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for both literature and music (the latter less pronounced in Michael’s case until he met Jill Craigie, who introduced him to Mozart), especially Bach’s choral music, and a passionate devotion to the grand old causes of nineteenth-century Liberalism. It was an intimate family whose members kept up warm relations throughout their lives. Michael and his brothers addressed each other in letters or telephone conversations with the words ‘pit and rock’. This private code recalled a famous phrase from the Book of Isaiah: ‘Look unto the rock whence ye are hewn and to the hole of the pit whence ye are digged.’ Hugh thus communicated with Michael while serving at a tense period as Governor of Cyprus in the late 1950s. Life in the Foot family seems to have been inspiring and somewhat pressurizing at the same time, being conducted at a high level of intensity, both political and religious. One newspaper described the household as characterized by ‘bacon for breakfast, Liberalism for lunch and Deuteronomy for dinner’.¹⁷

      One strict rule was abstinence from alcohol until the age of twenty-one, after which the sons would qualify for a small legacy from their grandfather: Michael and John celebrated their release from this thraldom by getting drunk together on a trip to Paris, in pursuit of culture and self-liberation, in 1934. The child Michael, dominated by his three older brothers, Dingle, Hugh and John, was to find a particular kinship with his slightly older sister Sally. A major factor here was that both suffered from severe eczema – a hereditary condition, apparently – and in Michael’s case from growing asthma as well. Outdoor games were to some extent denied him, and he turned naturally to indoor bookish pursuits, where Sally was a natural mentor and guide, with her own unfulfilled artistic and literary talents which later brought friendship, for instance, with Louis MacNeice. Sally introduced Michael to novels and poems which were to stay with him for ever. He would say that she taught him how to read. His lifelong attachment to female relationships, many of a bookish kind, undoubtedly stemmed from his loyal Sally, and his posthumous essay on her, ‘Sally’s Broomstick’, is deeply felt.¹⁸ Her cruel death in the 1960s was a particular blow to him.

      It may be that Sally’s presence was a calm refuge in an otherwise hyperactive family. One of the adverse consequences for some of the Foot family was a kind of depressive alcoholism, perhaps a reaction against the dynastic prescription of total abstinence in youth. Dingle ended his career in this sad condition, as did his youngest brother Christopher, whose life ended young, and so too did his sister Sally. Indeed, Sally’s death through apparent drowning may have been more tragic still. Christopher had to give up his solicitor’s work early through some kind of psychological illness. It was Michael, for all his mixed health, who was usually seen as the most stable and normal. So family life was not always as relaxed as when Isaac was telling his stories or Michael was organizing children’s games at parties. Keeping up with the Foots could bring its own pressures.

      Every Foot from Isaac onwards showed the influence of family. All shared the unyielding attachment to books, to Cromwell and the West Country, to Plymouth Hoe and Plymouth Argyle. All in important senses remained liberal, or at least libertarian, at heart. Most were political, but with a politics fired in the crucible of Foot family argument, rhetoric and dissent. Nothing showed this continuing tradition more clearly than the sadly posthumous book The Vote by Hugh Foot’s journalist son Paul, long a pillar of the Socialist Worker and a writer of a caustic brilliance equalled only by his cherished uncle Michael.¹⁹ Paul was named after the favourite saint; his brother Oliver derived his name from another cult hero. Paul Foot’s book is on many fronts a debate within the family. It conducts a sporadic, if affectionate, argument with Michael in denouncing his adhesion to a right-wing, disappointingly parliamentary Labour Party. The debate would be continued towards the end of Paul’s life, blighted as it was by illness, on the pavement outside bookshops in the Charing Cross Road, with both bibliophile disputants, uncle and nephew, waving their sticks about to the occasional alarm of passers-by. Paul’s book also engages in a covert dispute with his Aunt Jill, a devotee of the suffragettes, but mainly of the Tory Christabel Pankhurst and her mother Emmeline, whereas Paul Foot (like most socialists) found the social radicalism of Sylvia Pankhurst, the lover of the Labour Party’s founder Keir Hardie, by far the most appealing.

