History is relative

The BBC’s Laura Trevelyan found others knew more about her famous ancestors than she did â” until she went in search of the great dynasty of scholars and public servants

My introduction to the legacy of my ancestors came rather late in life. You might think I had been raised to recite the great works of George Macaulay Trevelyan, historian of England and my great-grandfather, by heart. Or to quote verbatim from the Northcoteâ“Trevelyan reforms of the Civil Service, brainchild of my great-great-great-grandfather Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan. Or perhaps my formative years were spent poring over a dog-eared copy of the Early History of Charles James Fox, by Sir George Otto Trevelyan, Liberal Cabinet minister and literary historian, and my twice-great-grandfather? Nope. Nothing of the sort. ‘Of course, my dear, you of all people know that history is relative,’ said an elderly peer when I was in my late twenties and reporting on Parliament for the BBC. I stared at him blankly. ‘Joke,’ he explained, somewhat testily. ‘Lord Macaulay, the historian, was the uncle of George Otto Trevelyan, also a historian, whose son G.M. Trevelyan carried on the family tradition....’ I made my excuses and stumbled out, resolving to learn more about my heritage.

But my ignorance can be explained, if not excused. As a child of divorced parents, growing up in the 1970s in Camden Town, north London, I knew little and cared less about the achievements of long dead relatives. What’s the relevance of G.M. Trevelyan when you’re trying to get through the day in a large girls’ comprehensive without getting your lights punched out? A history teacher tried to get me to read G.M’s well-loved Garibaldi trilogy, but without success. I vaguely connected my eminent relative to the statue of the Italian bloke above Dad’s fireplace but that was about it. ‘I suppose you spend your holidays galloping across the moors at Wallington,’ a distant friend of the family said when I was about ten, referring to the family seat in Northumberland, now owned by the National Trust. I hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about â” where the heck was Northumberland anyway? My father, named George Macaulay after his grandfather, was quietly furious about his giveaway initials. As a history student at Oxford, his tutors were always on the lookout for a glimpse of the family genius, wanting to enter him for essay competitions. So unsurprisingly, Dad didn’t try to pass on the family history to us lot.

But history can seek you out, as I found when I was working in Northern Ireland as a BBC reporter in the mid-1990s, just after the IRA’s first ceasefire. On a windy hillside in South Armagh, a member of the splinter group Republican Sinn Fein recoiled when I introduced myself. ‘Trevelyan,’ she spat, ‘you have the blood of the Irish on your hands.’ She was berating me for being related to Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan, the highly controversial administrator of relief to Ireland during the potato famine. My thrice-great-grandfather’s past deeds stalked me from the North to the South of Ireland. In Dublin, at a dinner with officials from the Department of Foreign Affairs who were working on the Anglo-Irish peace process, there was a sharp intake of breath as I confessed my relationship to the man at the epicentre of what some still claim was genocide. A lone voice began to sing ‘Trevelyan’s Corn’, a ballad about those who died while waiting for Sir Charles’s measly aid to arrive from England, and I shivered as the rest of the table joined in. Suddenly 150 years ago began to feel rather too close for comfort.

Later, working as a political correspondent at Westminster, I found many MPs and peers knew more about my family than I did. So when Elaine Thomas, a BBC producer, suggested we dig out the archive of G.M. Trevelyan and make a radio documentary, it was not before time. From that radio programme came the offer for me to write a book, and so I set about making sense of the past. What I found was a priggish, high-minded yet utterly admirable set of gents who were plain-living and high-thinking, and public-spirited in a way which has all but vanished today. A.L. Rowse summed up the family best by ascribing these values to them:

Integrity to the point of eccentricity, honesty to the point of rudeness, devoted public spirit, idiosyncrasy held in check by strong common sense; not much sense of humour. That distinguished family were apt to think there were Trevelyans â” and then the rest of the human race.

This sense of being obliged to achieve is most evident in the letters written by George Macaulay Trevelyan to his brother Charles Philips, the Labour Cabinet minister. As a young man, G.M. offered his sibling this code of conduct for the family. ‘It is a rule that no Trevelyan ever sucks up to the press, or the chiefs, or the “right people”. The world has given us money enough to enable us to do what we think is right. We thank it for that and ask no more of it, but to be allowed to serve it.’

And serve they did. For a hundred years family members from Lord Macaulay to G.M. Trevelyan contributed to the writing and the making of our history. Some were famous and distinguished, others were also-rans, but as leading members of the intellectual aristocracy they influenced British public and cultural life from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century. Charles Edward Trevelyan incurred the wrath of clubland with his proposals to introduce competitive entry into the Civil Service â” Trollope satirised him as Sir Gregory Hardlines â” yet his legacy runs through Whitehall to this day. His son George Otto Trevelyan was not a successful politician â” he was far too fond of resigning over principle for that â” yet he was a talented historian, one of the great literary Victorians. George Macaulay Trevelyan, as David Cannadine has written, ‘in his power to recreate the past, and to inspire in others the passion to explore it further ...had no equal in his day and has had no equal since’. Charles Philips Trevelyan was the first Labour secretary of state for education, responsible for raising the school-leaving age to 15 â” and he donated the family estate to the National Trust, for as a socialist he found owning it incompatible with his principles.

Not that they were above reproach, these Trevelyans. George Macaulay lost his brilliant son Theo aged four and created a creepy cult around the dead youngster, to the detriment of his surviving children and to the bewilderment of outsiders; while the 72-year-old Charles Philips fathered a son with his secretary at Wallington â” and refused to heed his wife’s pleas for the pair to be sent to live away from the estate.

My cast of characters has vanished now, like G.M’s ghosts at cockcrow. As Noel Annan wrote, ‘Aristocracies which seem to be secure can vanish overnight if society rejects the credentials by which they have established themselves or if they lose self confidence.’ The Trevelyan money ran out, and subsequent generations rejected the smug self-satisfaction of their elders. Yet to me, who grew up ignorant of all that went before me, something important has been lost with the passing of a generation which believed in public service above all else. As G.M. Trevelyan put it, ‘We are all moles ...but if we are moles in vision, the best of us become Gods in spirit.’

Laura Trevelyan is the BBC’s UN correspondent in New York. A Very British Family, The Trevelyans and their World is published by I.B. Tauris on 7 September.