Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

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 Cordoba 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 naive 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 the 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 cafe, 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.