with another Kingsman, the later Walter Wallich of the BBC, son of the director of the Deutsche Bank and descendant of its founder who, after the Kristallnacht of 1938, having sent wife and children abroad in good time, took a train from Berlin to Cologne and jumped off the bridge into the Rhine. It was an invitation that hardly any Cambridge undergraduate was likely to refuse, since even revolutionaries like to be in a suitable tradition. Who would not wish to be associated with the names of earlier Apostles, which were more or less the great names of nineteenth-century Cambridge: the poet Tennyson, the marvellous physicist Clerk Maxwell, the greatest of Cambridge historians, Frederick Maitland, Bertrand Russell and the glories of Edwardian Cambridge – Keynes, Wittgenstein and Moore, Whitehead and, in literature, E. M. Forster and Rupert Brooke. Only the greatest of nineteenth-century Cambridge names was missing, Charles Darwin of Christ’s. Actually, the bulk of the Victorian and Edwardian Apostles, who have been exhaustively and perceptively analysed by an American professor,13 were by no means in that class, and, since greatness of intellectual (or other) achievement often requires running the risk of boring friends whose interests do not coincide completely with your own – and no Apostle would have wanted to bore the other brethren – many of them suffered in later life from their inability to live up to the exemplars of their great tradition.
It may be worth observing that communism had nothing to do with my election, although the famous photo of six Apostles that appears in every book on the Cambridge spies contains four communists. It is no surprise that the Party was heavily represented in the society of the Spanish Civil War years. However, neither John Cornford and James Klugmann nor any of the heads of the Party in my time were Apostles, nor (with one exception) was any Marxist don of the 1930s. The criterion for being elected to the society was, and presumably still is, not subject or belief, or even intellectual distinction, but ‘being apostolic’, whatever that meant – and it was, and no doubt continues to be, endlessly discussed among the brethren. For that matter, neither were the Cambridge spies recruited primarily through the Apostles (except via Anthony Blunt): of the Cambridge Five three had nothing whatever to do with the society (Philby, Maclean and Cairncross).
The war had suspended the ‘real world’ in Cambridge, although a number of senior Angels continued in at least intermittent residence as dons. If I am not mistaken, only two pre-war active brethren returned to Cambridge as research students, myself and the late Matthew Hodgart, a black-haired, moon-faced, hard-drinking literary Scot, perhaps the most brilliant of my undergraduate friends, by then no longer a communist. We were, or rather, since he was not present, I was charged by the assembled Angels at the society’s first postwar annual dinner in 1946 (at Kettners in Soho) to revive it. We did this by recruiting among pre-war friends who had returned to Cambridge, and the students sent to me for supervision by King’s. When I became a Fellow, I recruited a college friend, the Canadian economist Harry Johnson. Since I also supervised economics students in economic history, the postwar Apostles thus found themselves continuing the tradition of Maynard Keynes. However, increasingly, the arts, i.e. history and English, tended to fill the society of the 1950s – together with the unclassified multiple brilliance of Jonathan Miller, who read natural sciences. Before the 1939 war many of them would have gone into the civil service, but now the non-economists among them flocked into two expanding occupations: ‘the media’ and university teaching, sometimes in succession. Women began to be elected only in the 1960s.
After the war the most famous surviving Apostle, the novelist E. M. Forster, moved into King’s College, and, loyal as ever to the society, offered his rooms for its Sunday evening meetings, sitting quietly in the corner – he probably never said much even in his youth – listening to the young brethren speaking literally (in the society’s argot) ‘on the hearth-rug’, since fireplaces fed from coal-scuttles were still the main Cambridge line of defence against the raw eastern climate. Never a habitual scribbler, by this time Morgan had virtually stopped writing, although he took enormous trouble to avoid the slightest hint of cliche s or platitude in such few texts as he still composed. He had no family, except that of his old policeman lover. I do not think he was ever as much at ease in the postwar world as he would have liked to be, but he was consoled by the unchanging nature of the youth surrounding him. In the early 1960s I once tried to introduce him to the later twentieth century by taking him to see the American soliloquist – one could hardly call him a ‘comedian’ any longer – Lenny Bruce, who was briefly performing at the Establishment, a shortlived Soho club, on his way to rapid self-destruction. Morgan was, as always, courteous and endlessly considerate, but this was not his wavelength.
It has been said by a perceptive observer of the society’s first century that ‘the Apostles devoted themselves to two things above all else, and did so with a pure intensity which to an unkind eye might look absurd, but to a kind eye absolutely admirable. These were friendship on the one hand, and intellectual honesty, on the other.’ 14 Both were still very central to the Apostles of my time, though the dons who participated in these sessions, being older, probably injected a dose of diplomacy into the ‘intellectual honesty’ they brought to their personal relations. Still, both crossed the barriers of age and temperament, and I, as well as my family, owe to the undergraduate Apostles of the early fifties (and to the young men and women I met with and through them) a number of lasting friendships.
III
I cannot say that the first half of the 1950s was a happy time for me in my personal life. I filled it with work, with writing, thinking and teaching, with a lot of travel during university vacations, and, dutifully, with Party work. Fortunately, moving out of London had put me out of the range of London local branch work – organization, canvassing, selling the
Intellectually, though, those were good years. The mind of most people is at its sharpest and most adventurous in their twenties, but I returned from the army passionately determined to catch up on the ideas of the lost war years, and just young enough to do so. There is nothing for the self-education of academics like the need to prepare lectures, and, since the four or five of us in Birkbeck’s history department had to cover all history since antiquity, I had to have a very wide range as a lecturer, even without the additional demands made on me as a supervisor in Cambridge. Academic careers might be blocked, but the historical world was not. What happened in the wider world of historians in those years is the subject of another chapter. For the present purposes it is enough to note that I began to publish in the professional journals from 1949, to play a part in international congresses and in the Economic History Society (to the council of which I was elected in 1952). Above all, from 1946 to 1956 we – a group of comrades and friends – conducted a continuous Marxist seminar for ourselves in the Historians’ Group of the Communist Party, by means of endless duplicated discussion papers and regular meetings, mainly in the upper room of the Garibaldi Restaurant in Saffron Hill and occasionally in the then shabby premises of Marx House on Clerkenwell Green. Those who know only the buzzing, gentrified Clerkenwell of 2000 cannot imagine the empty, cold, grey dankness of those streets at weekends fifty years ago, when the Dickensian fog, which disappeared after 1953, was still likely to fall like a vast yellow-grey blindfold on London. Perhaps this was where we really became historians. Others have spoken of ‘the astonishing impact of [this] generation of Marxist historians’ without whom ‘the worldwide influence of British historical scholarship, especially since the 1960s, is inconceivable’. 15 Among other things it gave birth to a successful and eventually influential historical journal in 1952, but
The Historians’ Group broke up in the year of communist crisis, 1956. Until then we, and certainly I, had remained loyal, disciplined and politically aligned Communist Party members, helped no doubt by the wild rhetoric of crusading anti-communism of the ‘Free World’. But it was far from easy.
The Soviet Union, God knows, made it harder and harder. Intellectuals were, of course, under particular pressure, since from 1947 on the beliefs to which they were committed were reduced to a catechism of orthodoxies, some only faintly related to Marxism, and several – especially in the natural sciences – absurd. After the official triumph of ‘Lysenkoism’ in the USSR this was a major problem in the Cambridge graduate branch, several, perhaps most, of whose older members were natural scientists. Were they, like the great geneticist J. B. S. Haldane, quietly to withdraw from the Party, unable to accept untruth? Were they, like J. D. Bernal, to ruin their
