Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

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.