uniform, he’d have felt a fraud, unable to reconcile ‘a covering so impudently borrowed with what was inside it’. After the war Cobb returned to Paris, where he lived for nine more years. He immersed himself intellectually and in person in the life of le menu peuple, the common people, integrating himself with the porters of Les Halles and the filles de joie of rue St Denis as enthusiastically as he trawled the archives in police headquarters on the Quai des Orfèvres. There his research led him eventually to the files located on an upper floor, to which he ascended ‘through successive layers of misdemeanour, fraud, and crime’. To make ends meet, he taught – what else? – English at various crammers, among them the Berlitz School. His pupils predominantly came from the junior ranks of the hotel and restaurant trades, among whom were several young Mireilles and Gisèles and Françoises, with whom he’d fall briefly and lustily in love, ever susceptible to a pair of beautiful eyes and a well-rounded derrière. At one point, Cobb went off to Bulgaria in pursuit of a romance which had begun, in his mind at least, in Turin, where he’d been invited to give a series of lectures on nineteenth-century European diplomatic history. The romance went nowhere, as unrequited as the one he’d pursued in Toulouse, and as ever he returned to France, in truth his natural home. He wanted to be French. He wrote his early academic books in French. He applied for French nationality but was unsuccessful. (Sixty years later, I too tried, but, inextricably tangled in red tape, eventually gave up.) Cobb’s disappointment at his failure was what brought him back to Britain in 1955 and an academic career in Aberystwyth, Leeds and finally Oxford. In the closing pages of The End of the Line, the picture of France Cobb chooses to leave us with is not of Paris in the ’30s or ’50s but of Rouen in 1977 – including a wonderful evocation of an all-night bar filled with mariners and sailors (three of them from Finland) and bargees and a row of women in full-length aprons waiting for the fish lorries to arrive from the coast so they could set to work gutting and filleting their cargo – and of Dieppe, where we find him in a drab hotel, all dark furniture and flower-patterned wallpaper, shaken awake by the engines of the ferry arriving to take him back to England. Cobb’s reputation derives above all from his scholarly work on France, principally the 1789 Revolution, and from his inspirational teaching. His history was ‘history from below’, as it’s been described. To quote the back jacket flap of The End of the Line, his focus was ‘the powerless people who experience rather than make history’. That and, I suspect, other more personal factors put him at odds with some of his peers who dismissed him as an eccentric, a prankster – Cobb loved practical jokes – even an anarchist (which he considered the highest praise). I can’t say if it’s true of Cobb’s academic books, but I do know from the two memoirs I’ve read that the reader must hit the ground running on p.1 and carry on running to keep pace with the long sentences, which skip and pulse with energy. Cobb had a joyous and unbridled appetite for life, insouciant of the niceties of his upper-middle-class origins. A colleague of mine who studied under him tells me there was no side to him. Other than briefly as an undergraduate trying to smoke French cigarettes and leaving copies of L’Oeuvre newspaper lying about for all to see, and pretending to read Czech periodicals in Paris cafés, he felt no need to strike poses. He was at ease with almost everyone because he found almost everyone interesting – even the cod-eyed captain. From England to France to Austria to Bulgaria and back, Cobb moved between fish market and fashionable boulevard, back-street bar and stylish restaurant, chic apartment and louche hotel, Berlitz classroom and august university, one movement morphing into the next until finally he came to rest in Abingdon, where as a student he’d once swapped his Oxford college for the solitude of a hotel in order to read and think and write at leisure, activities he could apparently sustain for days at a time, evidence of a prodigious appetite for work as well as an extraordinarily fertile mind. Assuming I could have attended them, I wish I’d known about Cobb’s lectures on France during his time in Oxford’s History Faculty and mine as an undergraduate studying French in a different one. I have another fantasy concerning the great man, that I buttonhole him after a lecture, tell him of my French family connections, and he invites me to sink a few pastis with him, swap stories, and we do what we can to recapture our lives on the other side of the Channel, the doors shut against the mists coming off the Cherwell.Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 85 © Christine Whittemore 2025
About the contributor
Martin Sorrell remembers with mixed emotions the lugubrious armoires, busy wallpaper and dour concierges of French hotels once upon a time, including one in Dieppe which just might have been Cobb’s.
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