The university and college authorities would certainly have been amazed and appalled by the Cambridge of 2000, filled with ‘science parks’, business negotiations with global entrepreneurs and ‘Cambridge’s spires (that) dream not of academe but of profit’.5 Theirs was a modest, introverted country town on the edge of East Anglia. Lacking industry it was not so much overshadowed as blotted out by the university, on which it largely depended in an antique way, by providing the colleges with porters, servants and landladies for the majority of the university’s young men for whom there was no room in the actual college buildings, and multiple incentives for 5,000 undergraduates, assumed to be fairly well heeled, to spend more than their allowances. By later standards it had surprisingly few places for eating meals out, although the Arts Theatre, one of Maynard Keynes’s many initiatives, had just opened, and included what set out to be a fashionable restaurant. It had ten cinemas. (Filmgoing was sufficiently familiar at the High Tables for an essay De Fratribus Marx (On the Marx Brothers) to be set in 1938 for one of the Classics prizes.)
What made Cambridge parochialism worse was that the place circumscribed within college walls the lives of the dons who lived there all the time – unlike undergraduates who spent only twenty-four weeks a year there – many of them bachelor scholars, then still so common. The Second World War, which sent so many of them into the wider world – if sometimes no further than the codebreaking centre at Bletchley – was still in the future. Some of them, one felt, knew about the world beyond Royston, ten miles south of Cambridge, only by hearsay. Indeed, compared to Oxford, Cambridge University was surprisingly remote from the centres of national life, which may explain why, unlike Oxford, none of its twentieth-century alumni became prime minister. Norfolk, where dons went on holiday, not to mention Newmarket, the famous racecourse, seemed a good deal closer than London.
Such was the place I came to, from a family no member of which had ever been to a university and a school which had never sent anyone to Cambridge. It was not like the university I had imagined. (In the vacations I soon discovered and frequented one that conformed to my idea of a ‘real’ university, namely the London School of Economics.) Cambridge was exciting, it was wonderful, but it took some getting used to for a stranger who knew nobody while, it seemed to me, everybody else knew somebody – a brother, a cousin or certainly earlier arrivals from their schools. The dons had even taught their fathers and uncles. I did not know that Cambridge was the centre of that network of intermarrying professional families, my friend and Cambridge contemporary Noel Annan’s ‘intellectual aristocracy’ which has played so central a role in Britain, although anyone in King’s soon discovered it. There were still plenty of Ricardos and Darwins, Huxleys, Stracheys and Trevelyans, both among undergraduates and dons. On the other hand, nothing was more obvious than that Cambridge was penetrated by the tribal customs of the British boarding schools, from which most arts undergraduates still came, and which were familiar to the likes of me only from boys’ magazines designed for those who did not go to such establishments. For instance, to my amazement, academic life came to a stop for two or three hours every afternoon, when it was assumed that the young men would be practising games and sports. I now found myself surrounded by Etonians (they still had a special connection with King’s, since in 1440 King Henry VI had founded both establishments together), Rugbeians, Carthusians, Stoics and crowds of people from major and sometimes virtually indistinguishable minor public schools. Ready to supply such a public, the firm of Ryder and Amies, still present on King’s Parade opposite the University Church of Great St Mary’s and the Senate House, stocked 656 old school, college, club and other institutional ties, where necessary designed in-house, as well as top hats, blazers and the other accoutrements of the traditional Cambridge undergraduate.6 There were no prefects, but the undergraduate weekly Granta published regular profiles of persons regarded as important, such as presidents of major sports clubs and societies, under the heading ‘In Authority’. (Those of its own retiring editors came under the modest heading ‘In Obscurity’.)
For practical purposes, for the new undergraduates the university meant their college. Being at King’s made things easier. The scholars, having as such the right to live in college, were decanted en masse into a gloomy slum generally known as ‘The Drain’, and thus had the chance to get to know each other, and the local mores of King’s favoured informality in the relations between teachers and students, seniors and juniors. I cannot say that I was a very characteristic Kingsman – the college was at its social high noon and the centre of Cambridge theatre and music – or that I was of any great interest to its establishment. For instance, I never had occasion to meet its most famous fellow, Maynard Keynes. However, King’s was liberal and tolerant, even of enthusiasts for team games, religious believers, conservatives, revolutionaries and heterosexuals, even of the less than good-looking young from grammar schools.
