On the face of it, Nadine Gordimer and Stanley Middleton didn’t have much in common. Look her up on YouTube, and you’ll see a literary superstar – South Africa’s first Nobel Laureate in Literature – being feted across the world. Look him up, and you’ll find a five-minute video entitled ‘Nottingham’s Forgotten Heroes. #5 Stanley Middleton’.

There is, however, one thing they did share: the 1974 Booker Prize. Fifty years ago, when Gordimer’s The Conservationist and Middleton’s Holiday became the first joint winners, splitting the award was, unlike now, completely permissible. Luckily, this still left room for that ever-popular Booker feature, the controversy – which this time involved a glaring conflict of interest for one of the three judges. (Only in 1977 was the number of judges settled at five.)

Elizabeth Jane Howard, the judge in question, had yet to begin the novel sequence The Cazalet Chronicles, for which she’s best-known today. But she’d written several books where, said Hilary Mantel, ‘her talent seemed… so unstoppable that there was no predicting where it would take her’. She’d also had a pretty eventful love life, including two marriages – one to the war-hero son of Scott of the Antarctic – and affairs with Laurie Lee, Kenneth Tynan, Arthur Koestler and Cecil Day-Lewis. 

By 1974, Howard was married to Kingsley Amis, whose son Martin would always credit her with introducing him to literature. (‘Thank you, O Jane,’ he wrote aged 18, ‘for quite literally getting me into Oxford. Had you not favoured my education with your interest and sagacity, I would now be a 3-O-levelled wretch with little to commend me.’) And it was this marriage that proved a problem for the Booker – because Kingsley’s novel Ending Up ended up on the shortlist.

In his memoirs, the Prize’s founder Tom Maschler claimed Howard bowed out of the judging once she realised her husband’s book was in contention – but this can most kindly be described as spin. According to the judges’ notes, which are held in the Booker Prize archives at Oxford Brookes University, the only one with Ending Up on their preferred shortlist was Howard; and according to their chair, Ion Trewin, ‘Jane said there was only one winner in her view: Ending Up’.

The memories of the other judge, A.S. Byatt, matched Trewin’s rather than Maschler’s. As she told Howard’s biographer, Artemis Cooper, ‘When we came to making the shortlist, Elizabeth Jane argued exclusively for Kingsley Amis.’ At this stage, Byatt says, ‘both Ion and I were behind Nadine Gordimer. Elizabeth Jane would not have her as a winner. She said, “She fails Kingsley’s readability criterion.” She asked if there was any rule about dividing the prize.’ 

It was, in other words, time for a compromise – even if it wasn’t the one Howard wanted. As Byatt went on: ‘I think she thought if she allowed the unreadable Gordimer to have half the prize, Kingsley could have the other half. But we did not want that and Ion introduced the idea of the wonderful Stanley Middleton whose work I had not previously known.’ Byatt then added a stinging punchline about prize night: ‘We stood in some kind of receiving line as the authors came in. Nadine Gordimer swept past me and flung her arms round Elizabeth Jane. “The value of this prize to me,” she said, “is that you have awarded it.”’

The ceremony was held at Claridge’s in London (complete with classic swirly-patterned Seventies curtains), where the BBC’s Robert Robinson asked about the conflict of interest. Howard unblushingly declared that her colleagues had ‘no problem with it’ – while Trewin made the perhaps more truthful point that ‘There are three judges and two of them aren’t married to Kingsley Amis’.

In the years since, Gordimer and Middleton’s contrasting careers – and the story behind the judging – seem to have led to a received wisdom that their books are from opposite ends of the literary spectrum: The Conservationist, a big, important, slightly forbidding denunciation of Apartheid; Holiday, a perfectly pleasant example of what Trewin called, in his chair’s speech, ‘an unfashionable genre – the provincial English novel’. But this wild simplification does a huge disservice to both books. 

While there’s never much doubt where Gordimer stands on Apartheid, The Conservationist is a far more tangled exploration of South African life than you might expect. The protagonist, Mehring, is a rich white businessman who runs a farm, with black workers, as a combination of tax-dodge and hobby – all characteristics, you’d imagine, likely to infuriate Gordimer the activist. Nevertheless, it’s Gordimer the novelist who’s in control here. 

As a result, Mehring is treated with a degree of novelistic understanding that at times borders on sympathy. Gordimer also observes that crucial rule for avoiding mere polemic: give good lines to the other guy. 

Throughout the book, Mehring has remembered and/or imaginary conversations with his ex-mistress – an anti-Apartheid activist who’s fled to London but still annoyingly acts as the conscience he tries hard to suppress. His side of the dialogue is unfailingly bullish, but his views on the naivety and condescension of white South African liberals are often uncomfortably – and, it would seem, deliberately – persuasive. These bleeding-heart types, he reckons, are both sentimentalising what post-Apartheid society will be like and overestimating their own role within it. (‘Change the world but keep bits of it the way I like it for myself –’ Mehring reflects, ‘who wouldn’t make the world over if it were to be as easy as that.’)

As for Holiday, it’s a lot less slight than its reputation suggests. Here, the main character is 32-year-old Edwin, who has left his wife and is holed up in a seaside town, trying to work out where his marriage – and life – went wrong. Not unlike Edith in Anita Brookner’s 1983 Booker winner Hotel du Lac, Edwin strikes up random relationships with fellow residents (in his case, those of an archetypal Seventies B&B specialising in ‘chips and chops, salmon salad, brown windsor, ice-cream’). He also wanders around a lot, looking back regretfully. 

