‘Our Secret Service reports of course do not deal with the better classes,’ the Prime Minister Lloyd George was told in 1919 at a time when trade union militancy and egalitarian fervour seemed to threaten civil unrest. His Cabinet nevertheless received a few warnings of well-bred trouble to come. In 1920 the Home Office’s Directorate of Intelligence reported in its weekly intelligence summary that letters had been intercepted in which communists urged that government offices, the army, postal and telegraph services, radio broadcasting and journalism should be infiltrated. An intelligence summary in 1921 reported that an Oxford university undergraduate, Arthur Reade, hoped to organize ‘a Communist nucleus among the Varsity men, who will be going out as schoolmasters, scientific workers, literary men and professional and “intellectual” workers’. A further warning that Moscow sought to penetrate institutions with communist converts from the universities reached the Cabinet in 1922.1
‘Bolshevism’, declared a future Conservative MP Edward Marjoribanks in an Oxford Union debate of 1919, ‘is non-representative, destructive of education, subversive of property, anarchical in legislation, a check upon industry, a scandal in food-distribution and the epitome of arbitrary cruelty.’ This reflected the view of the vast majority of Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates during the 1920s: the intelligence services were right to focus their limited resources on monitoring working-class unrest rather than middle-class renegades. Only the tiniest sect of undergraduates would have agreed with Maurice Dobb, who joined the CPGB in 1922, that bourgeois culture and capitalist societies were ‘decadent and sterile’, that revolutionary communism would dwarf the Renaissance, that ‘non-Marxists [were] as silly as pre-Darwinian biologists; & anyone who teaches a defence of capitalism [is] wicked & dangerous’. University communism made little headway in the 1920s when, as Cyril Connolly expressed it in ‘Where Engels Fears to Tread’, undergraduates parroted monosyllables, ‘words like Freud, Death, War, Peace, Love, Sex, Glands, and above all, Damn, Damn, Damn!’ It was only after the financial crisis of 1931 and the formation of the coalition National Government that, in a new mood of earnest salvationism, undergraduates began to chant big, new polysyllables such as ‘The Workers’ Revolution for the Classless Society through the Dictatorship of the Proletariat!’ A tetchy young communist of the 1930s complained that sex had been the ‘all-absorbing topic’ of his elders in the previous decade: ‘Weakness sought compensation in subjective self-assertion; Bloomsbury warmed its sterile soul in the artificial rays of aesthetic snobbery.’ W. H. Auden agreed: the young intelligentsia of the 1920s were obsessed with the Freudian Bed and those of the 1930s with the Marxist Board, so he said in 1944.2
Valéry believed that young people learn best to form judgements when they are in ‘an elegant, superficial, fickle and futile milieu’. Lady Maclean explained to MI5 that her son’s undergraduate curiosity about ‘this newish creed, Communism’ was merely a phase of intellectual experiment: ‘he was at a university for the purpose of finding his own mind’; Marxism had been a transient interest of his. ‘The most valuable thing about college life is the infection of ideas which takes place,’ according to Kenneth Clark, whose Oxford undergraduate years began in 1922. ‘It is like a rapid series of inoculations. People who have not been to college catch ideas late in life, and are made ill by them.’3
In the process of inoculation and recovery, Arthur Reade was a pathbreaker. Born in 1902, he was educated at Eton before spending seven months at the University of Strasbourg and matriculating at Oxford in 1920. He had his own carefully chosen furniture in his rooms at Worcester College, together with portraits of Marx and Lenin. It was mob vandalism by Worcester rugby hearties, who ransacked his rooms and broke the furniture and pictures by defenestrating them, that embittered him. ‘Oxford’s lovely city is defiled by the presence of the horde of social parasites from Mayfair, and paragons of bourgeois smugness from the provinces,’ Reade complained in Eights Week of 1921: ‘they bow down before the altar of the false gods of athleticism and salmon mayonnaise.’4
