Michaelmas term 1938 was a tense but politically exciting time to go to Oxford. For a brief moment Neville Chamberlain’s expedient deal with Hitler at Munich seemed to have bought a reprieve; but the shadow of war still loomed, and no freshman going up that year could feel confident that he would be able to finish his degree. By chance Oxford – and Balliol in particular – was immediately at the heart of the national crisis of conscience about Munich. In a famous by-election that autumn the adopted Labour candidate, the future Foreign Secretary Patrick Gordon Walker, was persuaded to stand down in favour of ‘Sandy’ Lindsay, who stood as an Independent anti-government candidate to unite all those opposed to appeasement: an unprecedented action for the head of an Oxford college. The government was defended by the thirty-one-year-old Quintin Hogg, while Lindsay’s supporters, including some dissident Tory MPs, campaigned on the slogan that ‘A Vote for Hogg is a Vote for Hitler’. Jenkins, along with most of Balliol, was swept up in Lindsay’s campaign – an intoxicating introduction to Oxford politics. ‘I remember canvassing up sodden and leafy half-drives in North Oxford, when I was shocked to discover that Conservative loyalty to Chamberlain and Hogg was rather stronger than academic solidarity with Lindsay.’9 Hogg won, saving Chamberlain’s face, but his majority was halved. A few weeks earlier, in the first Union debate of the term, Teddy Heath – hitherto a model young Conservative – had courageously teamed up with the Labour ex-president Christopher Mayhew to denounce Munich. In the most crowded house for years they carried the vote by 320:266. Then, following another debate in which he memorably accused the Prime Minister of turning ‘all four cheeks’ to the enemy, Heath was elected president by a margin of 280:155. Jenkins ‘almost certainly’ voted for him,10 though it was Mayhew’s speech that he most vividly remembered.fn2
With his family background and his own political ambition, it was inevitable that Jenkins’ life for the next three years centred on the Union and the Labour Club. In retrospect, he regretted that he wasted so much of his energy on the Union, neglecting the range of other opportunities that Oxford offered. But at the time politics consumed his whole existence. His friends were almost exclusively political, while Balliol provided five consecutive presidents in his first five terms, including Heath, Seligman and Hugh Fraser: his most ardent ambition was to continue that succession. The Oxford Union in those days took itself very seriously as a miniature House of Commons where national and international issues were debated along party lines; arguments, mannerisms and even jokes were honed which would soon be heard at Westminster; rivalries formed that would later be played out on the national stage. It is easy to mock these privileged young pretenders in tailcoats playing at politics; yet in 1938–41, debating questions of war and peace, socialism, communism or fascism, they were debating matters of life and death to their generation, and their arguments vividly illuminate the controversies of the time.fn3 The Labour Club was dominated by Communists, boldly proclaiming an allegiance most of them would subsequently outgrow. Healey, for instance, was a Communist party member while at Oxford: decades later Jenkins could still see him ‘walking purposefully through the Balliol quad in a belted mackintosh, full of ideological certainty’.13 John Biggs-Davison was another ‘straight-down-the-line fellow traveller’ who later swung right across the political spectrum to land on the far right of the Tory party.14 Jenkins, by contrast, was always firmly in the moderate Labour mainstream. A socialist by inheritance and upbringing, not rebellion, he had no need of adolescent posturing to establish his credentials. So long as the Communists were part of the broad left alliance against Nazism, however, and the Chamberlain government was still half-heartedly exploring possible cooperation with Stalin to contain Hitler, the latent division within the Labour Club did not come to a head.
