Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

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Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life Page 15

by Eric J. Hobsbawm


  The Party was, of course, my primary passion. But even for a 100 per cent communist there was simply too much to do in Cambridge to remain entirely confined to agitation, propaganda and organization, which in any case were not my forte. (In the end I reluctantly realized that the only really desirable career, that of the ‘professional revolutionary’, i.e. the Party functionary, was not for me, and I resigned myself to earning my living in a less uncompromising way.) Of course, everything was political in a sense, though not in the post-1968 sense for which ‘the personal is political’. We felt that what we wanted personally was not of interest to the Party, so long as it did not conflict with the Party line. But it was our duty not only to get good degrees but to bring Marxism into our work, just as politics entered the activities of those who went for acting or undergraduate journalism. Nevertheless, I cannot honestly say that I wrote for, and eventually edited, the student weekly Granta primarily for political reasons; nor that it was ever a journal that had much place for politics. Looking at old numbers today, I must sadly acknowledge that it was not much good as a journal, though my predecessor as editor, Charles Wintour, successfully used it to join Lord Beaverbrook’s stable, eventually editing the London Evening Standard. It was in fact pretty terrible, but we had a marvellous time in its office on Market Square over tea, gossip and jokes, and it gave us a golden opportunity to get free tickets for films: second to editing Granta, being its film editor was the potential contributor’s chief ambition. The film reviews even provided a neutral territory for friends of different politics, such as the young Arthur Schlesinger Jr, whom I met there, then as later a consistent anti-communist New Dealer.

  8

  Against Fascism and War

  Whatever happened in Cambridge in those years was coloured by the knowledge that we lived in a time of crisis. Before Hitler came to power, the modest student radicalization of the time was almost certainly precipitated by the world economic crisis, the miserable collapse of the 1929–31 Labour government, and such dramatic demonstrations of what mass unemployment and poverty meant as the Hunger Marches from the smokeless and silent industrial areas. After 1933 it was increasingly a movement to resist the advance of fascist dictatorships and the next world war their advance would certainly bring; that is to say a movement directed against craven, as well as capitalist and imperialist, British governments that did nothing to stop the drift to fascism and war. In the second half of the 1930s, and especially after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, this was certainly the main force behind the remarkable growth of the Socialist Club: the effect of Munich in Cambridge was that the Cambridge University Socialist Club (CUSC) recruited 300 new members in a week.1

  Throughout the decade the black cloud of the coming world war dominated our horizons. Could it be avoided? If not, how should we act? Would we fight ‘for King and Country’ as the Oxford Union had notoriously refused to do in 1933? Certainly not, but should we fight at all? Pacifism divided the Cambridge left, or rather the awkwardly combined anti-fascist and anti-war movement, for pacifism extended far beyond those interested in the politics of parties and movements, and even beyond the range of organized religion. As most of this apolitical pacifism disappeared after the fall of France in 1940, its strength in the 1930s is often forgotten. Indeed, pacifism was the only important issue that divided the Cambridge left, for within the Socialist Club the CP’ s line of broad anti-fascist unity had virtually unanimous support. Only one prominent member, Sammy Silkin of Trinity Hall, supported the official position of the Labour Party and was consequently cherished as proof of the ideological comprehensiveness of the Club (as distinct from the Labour Party itself which banned any organization with communists in it).

  For most purposes the CUSC meant the ‘Red Cambridge’ of the 1930s. This was not true literally, since even at the peak of its strength, in early 1939, it had no more than 1,000 members out of fewer than 5,000 undergraduates, and when I went up in the autumn of 1936 only about 450.2 The Party never had much more than 100 members. Nevertheless, given the family origins, socio-political milieu and traditional customs of undergraduates at the ancient universities, as well as the overwhelmingly right-wing political inclinations of west and central European university students between the wars, the domination of the left in both Oxford and Cambridge during the 1930s was quite astonishing. All the more so as, with the exception of the London School of Economics, the left was not particularly strong in any of the other British centres of higher education.4

  What is more to the point, the political transformation of Cambridge came from below. The typical politics of Cambridge dons were no doubt in the moderate centre rather than (as in Oxford) strongly Conservative, but prominent supporters of the Labour Party were rare, and communist dons could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Even so uncontroversial a campaign as that nominally organized by the Cambridge Peace Council, which succeeded in raising the then enormous sum of £1,000 for food for the women and children of Republican Spain in the autumn of 1938, was officially supported by only two heads of houses (St John’s and King’s), six professors – only one (M. M. Postan) in history – an eminent pacifist clerical don and Maynard Keynes.3 In the natural sciences, what turned Cambridge red were junior physicists and biochemists from the two intellectual powerhouses, the Cavendish and the Biochem Lab. But Cambridge science went its own political ways, building its campaigns round the Cambridge Scientists’ Antiwar Group, which entered wider consciousness mainly by demonstrating the inadequacy of the government’s defences against air-raids and poison gas, in the next war. A scientists’ faculty group of the Socialist Club was not established until late in 1938. Outside the natural sciences it was unquestionably the conversion of undergraduates that turned Cambridge red.

