II
But let me return to the time of the Berlin airlift. As the wartime alliance broke up, so did the fading hope of postwar co-operation between the two superpowers. In 1947 the communist ministers in western governments began to be edged out of their offices, and so were the non-communist ministers in the countries under communist rule. For purely European purposes a new Communist International (the so-called Communist Information Bureau or Cominform) was set up, to publish a journal which, even by the exacting standards of the Soviet era, must have been the all-time champion of unreadability. 8 The eastern regimes, deliberately not set up as communist, but as pluriparty ‘new’ or ‘peoples’ democracies’ with mixed economies, were now assimilated to the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, i.e. the standard Communist Party dictatorships. And for the West, as confrontation became more overt, communists became fifth columnists.
In Britain things began to change, but in a relatively low-key, gentlemanly manner. There was no overt purge of Party members from the civil service, though, where known, they were removed from jobs with access to sensitive information. Those in the politically sensitive ‘administrative’ class were discreetly informed that there was no future for them in the service, but there would be no publicity, if they were to choose to leave of their own free will. One who chose to stay served the rest of his career in those remote corners which large bureaucracies reserve for those who can neither be sacked nor given any job of the slightest responsibility.
There was no actual purge in the universities. Birkbeck College, where I had just begun teaching, was exceptional – at least until the arrival of an ambitious new Master in 1951 – in showing no discernible signs of anti-communism among staff or students. Its students earned their living during the day, and such political tradition as it had was on the left. The mood in the small, crowded and friendly staff common room suggested that it was overwhelmingly composed of Labour voters. Such Tories as there were – I suppose my colleague and later boss Douglas Dakin was one – were hardly typical. He had been secretary of the local branch of the union, the Association of University Teachers, in the intervals of running the entire student side of the college as part-time Registrar (with one secretary), playing cricket and teaching, and handed the union job on to me as soon as I arrived. Moreover, by far the most prestigious member of the college staff was a communist, and employer of Party members in his department, a man closely identified with the USSR, J.D. Bernal, crystallographer and so universal a genius (but for a total blank in music) that he could never concentrate on any topic long enough to win a Nobel Prize, although he was the inspirer of several. Even those who had their doubts about his loyalty to Moscow could hardly forbear to admire this short, bushy-haired man who looked like the essential scientist in a strip-cartoon, walked like a sailor on shore or, as he said, ‘the pobble who had no toes’, and entertained the staff room with well-honed anecdotes about his extraordinarily distinguished time as scientific adviser to Combined Operations during the war. Picasso himself, prevented by the authorities from attending a Soviet-sponsored meeting in Sheffield, had drawn a spirited mural on the wall of Bernal’s flat in Torrington Place, which many years later was to become a sort of logo of Birkbeck. The great artist shared not only Bernal’s communism, but also his legendary polygamy; with the difference only that Bernal genuinely treated the women drawn to him as equal partners, both sexually and intellectually. This reputation for gender equality was what attracted the brilliant Rosalind Franklin to Birkbeck from King’s College, London, dissatisfied with her treatment by the other (male) workers – the ones who got the Nobel Prize – on the famous Double Helix. Though she was notoriously, and understandably, touchy about macho assumptions in colleagues, she was, at least when we talked, full of praise for Bernal as man and scientist, even when she made fun of the Party-line loyalists in his department.
I was lucky to teach at a college which provided a built-in, unforced protection against the pressures of the Cold War outside. Nevertheless, the academic situation was not good. To the best of my knowledge, all communists who had been appointed to academic posts before the summer of 1948 remained in their jobs, and no attempt was made to dismiss them, unless by the non-renewal of short-term contracts, which were extremely rare in those days. On the other hand, to the best of my knowledge, no known communists were appointed to university posts for ten years or so from 1948, nor, if already in teaching posts, were they promoted. In the course of that decade, for instance, I was turned down for several posts in economic history in Cambridge – I supervised and examined this subject in the Economics Tripos – and I did not get promotion to a Readership in London until 1959. Even people who had had only a few months’ connection with the Party, such as the economic historian Sidney Pollard, were seriously held back. This was frustrating, but a long way from the American witch-hunting. (No British academic posts, to my knowledge, were made conditional on the formal abjuration of past sin, as happened when the University of Berkeley offered a chair to Pollard several years later – a condition which he refused to accept.) Curiously, there was more of a political purge in parts of Adult Education, a field which attracted a substantial number of reds and other radicals on ideological grounds, notably in the Extramural Delegacy of Oxford University, which had been run for some years by Thomas Hodgkin, a particularly charming member of the British intellectual aristocracy (Quaker branch) who had been expelled from Palestine for joining the Communist Party during his time as aide-de-camp to the British High Commissioner; the Party was the only place where Jews and Arabs mixed as friends and equals. Unfortunately the formidable Ernest Bevin, Foreign Secretary and still boss of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, had accused the delegacy of harbouring red activists who fomented strikes at what was then the major Morris car plant at Cowley – those were the days when Oxford could be described as ‘the Latin Quarter of Cowley’.9 However, even here there was no general purge of communists.
We accepted that ‘this tacit and often half-conscious discrimination, similar to, though less systematic than, the exclusion of social democrats from German university posts before 1914’10 was relatively mild and concentrated on denouncing American academic McCarthyism – those were the days when the US government refused an entry visa even to the great physicist P. A. M. Dirac – and the dangers that would follow if the American model were to spread to Britain. Nevertheless, in 1950 the historian E. H. Carr was reported as thinking, correctly, that ‘It had become very difficult … to speak dispassionately about Russia except in ‘‘a very woolly Christian kind of way’’ without endangering, if not your bread and butter, then your legitimate hopes of advancement.’ In any case, there is no question that the principle of freedom of expression did not apply to communist and Marxist views, at least in the official media.11
What made communist intellectuals feel members of a harried minority was not so much official or quasi-official victimization, as exclusion. Naturally we were convinced, and sometimes had evidence, that our letters were read, our phone bugged, and that, in case of real war, we would find ourselves interned, hopefully with plenty of time to read and work, on some suitable smaller island of the British archipelago. We resented it, even as we could not deny that, given the Cold War, it was logical behaviour for the government. We were the enemies of NATO, after all. What made the rhetoric of Cold War liberals so intolerable was their conviction that all communists were simply agents of the Soviet enemy and their denial that any communist could therefore possibly be a member in good standing of the intellectual community.