Some of the American Rhodes scholars shed their communist sympathies after the Nazi–Soviet pact of August 1939. Many of Wynn’s recruits similarly proved too fastidiously bourgeois to forgive either the pact or the Soviet invasions of Poland and Finland. Oxford, however, seems to have been more fallow ground than Cambridge. Cambridge was generally reckoned to be the more scientific university, and the supposed scientific nature of Marxism attracted scientists to the CPGB in the 1930s, but none of the ring of five was a scientist. So what were the other institutional, geographic and temperamental factors?
In the seventeenth century Cambridge had been a Roundhead city and Oxford a stronghold of the Cavaliers. Puritanism persisted in the Fenlands university throughout the twentieth century: in Oxford people were more comfortable with personal fulfilment and less pleased by self-mortification. The countryside surrounding Oxford abounded with hosts and hostesses who encouraged the politically ambitious young and introduced them to political sponsors. The Churchills at Blenheim, Lady Desborough at Taplow, Lady Astor at Cliveden, Margot, Countess of Oxford and Asquith at Sutton Courtenay, Lord Birkenhead at Charlton and Lord Tweedsmuir at Elsfield were among the political patrons and power-houses within easy reach of Oxford. Visiting youngsters there were allured by the possibilities of serving powerful interests. There were no comparable houses near Cambridge: Kipling’s reclusive daughter at Wimpole and the enfant gâté Lord Fairhaven at Anglesey Abbey had no interest in running political salons. Few tourists visited Cambridge in the 1930s: it was not on the road towards Shakespeare’s Stratford-upon-Avon, and its chief London rail terminus, Liverpool Street station, was a grim deterrent to tourists in ways that Oxford’s Paddington was not. ‘Oxford in vacation is as crowded and noisy as Hammersmith Broadway, which much of it resembles,’ wrote a graduate of King’s in 1940, ‘while Cambridge in vacation just lives quietly from one market-day to the next.’31
Cambridge was the more insular university, in which undergraduates tended to be unnerved by the risks to their personal integrity of mainstream political commitment, but calmer about joining the outer margins. Undergraduate politics were overt in Oxford: there was less shame in conventional party ambitions and engagement; there were fewer jibes about political careerism among the young. The Oxford Union debating society in Frewin Court was a better nursery of political leaders than its Cambridge counterpart in Bridge Street. Of prime ministers since 1900, only three graduated from Cambridge: Balfour, Campbell-Bannerman and Baldwin, all Trinity men, and all in power in the century’s earliest three decades. By contrast, Asquith, Attlee, Eden, Macmillan, Douglas-Home, Wilson, Heath, Thatcher, Blair, Cameron and May were graduates of Oxford. Between 1920 and 1970 some 77 of the 161 permanent under secretaries who attended university were Oxford graduates: Cambridge lagged far behind from the 1940s. This is indicative of where the mainstream current flowed, and where the stagnant backwaters stood. The Oxford don Richard Crossman, on a visit to Cambridge in 1953, noted of the ‘keen Socialists’ who entertained him at King’s, ‘somehow they are detached from practical politics’: Oxford’s difference from Cambridge, he decided, was that in his university ‘life is public affairs, not private affairs’. Two years later E. H. Carr, moving fellowships from Balliol to the former college of Blunt, Burgess, Cairncross and Philby, reported: ‘Cambridge is infinitely more remote from the world than Oxford.’32
Another possible deterrent to Oxford communism were MI5 agents. Two Oxford undergraduate communists of the 1920s – Tom Driberg and Graham Pollard – are known to have been reporting communist activities within the university. There were probably others in the 1930s of whom we as yet know nothing. Driberg, whose serpentine activities recur throughout this book, was a shifty, squalid, over-publicized character (known as M/8 in MI5 files). Pollard was the more significant agent, as witnessed by his designation of M/1.
