Since I was one of the leading Cambridge undergraduate communists in the second half of the 1930s, most readers of this book who belong to the Cold War generations will certainly ask what I knew about them. I might as well answer this question at the outset. Yes, I knew some of them. No, I did not know they were or had been working for Soviet intelligence until after this became public knowledge. The ‘big five’ (Blunt, Burgess, Cairncross, Maclean and Philby) belonged to an earlier student generation than mine, and my contemporaries associated none of them with the Party except Burgess, whom we regarded as a traitor, because he took care to advertise his alleged conversion to right-wing views as soon as he had gone down. I knew none of them personally before the war, and only Blunt and Burgess casually after 1945. What I know about them came not from politics but via the Apostles (for which see chapter 11) or from homosexual friends or from survivors of the interwar Oxbridge establishment such as Isaiah Berlin, whose passion for gossiping about the people he had known was irrepressible. I recall Burgess only from two annual dinners of the Apostles – the one he presided over in 1948 at the Royal Automobile Club (a suitably bizarre location), recorded in the memoirs of Michael Straight whom Blunt tried to recruit for the Soviets,1 and the one I organized in the late 1950s in a shortlived Portuguese restaurant in Frith Street, Soho, and to which, knowing his nostalgia for England, I sent him an invitation addressed to ‘Guy Burgess, Moscow’. I remember the first occasion because Burgess asked us to agree that Roman Catholics were not suitable for membership of the Apostles, because their commitment to the Church’s dogma precluded the intellectual frankness so essential to the society. I remember the second because he woke me with an early morning phone call from Moscow to Bloomsbury, regretting his inability to be at the dinner, and, I assume, making absolutely certain that my phone would thenceforth be bugged. His message helped to make the dinner a great success. If I had known Anthony Blunt at all well, I would not have committed a heartless gaffe, for which I am still sorry. When I found myself standing next to him at the bar at yet another Apostles dinner in Soho, shortly after the flight of Burgess and Maclean, and made some fairly cynical wisecrack, I had no idea of the close emotional ties between him and Guy Burgess. My words must have hurt him, but how could one tell? That elongated, elegant, slightly supercilious face showed no emotions it did not want to. According to his Soviet handler, he was the toughest of the bunch. He was a man of such ruthless self-control that he spent the day of his public exposure, besieged by the hacks and the paparazzi in the house of a friend, quietly correcting proofs.
I knew those of my contemporaries who became Soviet agents as militant members of the student Party, which makes it 99 per cent certain that they were not yet recruited for work which, by general convention, was quite separate from the open activities of a legal political party and, if discovered, might be regarded as discrediting these. We knew such work was going on, we knew we were not supposed to ask questions about it, we respected those who did it, and most of us – certainly I – would have taken it on ourselves, if asked. The lines of loyalty in the 1930s ran not between but across countries.3
After this brief intermezzo, let me return to Cambridge in the 1930s. It is first necessary to grasp, in spite of all apparent continuities, how different the place was then from what it is today.
I have had an association with Cambridge ever since I first went up for the scholarship exam in 1935, or rather with King’s, for (apart from arranging to examine me for a BA and a Ph.D.) the university has firmly kept me at a distance. On the other hand, my links with King’s College are unbroken. There is no time of day or night, no season of the year, and no phase of my life since 1935, when I have not looked from the humpbacked bridge over the river Cam, across the unbroken expanse of the great back lawn, to the extraordinary combination of the bleak Gothic rear of the chapel, giving no hint of the marvels inside, and the equally spare eighteenth-century elegance of the Gibbs Building: and always with the same astonished intake of breath as the first time. Not many people have been so lucky.
For young men who, like scholars of King’s, passed all their undergraduate terms within college, Cambridge was like enjoying the constant and envied public company of a universally admired woman – you might say it was like going to all one’s parties with Botticelli’s Primavera. (The domestic side of college life in the 1930s – peeing into the sink in the gyp room since the nearest bathroom and toilet might be three flights of stairs, a courtyard and a basement away – could be less inspiring.) However, even the majority of undergraduates who spent at least part of their years in some remote bedsit in a Victorian terrace could not escape the sheer force of seven centuries of Cambridge teaching and learning. Everything was designed to make us into pillars of a tradition reaching back to the thirteenth century, though some of the most apparently ancient expressions of it, such as the Festival of Lessons and Carols on Christmas Eve in King’s College Chapel, had in fact been invented only a few years before I came to the college. (Many years later this was to inspire a conference and book on The Invention of Tradition.)2 Undergraduates wore their short black gowns to go to lectures and supervisions, into the obligatory collective dinner in college halls and (with caps) whenever out in the streets after dark, policed by more amply gowned and capped Proctors, assisted by their ‘bulldogs’. Dons entered lecture rooms with their long gowns billowing and the squares planted with precision on their heads.3 Scholars read the Latin grace to the standing multitude before dinner and lessons in ancient chapels. (With tongue in cheek, the chapel dean of King’s made me read a piece of the book of Amos, the closest thing to a militant bolshevik preacher in the Old Testament.) The Cambridge past, like the ceremonial fancy-dress past of British public life, was not, of course, a chronological succession of time, but a synchronic jumble of its surviving relics. The glory and continuity of seven centuries were supposed to inspire us, to assure us of our superiority and to warn us against the temptations of ill-considered change. (In the 1930s they spectacularly failed to do so.) The main contribution of Cambridge to political theory and practice, as described brilliantly by the classicist F. M. Cornford in his little squib Microcosmographia Academica (1908), was ‘the principle of unripe time’. Whatever anyone proposed, the time for doing it was not yet ripe. It was powerfully reinforced by the principle of ‘the entering wedge’. Of course our undergraduate lives were lived at a level far below that of the master-operators of these principles, but those of us who became dons soon discovered their force.
Cambridge has changed so profoundly since the 1950s that it is difficult to grasp just how isolated and parochial the place was in the 1930s even academically – apart from the incomparable national and international distinction of its natural sciences. With the exception of its world-class economics, it refused to recognize the social sciences. Its arts subjects were, at best, patchy. However implausible it seems, outside the natural sciences most of the university took little interest in research, and none in higher degrees such as Ph.D.s which were regarded at best as a German peculiarity and, more likely, as a lower-middle-class affectation. Even on the eve of the war Cambridge contained fewer than 400 research students.4 It remained essentially a finishing school for young men and a much smaller number of young women, operating a double standard. Getting a Cambridge First, or the rarer ‘starred’ First, was, indeed, extremely hard, but it was even more difficult not to get a degree at all, because ‘passes’, or even the bottom layer of Third class honours, were virtually given away. I recall a discussion at an examiners’ meeting for the Economics Tripos in the early 1950s – I examined the economic history papers for some years – when we decided, not entirely with tongue in cheek, that anyone who knew the difference between production and consumption should pass the line. It was typical of this dichotomy that such degrees were known (among dons) as ‘Trinity Thirds’, for Trinity, Isaac Newton’s own college, contained plenty of young men of this description as well as, at this period, probably more Nobel Prize winners and aspirants than any other educational institution of its size on the globe. At the time I arrived in Cambridge one future Nobel laureate (R. L. M. Synge) was already a research student in biochemistry, another (J. C. Kendrew) was just about to start his first year.