Not that getting a degree, let alone a good degree, was the only thing in the minds of young men and young women who found themselves in a place as full of interesting things to do as Cambridge, and with more leisure to do them than most other adults. I myself found no difficulty in combining enough academic work to do well at exams, with active undergraduate journalism and pretty full-time activity in the Socialist Club and the Communist Party. And that without counting such time spent on extra-curricular talking, social life, punting on the Cam, the pursuit of friendship and love, etc. There seemed to be time for almost everything. Perhaps the only two activities I started but gave up were taking the university course in Russian from the formidable Elizabeth Hill – which has confined me to remaining a purely western cosmopolitan – and the Cambridge Union, whose debates were commonly regarded as the training ground for future politicians. I cannot remember why I decided to give up the Union, although my early efforts had been encouraged by the then President, whom I discovered later to be a non-public Party member. It certainly saved money.
As soon as I arrived, my politics had been discovered and I was immediately invited to join the Cambridge Student Branch of the Communist Party. I eventually became a member of its ‘Secretariat’ of three, the highest political function I have ever occupied. The memoirs of a contemporary are mistaken in saying I became its Secretary in 1938, but correct in observing that I was not a natural leader figure.9 Still, its two most prestigious leaders had gone: the dark and handsome John Cornford, whose photograph was on all progressive Cambridge mantelpieces, to fight and die in Spain; James Klugmann (see below) to Paris. Its most obvious nursery of revolution was the set of rooms, bursting with posters and leaflets, in Whewell’s Court, Trinity, just below Ludwig Wittgenstein, shared by the American Michael Whitney Straight and the biochemist Hugh Gordon. However, Trinity was the centre of graduate rather than undergraduate communism. That was, somewhat unexpectedly, Pembroke College, which, in addition to one of the rare communist dons (the superb Germanist Roy Pascal), sheltered a number of comrades, including two of the main organizers, David Spencer and Ephraim Alfred (‘Ram’) Nahum, a squat, dark natural scientist with a big nose, radiating physical strength, energy and authority. He was the son of a prosperous Sephardic textile merchant from Manchester and, by general consent, the ablest of all communist student leaders of my generation. As a graduate physicist he stayed in Cambridge during the war, and was killed in 1941 by the only German bomb to fall on the city. Unlike Ram Nahum (who was known only on the left), Pieter Keunemann, a dashing, witty and remarkably handsome Ceylonese (the island was not yet Sri Lanka) who lived in Pembroke in some style, was a great figure in university society – President of the Union, among other things – not to mention the lucky partner of the ravishing Hedi Simon from Vienna (and Newnham), with whom I vainly fell in love. (After we graduated Pieter and I rented a tiny house together in the now no longer extant Round Church Street a few yards from the house where Ram was to die.) Although both were devoted Party members, I do not think anyone would have predicted that this debonair socialite, who first introduced me to the poems of John Betjeman, would spend most of his later life as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Sri Lanka.
On the other hand, we all expected that the elegant charmer Mohan Kumaramangalam, of Madras, Eton and King’s, also President of the Union, the admired friend of so many of us, would become an important figure in his native India, as indeed he did. As an Indian, Mohan was not, of course, officially in the Party. Nor were the other ‘colonial students’ – overwhelmingly from the Indian subcontinent. I soon found myself working with their special ‘colonial group’, headed, in a sort of local inheritance, by a succession of Trinity historians with a bent for ‘Third World’ history. Unlike their mentors, the young ‘colonial communists’ did not envisage academic life, although that is where one or two ended up. They looked forward to liberation and social revolution in their countries. The two Kingsmen among them did best, for Mohan’s younger contemporary, the modest and selfless Indrajit (‘Sonny’) Gupta, after a succession of jobs as trade union and political leader ended up, in old age, as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of India and, for a short spell, as Interior Minister of his country.
The Party was, of course, my primary passion. But even for a 100 per cent communist there was simply too much to do in Cambridge to remain entirely confined to agitation, propaganda and organization, which in any case were not my forte. (In the end I reluctantly realized that the only really desirable career, that of the ‘professional revolutionary’, i.e. the Party functionary, was not for me, and I resigned myself to earning my living in a less uncompromising way.) Of course, everything was political in a sense, though not in the post-1968 sense for which ‘the personal is political’. We felt that what we wanted personally was not of interest to the Party, so long as it did not conflict with the Party line. But it was our duty not only to get good degrees but to bring Marxism into our work, just as politics entered the activities of those who went for acting or undergraduate journalism. Nevertheless, I cannot honestly say that I wrote for, and eventually edited, the student weekly Granta primarily for political reasons; nor that it was ever a journal that had much place for politics. Looking at old numbers today, I must sadly acknowledge that it was not much good as a journal, though my predecessor as editor, Charles Wintour, successfully used it to join Lord Beaverbrook’s stable, eventually editing the London Evening Standard. It was in fact pretty terrible, but we had a marvellous time in its office on Market Square over tea, gossip and jokes, and it gave us a golden opportunity to get free tickets for films: second to editing Granta, being its film editor was the potential contributor’s chief ambition. The film reviews even provided a neutral territory for friends of different politics, such as the young Arthur Schlesinger Jr, whom I met there, then as later a consistent anti-communist New Dealer.
8
Against Fascism and War
Whatever happened in Cambridge in those years was coloured by the knowledge that we lived in a time of crisis. Before Hitler came to power, the modest student radicalization of the time was almost certainly precipitated by the world economic crisis, the miserable collapse of the 1929–31 Labour government, and such dramatic demonstrations of what mass unemployment and poverty meant as the Hunger Marches from the smokeless and silent industrial areas. After 1933 it was increasingly a movement to resist the advance of fascist dictatorships and the next world war their advance would certainly bring; that is to say a movement directed against craven, as well as capitalist and imperialist, British governments that did nothing to stop the drift to fascism and war. In the second half of the 1930s, and especially after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, this was certainly the main force behind the remarkable growth of the Socialist Club: the effect of Munich in Cambridge was that the Cambridge University Socialist Club (CUSC) recruited 300 new members in a week.1