Fortunately, in spite of its Provost, it also respected the intellect and had a sense of its duty to bright students. After the war I got a post as a university lecturer within a year of leaving the army, entirely on the strength of the reference written about my undergraduate record by my pre-war supervisor, Christopher Morris, admittedly a master at this genre of literary composition. Since he had also originally interviewed me for my scholarship, I suspect that it was his recommendation that got me into King’s. A few years older than me and – uncharacteristically for the college – a family man, he was typical of the don of the old school, who was primarily a teacher, or rather a personal tutor. His calling was to get average young men from a public school a decent Second in the Tripos. Beyond this he concentrated on asking what he called ‘Socratic questions’, i.e. forcing his pupils to discover what it was they had written or meant to write in their weekly essay. This worked extremely well in my case, even when I did not accept his critical remarks about my prose style. I did not much respect him, and we dealt with one another at arm’s length, but I owe him a considerable debt.
I had less contact with the college’s three serious historians. As professors, two no longer supervised undergraduates: the tiny, witty, eminent and unbelievably conservative F. A. Adcock, Professor of ancient history, and the impressive and craggy John Clapham, just retired from the chair of economic history, author of that rarest of products of history in interwar Cambridge, a major work on a major topic, namely the three volumes of his Economic History of Modern Britain (1926–38). He was a mountaineer, which fitted in with the ethos of King’s; but was also both a solidly married man and firmly attached to the North of England nonconformity from which he sprang, which did not. (Nobody would have guessed that both Provost Sheppard and Maynard Keynes came from provincial Baptist stock.) I wish I had learned more from the third, John Saltmarsh, who did supervise me, for he published hardly anything, but poured his enormous learning into the lectures I did not attend.
The man who from 1933 to 1954 presided over the college’s fortunes (which, though we did not know it, were growing rather satisfactorily thanks to the financial acumen of his backer, fellow-gambler and fellow-Apostle Maynard Keynes) was Provost Sheppard. He was then in his mid-fifties, but since his full head of hair had gone white during the First World War, he had adopted the character of an old gentleman, doddering round the college in dark suits of stiffish cloth and a stiff wing-collar, saying ‘bless you, dear boy’ to (preferably good-looking) undergraduates encountered on his way. He kept open house at the Provost’s Lodge every Sunday evening, and would sit on the floor among the young men pretending, or possibly actually trying, to light his pipe, to encourage conversation. It was on one of these occasions that I encountered my first Cabinet minister, a man of platitudes and pompous body language whom Neville Chamberlain had just appointed to co-ordinate British defence. Not unexpectedly, he confirmed all my prejudices against the government of appeasers.
Undergraduates enjoyed the Provost as a star music-hall turn, on and off the boards and in the
lecture hall, which he treated as a stage. 7 He was not respected, but quite often sentimentalized, and he certainly sentimentalized himself. In fact, he was a lifelong spoiled child of quite appalling character, which, as he grew older, was no longer mitigated by the charm, sense of fun and liberalism of his younger days. As he grew older he became more passionately royalist. A classicist, he had long given up research himself, and was no longer taken seriously by others. A failure as a scholar and as the head of a college – he never had his brief stint as Vice-Chancellor, the usual reward for even moderately competent heads of houses – he became an active enemy to the pursuit of knowledge. King’s may have been the centre of the Cambridge beau monde in the 1930s, but it was not an academically distinguished college (except in economics, over which he had no control). He was against science. ‘King’s College, Cambridge?’ said the President of Harvard. ‘Isn’t that the place where the natural sciences are denounced from the chair?’ As undergraduates we had little idea of the malice and bitchiness behind the mask of camp senile benevolence. Still, though he is one of the few people in my life for whom I came to feel genuine hate, I cannot bring myself not to feel pity for his miserable last years, when, no longer Provost and unable to conceive of a King’s that was not an extension of his own personality, in visible mental decline, he chose the last of his roles on the college stage, that of a dishevelled King Lear standing by the college gates, silently denouncing the injustices done to him.