  Who were the Cambridge reds? The question is easier to answer for the less numerous communists than for the CUSC. Before the era of anti-fascism and the Popular Front there were occasional aristocrats, such as the splendidly named A. R. Hovell-Thurlow-Cumming-Bruce, later a kind-hearted judge, who as a small child had played at Chats-worth, where he broke one of the Duke’s massive oriental vases, but mostly they came from the prosperous professional, or more rarely business, upper middle class – the Schlegels rather than the Wilcoxes (to use the convenient distinction in E. M. Forster’s novel Howards End). Noel Annan’s ‘intellectual aristocracy’ was represented, not least by the charismatic John Cornford, a great-grandson of Charles Darwin, but not dominant. The proportion of members from public schools was distinctly smaller in my time, that is after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, when the numbers both of the Party and the CUSC shot up. The grammar schools of England and Wales (though not their equivalents in Scotland) were almost certainly better represented in the Party, and certainly in its leadership, than in the general body of Cambridge undergraduates. The student Party’s chief local commissar at the time was a lean-and-hungry-looking mathematician from a working-class family, George Barnard of St John’s, who ended his career as President of the Royal Statistical Society and in a chair at Essex University and whose younger sister, Dorothy (Wedderburn), whom I got to know after the war, was to become and remain an intimate friend of Marlene and myself. Equally prominent, a little later, was Ralph Russell, a working-class classics student of steely bolshevik demeanour – we called him ‘Georgi’ after Georgi Dimitrov, the Secretary of the Comintern. The products of ‘progressive schools’ (Bedales, Dartington, etc.) were also likely to move left, as were the young of Quaker families. It has been suggested that Jews were slightly over-represented, but that is not my memory. Communism – irreligious and anti-Zionist – attracted very few in the small body of Jewish students at Cambridge, sympathetic to Liberals and Labour though these tended to be. If anyone in my time was regarded as a prominent Jewish leftist student, it was the South African Aubrey Eban (Abba Eban), destined for political eminence in Israel, whose Zionism kept him safe from communist temptation. Nor did the few Party members who were Jews think about
their Judaism until, I think in 1937, King Street decided we should, and formed a ‘Jewish group’ or committee in London which ‘Ram’ Nahum and I reluctantly attended a few times before concluding that it had little reference to what we were doing. I remember the committee for my first encounter with the sort of East End communists who could not stop telling (extremely funny) Jewish jokes, a practice not characteristic of Party meetings in Cambridge.

  No doubt this type of socio-cultural analysis throws some light on the distinction between Cambridge right and left, but it is less illuminating than another phenomenon, which still needs explanation. More than one observer might agree with Henry Ferns, that ‘the only element common to all the Communists I encountered (in Cambridge) was high intelligence’.4 In the 1930s the left attracted the intellectually brightest members of the student generation in the country’s elite universities.

  Much larger though their numbers were, the members of the CUSC were also characteristically people of intellectual interests, although the club was sufficiently aware of the social dimension of life to organize a dancing class. It had the substantial advantage, not enjoyed by many undergraduate societies, of a large membership in both Girton and Newnham, whose idea of political activism, though just as serious as the men’s, was often less heavy. (The first Valentine I ever received was collectively from the Newnham group of the Communist Party of which I was the political instructor.) They were serious about studying. ‘The Committee wishes all CUSC members success in their Trips (Triposes)’ the Bulletin recorded before the 1937 exams. ‘Let us be as much to the fore on the academic front as on the political.’ 5 Starting with the modern linguists and historians, the club set up ‘faculty’ groups to debate problems of their subjects, and by late 1938 had twelve of them, including even such politically unpromising territories as agriculture, engineering and law.6 On the other hand, contempt for organized sports (but not, of course, for such traditional pursuits of progressive Cambridge as long hikes and mountaineering) was part of CUSC political consciousness. The CUSC gloried in the (frequent) success of socialists or communists at the Union, in drama and journalism – at one moment the presidents of the Union and the ADC (the main dramatic society) and the editor of Granta were all in the Party – but I am not aware that it took much interest in converting any of the university’s celebrated sports stars – admittedly an uphill task – or in the sporting or mountaineering achievements of its own members.

  Whatever else the CUSC did, it campaigned: constantly, passionately, and in a spirit of hopeful confidence that surprises me as I look back in old age on my undergraduate years in Cambridge, the years when Europe (but not yet the world) slid into catastrophe.

  The briefest headline summary of the politics of Europe in the 1930s shows that, from the point of view of the left, they were a virtually unbroken succession of disasters. Admittedly, as the song ‘Gaudeamus igitur ’ tells us, student days are not a time for depression, but should we not have been a little more desperate? We were not. Unlike the post-1945 anti-nuclear movement, we did not feel ourselves fighting a probably doomed rearguard action against enemies far beyond our reach. We lived from crisis to crisis, organizing like football teams living from match to match, each calling for the best efforts. As far as Cambridge was concerned, we were winning our matches. Each season was better than the last. In a way, the student left shared the university’s remoteness from the national centre, not to mention its traditional self-absorption. In everyday practice, for Cambridge comrades ‘the Party’ and the International meant the Cambridge student Party, for our only regular pre-war contact with the national leadership came through the notably un-authoritarian student organizer Jack Cohen, whose political command we naturally accepted without question, but who was aware that a worker without much formal schooling and who came to the students from Party work in the industrial Northeast, had much to learn about universities.

