The Education of
David Martin: The making of an unlikely
sociologist
David Martin
SPCK £25
(978-0-281-07118-0)
Church Times Bookshop £22.50 (Use code
CT205 )
I WAS born in the same year
as the author of this book and spent much of my childhood in an
outer London suburb a dozen miles or so from Mortlake (of boat-race
fame), where he was brought up. So I can testify from personal
recollections to the accuracy of his description of this part of
England in the 1930s and 1940s - especially during the Second World
War, when German bombs were falling all around us.
It is this early part of the
book which is likely to be of most interest to the general reader,
as it deals mainly with narrative facts. The later chapters are
concerned more with ideas. The book is, in fact, an
autobiographical memoir rather than a straightforward
autobiography. The facts may be there, but you have to hunt for
them (the index is less than adequate). There is more, for
instance, about the collapse of his first marriage than about his
second marriage to a fellow-academic, Bernice, and virtually
nothing about his children.
David Martin's childhood was
dominated by his father's revivalist enthusiasm. Martin senior was
first a chauffeur and then a taxi-driver - his employers included
Archbishop Davidson at Lambeth Palace and H. H. Asquith at 10
Downing Street. He was an intensely devout and religious man; so
his son attended church regularly from an early age. David Martin
was educated at East Sheen Grammar School, and then did his
National Service in the Pioneer Corps (he had registered as a
conscientious objector, though he later abandoned his pacifist
views).
After leaving the army, he
worked for some years as a teacher in primary schools before
deciding to read sociology at Regent Street Polytechnic. He had
become fascinated by an academic discip-line that provided answers
to the questions he liked to ask: in his own words, "I was a
natural for sociology." He came top in the university examination
and, at the age of 30, won a place at the London School of
Economics. Twelve years later, he had acquired a university
professorship.
Martin is intensely
interested in music, writing, and religion. He was a Methodist
local preacher for many years before being confirmed in 1979 in the
Church of England. Four years later, he was ordained to a
non-stipendiary title at Guildford Cathedral. He is a prolific
writer, both in academic journals and as a book-reviewer for the
TLS and the Church Times - he has acquired a
public profile as a controversialist in the media. And he has
written 16 previous books.
As an Anglican, he is a
passionate supporter both of the Book of Common Prayer and of the
King James Version of the Bible. He felt so strongly about the need
to protect these bastions of Anglicanism against the modernisers
that he organized a monster petition to the General Synod, signed
by scores of the great and the good. When the petition had no
effect, he followed it up with a draft Parliamentary Bill, which,
while it likewise got nowhere, at least led to a summons to Lambeth
Palace to meet Archbishop Runcie. He confesses that he found it
difficult at times to combine his various duties at the LSE with
his other activities, such as running campaigns.
Things were especially
difficult during the student revolution of 1968-69. The graduate
section of the sociology department was a centre of trouble at the
LSE - and Martin was in charge of it.
He is a man of formidable
intellect, who has found that sociology has given him full scope
for developing his ideas - and not least his religious ideas - in
all sorts of different directions. These ideas he discusses at
length in a book that is likely to be read with fascination by the
author's fellow academics - and indeed by anyone with an
intellectual turn of mind.
Dr Palmer is a former editor of the Church Times.
