Books
An apostolic succession
Andrew Boyle
Cambridge Between Two Wars: T.E.B. Howarth (Collins £6.50) Nearly a third of all Cambridge men who served in the Great War were killed or wounded: just over 2,000 died, nearly 3,000 limped home with grim memories and shattered illusions. A few came through unscathed in body if not in mind. The author of this excellent contribution to contemporary social history quotes in his prologue the following verdict of a certain Lieutenant J.B. Priestley: 'Nobody, nothing, will shift me from the belief, which I shall take to the grave, that the generation to which I belong, destroyed between 1914 and 1918, was a great generation, marvellous in its promise. This is not self-praise, because those of us who are left know that we are the runts'. Many Oxford men of that generation, Harold Macmillan among them, felt as Priestley did. Certain modern historians contend that the 'lost generation' motif has been slightly overdone. Nevertheless, as a strand in the tangled skein of factors, spiritual as well as material, which accounted for the sharp subsequent decline in Britain's pre-war self-assurance as a world leader, its psychological importance at least should not be underrated.
The Kaiser's War began the process of erosion, Hitler's War just twenty years later completed it. Of course, in the imperceptible way of nearly all historical changes, the British Empire had passed its zenith well before the turn of the twentieth century. Cambridge economic historians like Clapham would record that fact and analyse the reasons during the uneasy spasm of peace between the two world conflicts. As a scholar of Clare in the mid-Thirties, when intellectual or (more frequently) emotional Marxism was all the rage, the author of the present volume was re-treading familiar ground when he set himself the formidable task of painting a faithful likeness of his old university during such a startling period of change. His touch is light and deft, his eye for essential detail sharp. The arrangement of material is skilful, though staider, donnish critics may disapprove of Tom Howarth's inability to be pompous in his judgments. The chapters covering the advancement of learning are no less readable than those dealing with men (and women), manners and morals. Nor does he avoid politics, the rampant growth of Communism among an influential minority included. Acknowledging that 'many, dons and undergraduates alike, politicised their consciences', Mr Howarth refutes as a myth the commonly accepted notion, which probably originated with Julian Bell's letter to the New Statesman in December 1933, that by that date 'almost the only subject of discussion (at Cambridge) is contemporary politics, and. . . a very large majority of the more intelligent undergraduates are Communists or almost Communists. . . It would be difficult to find anyone of any intellectual pretensions who would not accept the general Marxist analysis of the present crisis'. The accent might well have that of Bloomsbury; the propagandist overtones were in tune with the Corn intern's. In the author's informed view, 'the collectivist fervour of the Thirties left the university, as such, remarkably unaffected . . . As to undergraduates, there were plenty with intellectual pretensions and no Marxist predilections, such as Enoch Powell, lain Macleod, Alastair Cooke, F.H. Lawson, Anthony Blackwell, J.H. Plumb, Michael Grant, J.R. Colville.' There were some Fascists also.
Yet the leftward swing was almost a case of unconsciously fulfilling Hume's dictum that the reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions. For scientific dons like Needham and Bernal, economic dons like Dobb, Robinson and the mysterious Sraffa, history and arts dons like Pascal and Blunt, held the same salvationist belief: the Gospel according to Marx would soon renew Britain and the whole world along the lines laid down in the Soviet Union by the beneficent Stalin. Needham, the Christian Communist, reviewed the Webbs' Soviet Communism in 1936 'with an enthusiasm bordering on rapture'. The Webbs had a kinsman by marriage called Malcolm Muggeridge, already an ex-Communist, who had studied apathetically at Cambridge in the Twenties.
'Nobody,' Mr Howarth reminds us, 'had Muggeridge's unusual opportunity to study the Webbs at close quarters; nor, for that matter, to look on Stalin's terrorist regime as a journalist-zealot and still see through it. The 'stridency of the Cambridge Marxists was . . . out of all proportion to their numbers', particularly after the outbreak of the Civil War in Spain. It claimed the deaths in battle of the intellectually gifted John Cornford and David Haden Guest as well as Julian Bell. The treasonable careers as secret agents of Burgess and Philby, both of Trinity, and of Maclean, of Trinity Hall, had already begun. The author refuses to speculate openly about a hypothetical 'Fourth Man', while casually admitting that he is 'not without suspicions in the matter'. Wisely, he leaves well alone.