Graham Pollard, son of the great Tudor historian A. F. Pollard, won the senior history scholarship to Jesus College, Oxford in 1922. He was known among his contemporaries as a bibliophile and aesthete: he joined the decadent Hypocrites Club, and beat his fellow Hypocrite Evelyn Waugh in a spitting contest. To the dismay of his father he got only a third-class degree. Pollard had been a pupil at Willington preparatory school in Putney in 1909–16 – the school where Maxwell Knight was sports master in 1921 before embarking on his strange career which included being MI5’s most successful agent-runner. The Pollards lived in Erpingham Road, close to the school, and near Knight’s Putney flat. Knight’s biographer Henry Hemming suggests that the twenty-one-year-old sports master and his eighteen-year-old neighbour met in 1921, and that it was at Knight’s instigation that the undergraduate Pollard proclaimed himself (to the surprise of his fellow Hypocrites) to be a communist. After graduating, Pollard became junior partner in a Bloomsbury bookshop, ran the St Pancras branch of the Amalgamated Union of Shop Assistants, Warehousemen and Clerks, edited the magazine Distributive Worker and in 1924 married a communist called Kathleen (‘Kay’) Beauchamp. He and his wife joined the staff of the Daily Worker. Throughout he remained Knight’s highly valued informant. His commitment continued despite his wife’s imprisonment in 1933 for publishing an article criticizing the conviction of a communist called Wal Hannington. His resolve and utility began to diminish only in the mid-1930s after he had separated from his wife. He had long since left Oxford activism behind, but it is doubtful that he was MI5’s last agent inside the Oxford University cell of the CPGB who weakened or betrayed its work.33
Whereas the Cambridge Labour Club collapsed after the National Government victory in the general election of 1931 leaving a vacuum in socialist organization, Oxford’s Labour Club survived. This was partly because Oxford – unlike Cambridge – was ringed by factories, notably the Morris motor-car plant and its associated Pressed Steel works at Cowley. The strikes and other activism at Cowley in the 1930s influenced left-wing thinking in the university. Abraham (‘Abe’) Lazarus, a CPGB organizer in the south Midlands, was a charismatic force in both Cowley and the university: Jenifer Williams was one of his acolytes. But Lazarus’s influence was countered by David Lewis (né Losz), who had lived in a Jewish shtetl in Belorussia from his birth in 1909 until his family moved to Canada in 1921. Lewis was a native Yiddish-speaker, who learnt English by reading The Old Curiosity Shop with a Yiddish–English dictionary beside him. From McGill University he went to Lincoln College, Oxford as a Rhodes scholar in 1932. He was a committed socialist, whose Marxism was modified by his family’s experiences of Bolshevism. In university debates and on public platforms he put the case for ‘parliamentary Marxism’ with vigorous éclat. His brand of Marxist socio-economic analysis and constitutionalism, his rejection of revolutionary means and proletarian dictatorships, tripled the Labour party membership in the university in 1932–4 and stopped the communists from making headway.34
Above the level of student activism, Labour leadership was provided by several dons. Richard Crossman was elected to Oxford City Council in 1934. Gordon Walker contested the Oxford City parliamentary constituency at the general election of 1935. Both men were driven to socialist activism by first-hand experiences of Nazism during prolonged visits to Hitler’s Germany. Like others of their political bent at Oxford, they upheld social democracy under the influence of two luminaries, A. D. Lindsay and G. D. H. Cole. ‘Sandy’ Lindsay had been instrumental in inaugurating Oxford’s honours school of modern humanities (known as modern Greats, or PPE) in 1920, and was a progressive Master of Balliol in the years 1924–49. He was anti-totalitarian, not just anti-fascist, and gave hours each week to frank dialogues with the politically earnest young. With his engaging stammer, his social conscience and his deprecation of ideology, he influenced such undergraduate politicians as Denis Healey, Edward Heath and Roy Jenkins. Lindsay was ‘a big man with a profoundly religious spirit’, said an admiring colleague: ‘there was nothing namby-pamby about his kind of democracy’. He mustered impressive support as the Popular Front candidate at the famous Oxf
ord City by-election of 1938.35
Second only to Lindsay among the Oxford social democrats was G. D. H. Cole, Ewer’s former Daily Herald colleague and university reader in economics from 1925. During the inter-war period, at moments of political crisis and economic stress, Cole made excitable remarks about the need for dictatorial socialism, and the redundancy of the capitalist conception of individual liberty; but his wife said that he was a Tory in everything except politics, and he proclaimed himself a pluralist. ‘I was repelled’, he explained in 1958, ‘by the Bolsheviks’ conception of a social philosophy based on rigidly determinist principles and involving the unquestionable class-correctness of a single, unified body of doctrine, regardless of considerations of time and place.’ Although he admired Bolshevik leaders for emancipating Russia from monarchical feudalism, he had realized by the Kronstadt revolt of 1921 that those leaders believed ‘that “class-enemies” had no human rights at all and could be killed or maltreated without any source of compunction’. Although this summary of his position depends upon selective amnesia, it is true that Cole’s general influence in the 1930s was anti-totalitarian, not just anti-fascist, and that he did not proselytize for the Soviet Union. He had, thought his Oxford pupil Royden Harrison, ‘a deep distrust of power, and was dismayed to find that those who exercised it repeatedly confused expediency with principle, and personal ambition with service to the good cause’.36