In his first term Jenkins attended Union debates assiduously, but did not speak. He made his maiden speech at the beginning of his second term in January 1939 on a Labour motion condemning the domestic policy of the National Government. Isis, the student newspaper, judged this first effort – carefully prepared and rehearsed – ‘very fluent’ and ‘quite good’.15 The political colour of Oxford at the time was reflected in a comfortable victory (129:84) for the anti-government side. Two weeks later Jenkins again took the loyalist Labour line against a motion that ‘This House welcomes the breaking down of the traditional party lines’: ‘Mr G.C. Grey (Hertford), summing up for the Ayes, thought a Popular Front could sweep the country, but Mr R.H. Jenkins (Balliol), summing up for the Noes, thought this most unlikely.’16 This time, in a much smaller House, he was on the losing side by 82:46. He spoke a third time in March to deplore Britain’s recognition of General Franco, recently victorious in the Spanish Civil War. At the end of this term he stood for the Library committee and did pretty well to get sixty-five votes. In the summer term, however, he spoke only once, again following the orthodox Labour line – despite the imminence of war – against immediate conscription; and again failed to be elected. Isis did not yet see him as a ‘Union prospect’.17
Altogether he did not make much impact in his first year. Outside the Union he remembered playing college hockey, going to the cinema a lot and eating walnut cake in Fuller’s Tea Rooms. Meanwhile he made heavy weather of his preliminary exams (‘Pass Mods’), which he managed to spread over three terms instead of the usual two: doubtless the result of spending too much time on politics. As a result he looked back on his first year with much less affection than the next two. That last summer of peace he took part in the Balliol Players’ annual tour, taking a production of Aristophanes’ The Birds (in English) to various picturesque locations around southern England (‘Roy was an enthusiastic member of the chorus’).18 In July he made his first recorded public speech, appearing on a platform with his father and the eighty-year-old George Lansbury in support of the Labour candidate at a by-election in Monmouth.19 Then he went to France for five weeks, where he got a job escorting British visitors across Paris – and was annoyed to run into Denis Healey offering to show him around – but also travelled as far as the Spanish border with Ronnie McIntosh, staying in a villa owned by a girlfriend of Biggs-Davison. When the bombshell of the Nazi–Soviet Pact scuppered the last hopes of peace, they all hurried back from Toulon just before the declaration of war. But there was no immediate call-up of young men under twenty – indeed no British involvement in hostilities at all for seven months; so after a gloomy few weeks at home in Pontypool he went back to Oxford in October.
His horizons expanded considerably in his second year. First, to accommodate the evacuation of Chatham House from London, much of Balliol was moved next door to Trinity, where Jenkins shared a staircase with Madron Seligman: two large rooms each instead of the ‘bed-sitter’ he had occupied in Balliol, with log fires and better food. ‘For long afterwards,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘whenever anyone asked whether wartime Oxford had not been a sad decline from the splendours of peacetime, I said that, on the contrary, it had put my standard of living up by about half.’20 Second, since all four of the elected officers of the Union immediately left to join the forces, unelected replacements had to be co-opted in their place: in this way Nicholas (‘Nicko’) Henderson of Hertford, later to be one of Jenkins’ closest friends but at this point no more than an ‘amical acquaintance’,21 became president and Seligman treasurer. Jenkins got his foot on the ladder by joining the Standing Committee and the next term, when Seligman became president, moved up to secretary. Third, he made a number of important new friends: David Ginsburg; two Old Etonians, Anthony Elliott and Michael Ashcroft, who joined the Foreign Office and the Treasury respectively after the war; Isaiah (‘Shy’) Halevy, with whom he shared digs in his third year (but who was killed in 1944); and above all Tony Crosland – ‘the most exciting friend of my life’ – with whom his career would be intimately entangled for the next thirty-eight years.22
Crosland was fifteen months older than Jenkins and a year ahead of him, having gone up to Trinity in 1937 as a classical sch
olar after a turbulent career at Highgate School. His father was a senior civil servant, his mother an academic; but, most importantly, Joseph and Jessie Crosland were Plymouth Brethren: members of a strict Christian sect that rejected any form of priesthood. This conflicted background – professional upper-middle class, materially comfortable yet at the same time fiercely puritanical – set up all sorts of complicated tensions in their son which were exacerbated by Joseph’s death in 1935. Partly in emulation of his parents, partly in reaction against them, young Tony embraced a form of socialism that was at once cerebral and romantic, egalitarian and elitist, and a personal lifestyle that was simultaneously hard-working and hedonistic. At Oxford he cut a striking figure, as Jenkins recalled in an obituary tribute written in 1977:
I first saw Tony Crosland in 1938 or early 1939. He was 20, and I was 18. The gap seemed bigger. He was a very impressive undergraduate, showing every sign of intellectual and social self-assurance. He was immensely good-looking, and even in those days rather elegant. He wore a long camel-hair overcoat, and drove a powerful low MG known as the Red Menace. I, like many of his near-contemporaries, admired him from afar, and was rather intimidated.