  And yet, could we really forget that our greatest triumph, Spain Week, was won at a time when the Spanish Republic was visibly on its last legs and virtually beyond hope? Moreover, though we constructed scenarios about how war could be avoided by firm collective resistance to Hitler, we did not really believe them. We knew in our bones that a Second World War was coming, and we did not expect to survive it. I remember one bad night in a hotel room, possibly in Lyon, in the middle of the Munich crisis of 1938 – I was returning from a long vac study trip to French North Africa – when the thought that war might break out within days suddenly hit me. The nightmares of mass aerial bombardments and clouds of poison gas, against which, as we had so often warned, there was no protection, would become reality. There was no comparable hysteria in September 1939. The year from Munich to the invasion of Poland had allowed us to get used to the prospect of war.

  I think we kept cheerful for three reasons. First, we had only one set of enemies – fascism and those who (like the British government) did not want to resist it. Second, there was an actual battlefield – Spain – and we were on it. Our own hero, the charismatic John Cornford, fell on the Córdoba front on his twenty-first birthday. True, he and one or two others who had gone out during the summer of 1936 were to be our only direct participants in the war, for curiously – the fact has not been much noticed – a Party decision at the highest level actually discouraged recruiting students for the International Brigades, unless they had special military qualifications, on the grounds that their primary Party duty was to get a good degree first, so they would, presumably, be of greater usefulness to the Party. Finally, we thought we knew what the new world would be like after the old world had come to an end. In this, like all generations, we were mistaken.

  Hence the 1930s were for us very far from the ‘low and dishonest decade’ of the disenchanted poet Auden. For us it was a time when the good cause confronted its enemies. We enjoyed it, even when, as for most of radical Cambridge, it did not occupy the bulk of our time, and we did a certain amount of world-saving as a matter of course, because it was the thing to do. ‘On the other hand we avoided that strain of unhappiness which today frustrates people whose instinct it is to feel about world affairs exactly as we did then, but who find it impossible to translate their feelings into action, as we did.’7

  In doing so we ‘distributed our emotions and energies evenly over the public and private sectors of the landscape’, or rather we made no sharp distinction between these two sectors. It is true that we sang, to a Cole Porter-like tune:

  Let’s liquidate love Let’s say from now on That all our affection’s For the workers alone. Let’s liquidate love Till the revolution Until then love is An un-bolshevik thing.

  Nevertheless, since close comradeship between emancipated men and women was part of the cause, we did not live up to this aspiration, even though Cambridge communists’ private lives, at least among the more specialized politicians, seem to have been less highly coloured than contemporary Oxford ones. The ethos of the CUSC and the Party was, of course, overwhelmingly heterosexual as, indeed, outside theatrical circles and King’s College, it was among the undergraduates generally. In the 1930s even the Apostles had left the era of the Edwardian ‘higher sodomy’ behind. No doubt some of us were not as naïve as Henry Ferns, who claims that ‘I never once encountered a Communist in Cambridge who was a homosexual’, but it is true that inside the Comintern (and still less in the CUSC) one did not advertise membership of the Homintern. It was treated on both sides as a private matter. I can think of at least two friends I first knew in the pre-war Party of whose lifelong homosexuality I was simply not aware until after the war.

  There was no sharp division between term and vacation. Students did not do much paid vacation work yet, other than tour-guiding for linguists. The odd grant was available – one of these paid for my study trip to Tunisia and Algeria in 1938 – and I financed the long vacation of 1939 with my share of the profits of editing Granta, which amounted to some £50. (Thanks to the May Week number, summer term was the time to be editor. At t
he end of each term the editor pocketed what was left after the technical owners, the printing firm of Messrs Foister and Jagg had been paid for production and distribution.

  My own vacations, broadly speaking, were divided between the London School of Economics and France. The LSE, or at least its main building in Houghton Street, Aldwych, is still recognizably what it was some sixty years ago, even down to the survival of a small snack-bar immediately to the left of the main entrance, which in those days was known as Marie’s café, where the student activists used to discuss politics or try to win converts, usually observed by a silent lone central European rather older than ourselves, apparently one of those ‘eternal students’ who hang around inner-city campuses, but who was in fact the totally unknown and unconsidered Norbert Elias, just about to publish his great work on The Process of Civilization in Switzerland. Academic Britain in the 1930s was extraordinarily blind to the brilliance of the central European Jewish and anti-fascist refugee intellectuals unless they operated in conventionally recognized fields such as classics and physics. The LSE was probably the only place where they would be given house-room. Even after the war, Elias’s academic career in this country was marginal, and the worth of scholars such as Karl Polanyi was not recognized until after they crossed the Atlantic.

 

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