The university and college authorities would certainly have been amazed and appalled by the Cambridge of 2000, filled with ‘science parks’, business negotiations with global entrepreneurs and ‘Cambridge’s spires (that) dream not of academe but of profit’.5 Theirs was a modest, introverted country town on the edge of East Anglia. Lacking industry it was not so much overshadowed as blotted out by the university, on which it largely depended in an antique way, by providing the colleges with porters, servants and landladies for the majority of the university’s young men for whom there was no room in the actual college buildings, and multiple incentives for 5,000 undergraduates, assumed to be fairly well heeled, to spend more than their allowances. By later standards it had surprisingly few places for eating meals out, although the Arts Theatre, one of Maynard Keynes’s many initiatives, had just opened, and included what set out to be a fashionable restaurant. It had ten cinemas. (Filmgoing was sufficiently familiar at the High Tables for an essay De Fratribus Marx (On the Marx Brothers) to be set in 1938 for one of the Classics prizes.)
What made Cambridge parochialism worse was that the place circumscribed within college walls the lives of the dons who lived there all the time – unlike undergraduates who spent only twenty-four weeks a year there – many of them bachelor scholars, then still so common. The Second World War, which sent so many of them into the wider world – if sometimes no further than the codebreaking centre at Bletchley – was still in the future. Some of them, one felt, knew about the world beyond Royston, ten miles south of Cambridge, only by hearsay. Indeed, compared to Oxford, Cambridge University was surprisingly remote from the centres of national life, which may explain why, unlike Oxford, none of its twentieth-century alumni became prime minister. Norfolk, where dons went on holiday, not to mention Newmarket, the famous racecourse, seemed a good deal closer than London.
Such was the place I came to, from a family no member of which had ever been to a university and a school which had never sent anyone to Cambridge. It was not like the university I had imagined. (In the vacations I soon discovered and frequented one that conformed to my idea of a ‘real’ university, namely the London School of Economics.) Cambridge was exciting, it was wonderful, but it took some getting used to for a stranger who knew nobody while, it seemed to me, everybody else knew somebody – a brother, a cousin or certainly earlier arrivals from their schools. The dons had even taught their fathers and uncles. I did not know that Cambridge was the centre of that network of intermarrying professional families, my friend and Cambridge contemporary Noel Annan’s ‘intellectual aristocracy’ which has played so central a role in Britain, although anyone in King’s soon discovered it. There were still plenty of Ricardos and Darwins, Huxleys, Stracheys and Trevelyans, both among undergraduates and dons. On the other hand, nothing was more obvious than that Cambridge was penetrated by the tribal customs of the British boarding schools, from which most arts undergraduates still came, and which were familiar to the likes of me only from boys’ magazines designed for those who did not go to such establishments. For instance, to my amazement, academic life came to a stop for two or three hours every afternoon, when it was assumed that the young men would be practising games and sports. I now found myself surrounded by Etonians (they still had a special connection with King’s, since in 1440 King Henry VI had founded both establishments together), Rugbeians, Carthusians, Stoics and crowds of people from major and sometimes virtually indistinguishable minor public schools. Ready to supply such a public, the firm of Ryder and Amies, still present on King’s Parade opposite the University Church of Great St Mary’s and the Senate House, stocked 656 old school, college, club and other institutional ties, where necessary designed in-house, as well as top hats, blazers and the other accoutrements of the traditional Cambridge undergraduate.6 There were no prefects, but the undergraduate weekly Granta published regular profiles of persons regarded as important, such as presidents of major sports clubs and societies, under the heading ‘In Authority’. (Those of its own retiring editors came under the modest heading ‘In Obscurity’.)
For practical purposes, for the new undergraduates the university meant their college. Being at King’s made things easier. The scholars, having as such the right to live in college, were decanted en masse into a gloomy slum generally known as ‘The Drain’, and thus had the chance to get to know each other, and the local mores of King’s favoured informality in the relations between teachers and students, seniors and juniors. I cannot say that I was a very characteristic Kingsman – the college was at its social high noon and the centre of Cambridge theatre and music – or that I was of any great interest to its establishment. For instance, I never had occasion to meet its most famous fellow, Maynard Keynes. However, King’s was liberal and tolerant, even of enthusiasts for team games, religious believers, conservatives, revolutionaries and heterosexuals, even of the less than good-looking young from grammar schools.
Fortunately, in spite of its Provost, it also respected the intellect and had a sense of its duty to bright students. After the war I got a post as a university lecturer within a year of leaving the army, entirely on the strength of the reference written about my undergraduate record by my pre-war supervisor, Christopher Morris, admittedly a master at this genre of literary composition. Since he had also originally interviewed me for my scholarship, I suspect that it was his recommendation that got me into King’s. A few years older than me and – uncharacteristically for the college – a family man, he was typical of the don of the old school, who was primarily a teacher, or rather a personal tutor. His calling was to get average young men from a public school a decent Second in the Tripos. Beyond this he concentrated on asking what he called ‘Socratic questions’, i.e. forcing his pupils to discover what it was they had written or meant to write in their weekly essay. This worked extremely well in my case, even when I did not accept his critical remarks about my prose style. I did not much respect him, and we dealt with one another at arm’s length, but I owe him a considerable debt.
I had less contact with the college’s three serious historians. As professors, two no longer supervised undergraduates: the tiny, witty, eminent and unbelievably conservative F. A. Adcock, Professor of ancient history, and the impressive and craggy John Clapham, just retired from the chair of economic history, author of that rarest of products of history in interwar Cambridge, a major work on a major topic, namely the three volumes of his Economic History of Modern Britain (1926–38). He was a mountaineer, which fitted in with the ethos of King’s; but was also both a solidly married man and firmly attached to the North of England nonconformity from which he sprang, which did not. (Nobody would have guessed that both Provost Sheppard and Maynard Keynes came from provincial Baptist stock.) I wish I had learned more from the third, John Saltmarsh, who did supervise me, for he published hardly anything, but poured his enormous learning into the lectures I did not attend.