Then, one winter’s evening a few months after the outbreak of the war, he came to my rooms, probably on some minor point of Labour Club business, and having settled it, remained uncertainly on the threshold, talking but neither sitting down nor departing for nearly two hours. His character was more ambivalent than I had thought, but also more engaging.
Thereafter, I saw him nearly every day for the next six months until he left Oxford.23
In the early days of their relationship Jenkins was clearly the junior partner. Crosland was not only older but intellectually more confident. He introduced his younger friend to Marxism, and taught him the importance of socialist theory and the class struggle – in which Roy, deriving his political allegiance unquestioningly from his father, had hitherto felt little interest. At the same time Tony deeply envied Roy’s roots in the Labour movement, which he, as a middle-class intellectual, could never match. As their friendship developed, Roy took Tony back to Pontypool to meet his parents, as he did most of his Oxford friends.fn4 But Arthur and Hattie took particularly to Tony, so much so that he became almost an adopted son. Hattie mothered him in a way that his own mother never had, and Arthur – the first of several surrogate father-figures in Tony’s life – played a major part in weaning him from his initially over-theoretical understanding of socialism. Thus Roy and Tony formed a very close and complementary relationship: personal as much as political. Tony at this time was openly gay – it was part of his slightly dangerous glamour – and part of Roy’s attraction for him was probably sexual. There is certainly a strong homoerotic undercurrent in his letters; and years later Roy confessed that Tony had successfully seduced him at least once.25 Jenkins was not by nature gay – far from it; but it is clear that he fell for a time so wholly under Crosland’s spell that he might have tried anything.
The teasing balance of their relationship (both personal and political) is well conveyed in the first surviving letter that Tony wrote Roy at the end of 1939, when Roy was back in Pontypool for Christmas and Tony was staying with his mother in Sussex:
My dear Roy,
Your kind uncle is sending you Christmas card, letter, & fabulously expensive present all at once. But your uncle is also very annoyed with you for not sending back that ‘Labour & the War’ very soon, as you promised to do; I wanted it rather badly at Oxford, but it doesn’t matter now at all, so you are magnanimously forgiven.
How have you been getting on with your ‘beautiful’ boy friend? Personally I think that however gold his heart may be (& I rather doubt even that) his exterior is bordering on the repulsive. However, one who wears political blinkers is likely to be aesthetically blind as well – it’s all one can expect of a Social Democrat.
‘Social Democrat’ was of course intended as a friendly insult. Tony was critical of Labour from a far-left perspective. ‘I still cling rather pathetically to my hopes in the Party,’ he wrote, but he thought it insufficiently socialist, and suspected Roy of the same weakness. ‘Fundamentally it’s your nice liberal outlook again – the “we’re-all-decent-chaps-at-heart-so-why-can’t-we-all-pull-together-after-all-remember-what-Nelson-said” sort of outlook – one which is diametrically opposed to Marxism.’ He concluded teasingly:
Well, Roy, write to me soon and tell me your ideas about Liverpool [the upcoming Universities Labour Federation (ULF) conference]. And don’t forget – drink, women and sleep are all things to be taken in small quantities! What a thrill the Pontypool girls must get each vac. when their handsome (& pansy) Beau Geste comes back to them again! God, what an awful thought!
