Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

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,