The only other fellows with whom I had contact were the Tutor and Dean, and the history teachers. The Tutor, Donald Beves, was a large, peaceful, broad-beamed man whose passions were amateur dramatics – he was a celebrated Falstaff – and collecting Stuart and Georgian glass, which he displayed in his comfortable set of rooms, from which he surveyed the disciplinary problems of the young with an intermittent attention to administrative detail. His field was French, and he kept in regular touch with that country by touring its restaurants during vacations with friends in his Rolls-Bentley. He is not known to have published anything on its language or literature. Many years later, since his surname had five letters and began with a B like Anthony Blunt’s, some journalist, misinterpreting a leak, suggested that he might be the notorious ‘third’ or ‘fourth’ of the Cambridge spies for whom every editor was then looking. The idea of Donald Beves as a Soviet agent struck everybody who had ever met him as even more absurd than the suggestion, which was also floated for a moment at the peak of the espionage mania, that another closet bolshevik was the genuinely distinguished Professor A. C. Pigou, fellow of King’s for fifty-seven years, the founder of welfare economics, and reputed (with the great physicist J. J. Thompson) to be the worst-dressed man in Cambridge. Still, Pigou, another lifelong bachelor, was at least a pacifist, when not reflecting on economic matters and inviting intelligent, athletic and handsome young scholars to climb the crags from his cottage in the Lake District.
Actually, with one alleged exception, the links of King’s dons with intelligence were with the British rather than the Soviet secret services. Kingsmen, headed by the small, roly-poly later professor of ancient history, F. E. Adcock, had set up the British codebreaking establishment in the First World War, and at least seventeen King’s dons were recruited by Adcock for the much more famous establishment at Bletchley during the Second World War, including probably the only genius at King’s in my undergraduate years, the mathematical logician Alan Turing, whom I recall as a clumsy-looking, pale-faced young fellow given to what would today be called jogging. The person generally understood to be the local talent-spotter for the secret services – most Oxbridge colleges had at least one – was the Dean, Patrick Wilkinson, an exceptionally courteous and agreeable classical scholar with a constant half-smile and a tall head with very little hair that put me in mind, I don’t know why, of Long John Silver in Treasure Island. To everyone’s surprise he returned after the war from Bletchley a married man. Unlike the Provost, he was genuinely, deeply and unselfishly devoted to the college and its members. For many years he was responsible for the annual college report which provided full, if sometimes not completely explicit, obituaries of all Kingsmen without exception, however obscure: a document as elegantly written as it was (and continues to be) sociologically invaluable.
Cambridge in the 1930s no longer paid much attention to the object of medieval universities, instruction for the professions requiring special forms of knowledge – the clergy, the law and medicine – although it made provision for the early stages of training for them. Its purpose, at least in the arts, was not to train experts, but to form members of a ruling class. In the past this had been done on the basis of an education in the classics of ancient Greece and, above all, Rome, largely achieved by instructing the young in such esoteric practices as writing Greek and Latin verse. This tradition was far from dead. Something like seventy-five people (as against about fifty each in history and natural sciences) won scholarships or exhibitions in classics in the 1935 scholarship examination, most of them, of course, from the public schools, since not many grammar schools like my own taught Greek. But increasingly since the late nineteenth century history (centred on the political and constitutional development of England) had become the vehicle for all-purpose ‘general education’ at Cambridge. It was therefore taken by undergraduates in their hundreds, almost none of whom envisaged using it to earn their living, except perhaps as schoolmasters. It was not an intellectually very demanding subject.
The essential elements in a Cambridge education outside the natural sciences were the weekly essay written for a private session with a ‘supervisor’, and the Tripos, the degree examination in two parts, at the end of a one-year and a two-year course. Lectures were less important. They were mainly aimed at those who relied on the notes taken in the so-called ‘bread-and-butter courses’ to get them through the Tripos. Good students soon discovered that they could get more out of an hour’s reading in the magnificent libraries of college, faculty and university than an hour’s listening to undemanding public speech. Except for the ‘Special Subject’ taken in one’s last year, I doubt whether I went to any lecture course consistently after my first term, other than M. M. Postan’s economic history lectures, lectures so intellectually exciting – at the time I wrote about ‘that air of revivalism that pervaded’ them8 – that they brought the brightest of my generation of history students out at nine a.m. Good students might end by hardly going to lectures at all, but nobody seemed to mind. We learned more from reading and talking to other good students.