      But the most startling family argument of all for Paul was with his deceased grandfather Isaac, pillar of the Cromwell Association over so many years. Where Cromwell to Isaac (and to Michael too) was the people’s Oliver, champion of liberty, to Paul he was the establishment enemy of the Levellers, who rebutted the dangerous democracy voiced by Rainboro, Lilburne and their friends at Putney in 1647. Paul was indirectly announcing that he was the first Foot to break away from the family shibboleths, that Cromwell was no real hero for the popular, let alone the socialist, cause, and that in the earliest campaign for the vote the puritan establishment was essentially an obstacle. Those political continuities, traced by Liberals over the centuries from Putney to the Parliament Act, were in reality an illusion. Paul Foot’s was an iconoclastic book, but it was notable that it was the family’s boat that had first to be rocked, if not sunk without trace.

      His uncle Michael’s early years were comfortable and elitist. The First World War made little direct impact upon him, unlike say the youthful Jim Callaghan down the coast at Portsmouth, whose father served in the navy and fought at Jutland. None of the Foots had any experience of this or any other war. Basically they had disliked every one since 1651. The dominant feature of Michael’s upbringing is the abiding stamp of loyalty to Plymouth itself It symbolized for him Britain’s worldwide mercantile glories, as well of course as embodying an eternal legend of defence against foreign conquest in the great days of Drake. Plymouth, English to its core, was not therefore the natural base for a devotee of European integration. In 1972 Michael spoke strongly in support of his Conservative successor as MP for Devonport, Joan Vickers, in resisting proposals in Peter Walker’s Local Government Bill to merge Plymouth with the surrounding area. There was, declared Foot, a ‘deep lack of affinity between Plymouth and the County of Devon’. In family vein, he went on:

      Charles I tried to subdue Plymouth and failed, and Freedom Fields is a monument which bears that out. Charles II tried to subdue the people of Plymouth by establishing a citadel with the guns facing not seawards towards Plymouth sound but inwards, but he, too, failed.

      Foot had the joy of representing Devonport in that city for ten years in Parliament, from 1945 to 1955, and hung on as a predictably unsuccessful candidate in 1959, a decision that Aneurin Bevan declared was ‘quixotic’.²⁰ Well into his nineties, journeys with his friend Peter Jones to see Plymouth Argyle do battle at Home Park were a staple of life. Contact with his private secretary, Roger Dawe, at the Department of Employment in 1974 was greatly eased by the latter’s Devonian and Methodist origins, and his being a fellow Argyle supporter.

      During the First World War the Foots moved to Ramsland House in St Cleers, on the edge of the Cornish moors. But Michael always identified intensely with Plymouth, the city which was his boyhood home, where his father was Lord Mayor and where he fell in love with Jill. And to a degree Plymouth identified with him, indeed with all the Foots. David Owen, a future Cabinet colleague and Member for Devonport, grew up there in the fifties under the shadow of the Foots as a dominating dynasty. In the 1970s Michael and Jill, somewhat remarkably, managed to persuade the local authority in Hampstead to rename their road Pilgrims Lane, in tribute to his native city’s most famous exports, and the nickname also of its football team. In later life he would recall happy episodes from his childhood, such as visits to the Palace Theatre. One such recollection became memorable, when in a Commons debate in October 1980 during Labour’s leadership election he spoke of a conjuror who smashed with a hammer a gold watch belonging to a member of the audience, but then forgot the rest of the trick. But it remains open to conjecture how far this was a real Plymouth, or rather an affectionate amalgam of fact, legend and folk memory, specific and selective associations from the Armada to the Blitz, ready for instant political mobilization in argument. Michael Foot’s historical reading and personal background formed a highly usable background. This was true of all his interpretations of past scions of the liberty tree, from the Levellers to the suffragettes, and it applied equally to his vision of a post-modernist

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