Yrs etc. Tony26
But if Tony was clearly the dominant partner, Roy did not follow him uncritically. The Oxford Labour Club was deeply divided over whether or not to support the war. Since the Nazi–Soviet Pact the majority had followed the Communist line that it was an imperialist war, like 1914, which the working class should not support. Tony and Roy took the minority view that Labour should support the war but not Chamberlain, in the belief that it could be turned to socialist ends. Tony, however, as a good Marxist, was still prepared to justify the Nazi–Soviet Pact, and Soviet threats to Finland, on grounds of self-defence. Roy, following Attlee and the Labour leadership, was not. On 22 November he proposed a motion at the Union that ‘Recent Soviet policy has not been in accordance with socialist principles’:
Mr R.H. Jenkins (Balliol), who opened the debate, stated that he was a socialist, but that he thought a country’s policy should not necessarily be guided by what Marx would have thought or Lenin would have done. He was not prepared to accept the dictates of Moscow as infallible reason.27 . . . Stalin’s policy was inconsistent with the war aims propounded by Mr Attlee, and Russia’s withdrawal from the Peace Front had betrayed Socialism by precipitating bloodshed, war and disorder.28
In the Oxford Magazine Nicko Henderson commented that ‘Mr Jenkins made, as usual, a very sound and sensible speech; but he should try and get his arguments home by using more emphasis and thrust at the right moments’. In reply, Tony made what Henderson considered ‘the best speech Mr Crosland has made in the Union’. But the House was against him – ‘His sang-froid was useful against interruptions’ – and Roy won the debate by 93:40.29
A week later Soviet troops invaded Finland. The Labour Club’s cyclostyled Bulletin carried three distinct reactions. Leo Pliatzky – another undergraduate Communist who finished up as Permanent Secretary in the Department of Trade in the 1970s – defended the invasion. Jenkins condemned it as wanton aggression and a violation of self-determination. Crosland, with characteristic ambivalence, still excused it on military grounds but condemned it as a diplomatic blunder on Stalin’s part which would only fuel anti-Soviet outrage in the West – as it did.30
After Christmas Tony (with Pliatzky) paid his first visit to Pontypool, where they doubtless carried on the argument and Arthur took them down a coalmine. (Tony had been down a mine before, whereas Roy – to judge from the way he describes the experience in his memoirs – surprisingly had not.) From there they all drove in Tony’s car to the ULF conference in Liverpool, beginning on 2 January 1940, where they found themselves in an even smaller minority against the Communist domination of student Labour politics.fn5 The Oxford Labour Club was divided; but most other university Labour clubs were virtually monolithic. Crosland, supported by Jenkins and another Oxford delegate, moved a counter-resolution in support of the war; but it was defeated by 49:9 and the invasion of Finland supported by 46:6.32 As a result of these votes the ULF was disaffiliated from the Labour party.
Back in Oxford, Seligman as president invited the Finnish ambassador to the Union, where he pleaded for ‘all possible help’ to be given to his beleaguered country. Jenkins spoke in his support; Crosland did not speak, but staged a pro-Soviet demonstration, lowering a banner from the gallery demanding �
��Hands Off Russia’. In a crowded House the motion was carried by 295:141; but Seligman and the ambassador had to fight their way out of the building through a crowd of left-wing bullies. This was Crosland’s last pro-Soviet flourish. In all the other debates that term, as the war in the West still hung fire – the so-called ‘Phoney War’ – he and Roy were on the same side. On 1 February they both condemned the Chamberlain government’s policy on the home front. On 15 February Roy spoke ‘on the paper’ and Tony from the floor against Labour joining an immediate coalition. The next week Roy used his father’s influence to secure Arthur Greenwood (Labour’s deputy leader) as guest speaker to advocate a socialist Britain, supported by Tony and Henderson, but did not speak himself. On 29 February he argued against banning the Communist Party. He was now winning some plaudits as a speaker. ‘He has a fine control of language,’ the Oxford Magazine allowed, ‘and is a convincing debater.’33 But on 7 March he drew the short straw in another high-profile debate when the exiled President of Czechoslovakia Eduard Beneš was the star guest, supported by Ted Heath, returning as an ex-president to the scene of his former triumphs. Jenkins proposed – surely against his own belief – the motion that ‘This House has no faith in liberal Western democracy as a basis of government’. Against the usual leftist trend, but doubtless in guilty expiation of Britain’s betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich, it was rejected by acclamation. Despite this, Jenkins was elected librarian for the summer term. Crosland stood for the presidency, but lost to a Tory, Robin Edmonds from Brasenose (later a diplomat). He was probably punished for toeing the Moscow line too long.
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