Perhaps the subtle infiltration of Marxists into the secret society known as the Apos tles, a coup which momentarily incensed Keynes, was a significant development in
the increasing hold of Communism on Cambridge in the later Thirties. Among th.c illustrations in the book is a suitably intriguing 1932 snapshot of five young Apostles seated, so to speak, at the feet of one of their Masters. There were other select cultural, bodies, of which the Heretics, with their commitment to total freedom of thought, probably proved the most productive in the coining of choice epigrams. There was Coulton, once castigated by Belloc as the 'remote and ineffectual don that dared attack my Chesterton', who declared boldlY that 'the belief in this crucified carpenter has taken more men out of themselves than any other thing in all recorded history . There was F.M. Cornford who brightly suggested that theology was already taking its place in the curriculum as a branch of anthropology. Bertrand Russell in an ear' her day had remarked that the Ten conv mandments should be tackled in much the same fashion as a Cambridge examination paper, on the basis that 'only six need he attempted.' But towering above most fell& Heretics stood the imposing J.B.S. Hal' dane, 'in whose complex and fascinating personality the capacity to outrage con' temporary canons of respectability was sur' passed only by his brilliance as a biochenr ist'. Conversion to Communism came to Haldane after he left Cambridge for Low don. The University authorities frowned on his lack of discretion and moral sense in openly taking his future wife, Charlotte, a! his mistress. One member of the Council observed tartly that Haldane was 'never a man not to blow his own strumpet'. The decay of religious values, the unfash' ionableness of organised Christianity, had set in several generations earlier. The two Darwins, Erasmus and Charles, were als° Cambridge men. They obviously fall out' side the resonably wide scope of Mr How' arth's canvas. But the strong scientific tad' ition fortified by moral earnestness, which continued to differentiate Cambridge from Oxford, are given their due prominence in these pages. What J.J. Thomson, the great physicist, began at the Cavendish, his successor, Ernest Rutherford, and a galaxy of outstanding disciples carried forward. Of Thomson Sir William Bragg has written: 'He, more than any other man, was responsible for the fundamental change in outlook which distinguishes the physics of this certury from that of the last'. Thomson discovered the electron. Rutherford did more, than split the atom. As Mr Howarth notes.. 'It must be true of the team Rutherford built around him in the Twenties that it contained the largest number of gifted expe.ri" mental physicists grouped together which, had ever been known'. The Russian so.'" entist, Peter Kapitsa, a unique character in his own right, was only one of them. He remained with the team until the Soviet Establishment obliged him to sever his connection with the Cavendish and reluctantly work in Russia after he returned there for his regular holiday in 1934. Soon 'the social unsettlement of the age' infected
scientists like others and 'extended to the world of atoms'.
Atomisation of culture, of religion, of Philosophy had become a feature of the Confused, inter-war years. The author has succeeded in compressing within these Pages virtually everything relevant to his Microcosmic theme. For Cambridge, in the Way of most hothouses, contained and reflected nearly all of the pressures and Problems then affecting a wider world. It may be difficult to measure and weigh accurately the importance of a G.E. Moore,
Wittgenstein, a Leavis or an Ivor Kichards, since the academic vogues of one generation tend to become the anachronisms of the next. Often enough debates aI the Union are better guides to period Moods, Mr Howarth is too wise to dogmatize. He is not above jogging the reader's elbow; but he refrains from ramming conclusions needlessly down the reader's throat. Oxford has seldom lacked its apologists, memorialists and artists in miniature. Cambridge, at a decisive turning Point in English history, has found a worthy recorder of its achievements and shortcomasgs. Sir Thomas Browne was alluding to a seventeenth century state of tormoil when he wrote:
The King to Oxford sent a troop of horse, For Tories own no argument but force: With equal skill to Cambridge books he sent, For Whigs admit no force but argument.
Could it be, I wonder, entirely fortuitous that Cromwell, too, was a Cambridge man?
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