After a talk by Cole at an Oxford socialist Pink Lunch in 1932, Gordon Walker set out his credo – which diverged far from Cambridge notions. He rejected the Soviet model, and insisted upon English particularity: ‘abstracts and fundamentals must be allowed’, he conceded, ‘but we are politicians and we are Englishmen’ and so ‘our particular concern is English socialism for England’. There was little resemblance between the history of England and that of Russia: ‘even if the Marxist inevitable end is a true reading of history, England has half-escaped its applicability to her’. Gordon Walker disbelieved in long-term tactical planning (‘he goes furthest who knows not where he is going’), rejected ‘socialism imposed and maintained by force’, and wanted ‘no running after a vague equality. The ideal will be very near to the Medieval Church: of men chosen and promoted for their subservience to the main end.’37
There was another divergence between the two ancient universities. Male homosexuality was practised with some openness and reasonable acceptance in Oxford. The undergraduate letters and diaries of Evelyn Waugh, like the careers of Harold Acton, Brian Howard, Wystan Auden and Stephen Spender, show overt and fulfilled sex lives. Maurice Bowra coined the neologism Homintern, and described himself in the 1930s as a leader of the 69th International and a member of the Immoral Front. Men with sexual preferences that were criminal under the law of 1885 were elected as heads of houses in Oxford: some perhaps sexually abeyant, such as Cruttwell of Hertford in 1930, Stallybrass of Brasenose in 1936 and Smith of New College in 1944; but others – Bowra at Wadham in 1938, T. S. R. Boase at Magdalen in 1947, John Kelly at St Edmund Hall in 1951 and John Sparrow at All Souls in 1952 – demonstrably less so. In puritanical Cambridge, despite the exceptions of Maynard Keynes and his circle, male homosexuality was more culpable and repressed. Among heads of houses, Arthur Benson, who was Master of Magdalene until 1925, was virginal, while John Sheppard, elected Provost of King’s in 1933, became an absurd gibbering wreck. Predilections were supposed to be sublimated in Cambridge: Anthony Blunt’s research fellowship at Trinity was not converted into a full fellowship because of objections to his sexual activity, although there were plenty of bachelor dons in the college. The sexual climate was more clandestine, seething, tortuous and potentially dismal for men in the Cambridge colleges. Perhaps these uncomfortable local twists and frustrating deformities of erotic activity were a factor in young men’s choices of political expression and allegiance.
Stamping out the bourgeoisie
Owen Wansbrough-Jones, the senior tutor at Trinity Hall when Maclean was an undergraduate, described him to MI5 in 1951 as ‘not the kind of man to accept other people’s ways of thinking, without having thought them out for himself and studied all the relevant authorities’. He recalled Maclean as ‘a good athlete when it suited him to play games’, but generally as ‘the cat that walked alone’. Intellectually, he was outstanding, Wansbrough-Jones said. ‘Everything came easily to him … He would be inclined to feel – more often than not correctly – that in dealing with any of his contemporaries, he was dealing – relatively – with a fool.’ Wansbrough-Jones thought him of a type liable to join the CPGB.38
One of Maclean’s contemporaries at Trinity Hall was Jocelyn (‘Jack’) Simon, later Lord Simon of Glaisdale and a law lord. His father was Unitarian by religion and a stockbroker by profession: his mother’s maiden name was Mamelsdorf (anglicized in 1914 to Morland) and his maternal grandmother was a Rosenheim. Simon was thus a cousin of Klugmann and Kitty Cornforth, and was born in Belsize Park, where numerous Rosenheim cousins (including the Klugmanns) lived in affectionate proximity. These Jewish kinsmen were not mentioned when he was interviewed by Roger Hollis in 1956 about his early friendship with Maclean. By then he was a QC and Tory MP. He told how his parents had been friends of Sir Donald and Lady Maclean, and how he had attended Gresham’s with Maclean as well as Trinity Hall. He and Maclean played cricket together in the holidays, and skated on the Holland Park rink. Maclean made no secret of joining the CPGB in the winter of 1932–3, recalled Simon, who thought his friend’s conversion followed Hawks’ Club rowdies wrecking the rooms of Burgess’s Eton boyfriend David Hedley, then reading classics at King’s and a convert to communism. If Simon remembered correctly, the anti-Hedley hooliganism was a trigger event reminiscent of the smashing of Arthur Reade’s cherished possessions in Oxford eleven years earlier. Maclean made a show of his communism, said Simon, ‘by selling his wardrobe and replacing it with a rather scruffy set of reach-me-downs, and filling his bookshelves with Communist books’.39