Yet, if this makes the novel sound like a gentle, meditative, slightly dull read, that would only be one-third true. Meditative, it certainly is – and quite profoundly at that – but, as in Hotel du Lac, there’s much unsparing darkness beneath its quiet surface, as well as some surprisingly lurid incident. Middleton’s aim as a novelist, he said, was ‘to demonstrate the complexity of human character and motive’ – something that Holiday achieves just as powerfully as The Conservationist, thanks to an equally melancholy portrait of a man adrift.

So why, of the two winners, is Middleton the largely forgotten one? Well, one obvious reason is that he stuck so firmly to those unfashionable provincial guns. Holiday is among very few of his 44 novels not set primarily in Nottingham (although that’s where Edwin is on holiday from). Middleton was born there, went to High Pavement grammar school there, went to university there and lived there for the rest of his life, teaching for more than 30 years at High Pavement. In the circumstances, it’s hard not to detect a note of defiance, as well as self-satire, when Edwin’s somewhat pompous father-in-law insists that ‘everything worth knowing about the world could be found in Cefn where he had grown up. All varieties of humanity were there.’ (It’s also worth remembering that Middleton’s chosen genre wasn’t always so disparaged: no less a novel than Middlemarch is subtitled A Study of Provincial Life.) 

But another reason for his comparative obscurity might be Middleton’s almost pathological modesty. In 1980, for example, he appeared on the actor Peter Bowles’s episode of the TV show This is Your Life, where Eamonn Andrews introduced him as ‘your former English teacher Stanley Middleton’, with no mention that he was a published writer, let alone a Booker winner. 

According to his daughter, Penny, this is exactly the way he’d have wanted it. Penny was 18 when her father won the Booker – and, as she recalls, he characteristically ‘didn’t make a big deal about it. He never wrote to get honours or fame. He wrote because it was inside him and he wanted to do it.’ 

On Booker night itself, all Middleton said to Robert Robinson about his victory was: ‘When you hear someone from outside say, “Not too bad”, you’re pleased.’ A friend later reported that ‘the only way the Booker affected him, he told me, was that it stopped him writing for a whole week’. After that, he got back to work, producing a further 30 novels in the 35 years before his death in 2009, aged 89. 

Since then, there have been occasional articles arguing that Middleton is due a revival – and even more occasional signs that one may be coming. In 2019, Penny unveiled a plaque to him on their old house; on 27 November, 50 years to the day since his Booker triumph, she will present his trophy to Nottingham’s Central Library, where it will be put on display.

But for now, his name remains associated almost solely with the 1974 Booker Prize – which I still think he richly deserved to share with Gordimer. And that despite a strong shortlist of five. (Only in the 1980s was the number of books settled at six). In her defence, Howard wasn’t wrong that Ending Up is a lot of fun to read – although, for her, the fun must surely have been tempered by the presence of a hysterically self-dramatising female character based on the author’s then-wife. Beryl Bainbridge’s The Bottle Factory Outing is a fine literary entertainment, too: a rollicking, if not wholly seamless mix of sexual comedy, social comment and violent death. With its atmosphere of abiding dinginess, it’s also the book which most reminds us that 1970s Britain was still a post-war country.

The fifth author, I’d suggest, is the one that people in 1974 might have thought the likeliest to be remembered in 50 years. After all, C.P. Snow was then a celebrated public intellectual – knighted in 1957, made a life peer in 1964 – whose 11-novel series, Strangers and Brothers, had been widely acclaimed (with the title of one of them, Corridors of Power, adding a new phrase to the language).

These days, though, Snow has rather fallen beneath the radar – which, judging from the shortlisted In Their Wisdom, is both understandable and a pity. On the one hand, the book now seems resolutely, even comically old-fashioned: based on a disputed will, and featuring members of the Lords discussing their lives in London clubs. Touchingly, Snow expects his readers to understand when he compares his characters to say, the Duc of Saint Simon or ‘the unquenchable Lanjuinais throughout the French Revolution’.

On the other hand – as Elizabeth Jane Howard’s grateful young stepson once wrote – ‘one can only continue to admire Snow’s tolerance and honesty and his eloquence when writing about the possibilities of doing good and the difficulties of behaving well’. And, for all its dated feel, In Their Wisdom is the shortlisted book of 1974 most concerned with the events of the day: Britain’s sense of national decline; the fear that it was becoming ungovernable; and, not least, its entry into what would become the EU – where the arguments about the nation state versus an increasingly federal Europe seem strangely familiar.

By now you may have spotted something that Trewin lamented in his Claridge’s speech. Between them, the five shortlisted authors had written 53 novels – and ‘it is disappointing,’ Trewin told the Booker ceremony guests, ‘to see so little new talent emerging this year’. As it transpired, the old guard would remain in charge for a while yet: Booker winners over the next few years included Paul Scott, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Iris Murdoch and William Golding – all of whom had been going since the early 1950s. But waiting in the wings, and beginning to publish their first books, were the next-generation likes of Barnes, McEwan, Rushdie and Amis Jr…

And finally, an intriguing what-if. In later life, John le Carré wouldn’t allow his novels to be entered for literary prizes. But in 1974, one of his best-known books, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, was not only eligible for the Booker, it was, as the prize’s archives reveal, championed strongly by Trewin. So what if it had made the shortlist, or even won? Might Booker history, and British literature in general, now look very different, with the distinction between ‘genre’ and ‘literary’ fiction either far more blurred or obliterated entirely? (Discuss.)