Not that getting a degree, let alone a good degree, was the only thing in the minds of young men and young women who found themselves in a place as full of interesting things to do as Cambridge, and with more leisure to do them than most other adults. I myself found no difficulty in combining enough academic work to do well at exams, with active undergraduate journalism and pretty full-time activity in the Socialist Club and the Communist Party. And that without counting such time spent on extra-curricular talking, social life, punting on the Cam, the pursuit of friendship and love, etc. There seemed to be time for almost everything. Perhaps the only two activities I started but gave up were taking the university course in Russian from the formidable Elizabeth Hill – which has confined me to remaining a purely western cosmopolitan – and the Cambridge Union, whose debates were commonly regarded as the training ground for future politicians. I cannot remember why I decided to give up the Union, although my early efforts had been encouraged by the then President, whom I discovered later to be a non-public Party member. It certainly saved money.
As soon as I arrived, my politics had been discovered and I was immediately invited to join the Cambridge Student Branch of the Communist Party. I eventually became a member of its ‘Secretariat’ of three, the highest political function I have ever occupied. The memoirs of a contemporary are mistaken in saying I became its Secretary in 1938, but correct in observing that I was not a natural leader figure.9 Still, its two most prestigious leaders had
gone: the dark and handsome John Cornford, whose photograph was on all progressive Cambridge mantelpieces, to fight and die in Spain; James Klugmann (see below) to Paris. Its most obvious nursery of revolution was the set of rooms, bursting with posters and leaflets, in Whewell’s Court, Trinity, just below Ludwig Wittgenstein, shared by the American Michael Whitney Straight and the biochemist Hugh Gordon. However, Trinity was the centre of graduate rather than undergraduate communism. That was, somewhat unexpectedly, Pembroke College, which, in addition to one of the rare communist dons (the superb Germanist Roy Pascal), sheltered a number of comrades, including two of the main organizers, David Spencer and Ephraim Alfred (‘Ram’) Nahum, a squat, dark natural scientist with a big nose, radiating physical strength, energy and authority. He was the son of a prosperous Sephardic textile merchant from Manchester and, by general consent, the ablest of all communist student leaders of my generation. As a graduate physicist he stayed in Cambridge during the war, and was killed in 1941 by the only German bomb to fall on the city. Unlike Ram Nahum (who was known only on the left), Pieter Keunemann, a dashing, witty and remarkably handsome Ceylonese (the island was not yet Sri Lanka) who lived in Pembroke in some style, was a great figure in university society – President of the Union, among other things – not to mention the lucky partner of the ravishing Hedi Simon from Vienna (and Newnham), with whom I vainly fell in love. (After we graduated Pieter and I rented a tiny house together in the now no longer extant Round Church Street a few yards from the house where Ram was to die.) Although both were devoted Party members, I do not think anyone would have predicted that this debonair socialite, who first introduced me to the poems of John Betjeman, would spend most of his later life as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Sri Lanka.
On the other hand, we all expected that the elegant charmer Mohan Kumaramangalam, of Madras, Eton and King’s, also President of the Union, the admired friend of so many of us, would become an important figure in his native India, as indeed he did. As an Indian, Mohan was not, of course, officially in the Party. Nor were the other ‘colonial students’ – overwhelmingly from the Indian subcontinent. I soon found myself working with their special ‘colonial group’, headed, in a sort of local inheritance, by a succession of Trinity historians with a bent for ‘Third World’ history. Unlike their mentors, the young ‘colonial communists’ did not envisage academic life, although that is where one or two ended up. They looked forward to liberation and social revolution in their countries. The two Kingsmen among them did best, for Mohan’s younger contemporary, the modest and selfless Indrajit (‘Sonny’) Gupta, after a succession of jobs as trade union and political leader ended up, in old age, as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of India and, for a short spell, as Interior Minister of his country.
Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life Page 14