Reade began publishing a student magazine, which was entitled Free Oxford rather than Red Oxford because it favoured ‘free love’ as much as any political creed: mixed nude bathing was one of its early causes. Lewis Farnell, the university’s Vice-Chancellor, was shocked that such ‘obscene licentiousness’ was being ‘pushed into the hands of ladies coming out of church’. After publishing an editorial declaring ‘By TERROR we shall destroy the domination of the bourgeoisie – by TERROR we shall establish the rule of the workers,’ Reade was expelled from the university in December 1921. Farnell condemned Free Oxford for preaching ‘extreme theories of Russian Bolshevism, the “Red Terror” … and the bitterest class-hatred: gross insults against all authorities were scattered through the pages. There was nothing of boyish fooling in it.’ He suspected that the magazine had Soviet money behind it. ‘No university where any discipline remained could’, Farnell said, ‘allow such filth to be flung in its face by its own students.’5
There were reports that Reade had visited army camps distributing pamphlets which were said to suborn military discipline. His membership of the CPGB was confirmed by an MI5 informant in Oxford. Political work in Greece and Albania disillusioned him with Bolshevism during 1924–5. In 1930, writing in an intercepted letter to Ewer, Reade deplored ‘the transformation of Marxist thought into a religious faith complete with saint in the mummified person of Lenin – horribly reminiscent of the Patron Saint of Corfu whose embalmed body is paraded round the town in a Sedan chair’. He loathed the hunting and punishment of doctrinal heretics. ‘The whole philosophy of the C.P. leaves no room for personal friendship – only loyalty to the Church. Independence – individualism – opportunism – desertion – renegacy – Siberia. The logic is perfect and intolerable.’6
Reade was a rarity in the Oxford of the 1920s. ‘We were avid for experience, and did not care overmuch if some of it turned out to be wasted,’ his contemporary Edward Sackville-West recalled, ‘for the twenties was the last great period of Privilege.’ The writers who most influenced this Oxford generation were Gide, Proust, Freud, D. H. Lawrence and Norman Douglas, the latter with his cult novel of cynical sensuality, South Wind. There was a ‘general reversal of values’ among the young literary intelligentsia: ‘private life took place in public, and public life in private’, according to Sackville-West, who in middle age claimed that he had been to bed with the youthful Donald Maclean.7
During the 1920s the CPGB attitude to Oxford and Cambridge universities was ambivalent. An editorial in The Plebs, a Marxist magazine edited for a time by Dobb, denounced the provision by Oxford’s Extra-Mural Department of a two-year course of study free of charge for selected trade unionists: ‘the policy of Oxford in making this offer is to endeavour to deprive the trade union movement of its most promising brains’. The Plebs objected to class fluidity. Workers who had attended university would ‘fight violently against going back to factory or mine’. An Oxford education guaranteed that they would betray their class by finding ‘remunerative occupation amongst the under-strappers of the employing-class’.8
Turning communist became fashionable in Cambridge colleges because of Maurice Dobb. Dobb was a north London draper’s son and a Leninist who thrived on crisis. Marxism became his imperative faith. ‘It is largely true’, he told a Cambridge meeting in 1920, ‘that man is not ultimately influenced by reason, but in the main finds reasons for what he wants to believe.’ Dobb was an ideologue on a quest for coherent ethical laws, true definitions and unselfish ruling principles; a class warrior, too, who wanted a dictatorship of the proletariat in which the bourgeoisie were cured of their ‘old psychology’. To the detriment of his academic career, he gave his best energies to promoting the cause of socialist equity for almost thirty years. The intellectual dishonesty and coercion of Lysenkoism, whereby thousands of Soviet biologists were dismissed, imprisoned and even executed for questioning the nonsensical Stalinist orthodoxy on genetics, finally disillusioned him in the late 1940s. Dobb formed the first communist cell in Cambridge University in June 1931. Without his leadership it is doubtful that communism would have been so influential in his college, Trinity, or in the wider university. He was crucial in creating Cambridge’s ring of five by setting Philby on the course that led to his recruitment by the NKVD.9
Dobb’s account of his visit to Russia in 1925, which he compiled as a retort to Keynes’s criticisms of Soviet tyranny, is basic to understanding the development of the Cambridge communist mentality after 1931. Comparisons between capitalist individuality and Marxist collectivism were all to the latter’s advantage.