Another of Maclean’s contemporaries at Trinity Hall was Alan Nunn May. He was typical of most Cambridge undergraduate communists of the 1930s in being a grammar school boy rather than a public school man. Born in Birmingham in 1911, Nunn May was the son of a prosperous brass-founder who was reduced to working as a salesman when his business failed after a fire. Paternal humiliation and anxiety status dominated Nunn May’s adolescence. As a pupil at Birmingham’s leading grammar school, he was influenced by Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front and Robert Sherriff’s play Journey’s End. He decided that his generation had been ‘conned’ by the governing classes about the war of 1914, the ‘Hang the Kaiser’ election of 1918, the Versailles peace treaty of 1919, the bogus Zinoviev letter of 1924 and above all the capitalist crisis after 1929. From the backwashes of Birmingham he saw ‘deliberate deception’ by the authorities on all sides: as he said, in self-justificatory old age, ‘this feeling that the Establishment was not to be trusted, that any officially sponsored line of thought had to be critically examined, grew on me. I felt that the ruling class had lost all claims to trust.’40
Nunn May won a scholarship to Trinity Hall, where he gained a first in physics. His academic mentor there was the fellow-traveller Patrick Blackett. Communist propaganda in 1933–6 against the private manufacture of armaments aroused Nunn May, who became convinced that capitalists fomented war to increase their profits from munitions. After leaving Cambridge he joined the CPGB and visited Russia in 1936. His party commitment was dormant from the German–Russian pact of August 1939 until the German invasion of Russia in June 1941. He then began supplying atomic secrets to the Soviet Union: his unmasking in 1945–6 was to destabilize the other Cambridge spies.
Francis and Roualeyn (‘Spider’) Hovell-Thurlow-Cumming-Bruce came under the Marxist sway at Trinity. They were the identical twin sons of Lord Thurlow, an Anglican clergyman who specialized in missionary work among merchant seamen. During the 1920s their father had been chaplain to the Merseyside seamen’s missi
on, with the quaint title of Rural Dean of North Liverpool, and during the 1930s he was rector of a parish in the vicinity of Durham collieries. Like Blunt and Maclean, the Cumming-Bruce brothers were reared in an atmosphere of self-sacrificing Christianity, with added exposure to social deprivation. Deciding that the Church of England gave no solution to the perplexities of their time, they found a new faith in dialectical materialism, which they studied under the aegis of Dobb and Cornforth. They enjoyed the cloak-and-dagger way in which they were given their little green CPGB membership cards. Their party membership, so Roualeyn Cumming-Bruce said in 1953, ‘was a mark of grace extended through Maurice DOBB only apparently when students had reached a certain state of political education’. The twins left the CPGB about the time that they graduated from Cambridge: their observations convinced them that ‘an Engels-world upside-down offered no future at all, and both reverted … to a more sober Labour Party line’. Francis Cumming-Bruce, on furlough in England after five years in the high commission in New Zealand and before his posting to its counterpart in Ottawa, was still sufficiently keen to attend the Labour party conference at Blackpool in 1944: he admired the party executive’s adroit management of the proceedings. He ended his official career as Governor of the Bahamas and a hereditary member of the House of Lords.41
Philby went to Berlin with his friend Tim Milne in March 1933 three months after Hitler’s accession to power. The German capital was festooned with Nazi flags and anti-Jewish notices: the German communist party, which had failed to halt the advance of Hitler’s political forces, was demonstrably in decline. Milne in old age suspected that this diverted Philby, ‘always a believer in the realities of power, away from international communism and towards the Soviet Union as a mainspring of resistance to fascism’. Philby graduated in June 1933 with upper-second-class honours in economics. On his last day in college, he asked Dobb’s advice on how to fulfil his commitment to combat fascism. ‘Ach,’ Dobb had said in exasperation in 1930, ‘these conventional intellectuals without any spunk!’ (He was talking about his failure to get Trinity colleagues to protest against the deportation of Edith Suschitzky, a Viennese communist who later took the surname of Tudor-Hart.) Dobb thought Philby had spunk: he gave him a letter of introduction to a Paris group, almost certainly Willi Münzenberg’s newly formed World Committee for the Relief of Victims of German Fascism. In doing so, he launched Philby on the course which led to his first meeting with Suschitzky and her initiation of his recruitment as a spy. It must be stressed that although Dobb recruited young men into the party, he had no direct hand in inveigling them into working for Moscow.42
Enemies Within Page 29