Trains run on the main lines in Soviet Russia efficiently & to time – in fact on the Moscow–Leningrad line they have brand new wagons-lit which are the very acme of luxurious travelling. The telephones work, if anything, better than in London. The Nevsky in Leningrad – perhaps the most wonderful street in Europe – is gay with arc-lamps & lighted shops at night, thronged with people in & out of cafés, or the gardens of former palaces, where orchestras play Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov & Scriabin, with trams racing down at a terrifying speed merrily ringing their bells. In Moscow the streets are as clean as is compatible with cobbled surfaces; new Leyland motor buses rival the crowded tram-cars.
Dobb admired the public parks, ‘with their cleverly worked Soviet designs in flowers, but disregard for the lawn-mower’. The performing arts were as good as those in Vienna. ‘Compared with anything in Western Europe, of course, standards of efficiency are exceedingly low. The Russian, with a temperament much like the Irish, is a charming and kindly creature who will promise one anything on earth in order not to seem unkind … but of elementary ideas of time, neatness, thoroughness … he seemed to me woefully devoid.’
Leningrad and Moscow throbbed with zeal, Dobb continued. ‘There’s a hope in men’s eyes, and a sturdy determination among the young men and women who march in demonstrations.’ Factory workers knew that the unstoppable power of collective ownership was preordaining communist supremacy over capitalism. Echoing The Plebs editorial that deplored workers getting privileged Oxford experience and bettering themselves, Dobb admired the class immobility that he found in the Soviet system. Russians who sought to use education as a means to abandon their class, or regarded job promotion ‘as a reason for dressing-up in a stiff white collar & assuming the dignity of a “superior” person’ were despicable: ‘all one’s qualities as a “gentleman” which command respect, if not servility, in the bourgeois West, count in Russia for nothing, except for laughter & contempt’. At the frontier, where his train halted on his departure from Russia, Dobb disdained the Latvian customs official, ‘dressed as in a comic opera to show you that he was an officer & a gentleman, [who] displayed deference for my British passport & my bourgeois manner’. His disgust swelled on the journey from Riga to Berlin at ‘the fat, perfumed, wanton prosperity of a trans-continental restaurant car!’
Dobb admitted that freedom was curtailed in Russia. ‘Members of the old régime are spied upon & watched. The Cheka, now the [O.]G.P.U., uses many of the weapons of the old Okhrana – spies in private households, offer of pardons to political prisoners if they will engage in espionage for the Government. There is a severe censorship, often like all censorships undiscriminating & stupid.’ Political prisoners in the Siberian Arctic were said to die of exposure or hunger, Dobb conceded, but there were extenuating circumstances. ‘One must preserve that sense of proportion which the intellectual so notoriously lacks. Russia emerged from invasion & civil war, is not only surrounded by foes, but has foes inside her boundaries, even in her Government offices.’ The oppression of the security forces was excusable because it bore ‘almost entirely on the bourgeois alone. The things which are forbidden to the worker are for the most part things which he does not want, or at least in Western Europe cannot usually afford. For him there is fairly free expression of opinion, because the whole essence of Communist theory is that Soviet rule should base itself on the consent of the masses & interpret their desires, & hence if the masses have a grumble, authority prefers it to be voiced aloud.’10
The hypothesis of capitalist equilibrium, which posited the impossibility of over-production, was refuted by the industrial rationalization movement of the late 1920s: Whitehall and the Bank of England induced competing steelworks, shipyards and cotton-spinners to merge and shut surplus factories, which aggravated regional unemployment. The Wall Street crash in 1929 and the abandonment in 1931 of the cherished idol of British capitalism, the gold standard that backed sterling, suggested to Dobb’s disciples that capitalism was decomposing. The electorate’s preference for reducing unemployment rather than lowering prices killed another sanctified emblem of British capitalism, free trade.
A trigger was set on Easter Sunday of 1931. A fierce, single-minded Trinity undergraduate, David Guest, son of a former Labour MP, had gone to study mathematical philosophy at the University of Göttingen. He was detained at an anti-Nazi youth demonstration, was kept incommunicado and alone in a cell for a fortnight, and returned to England as a convinced communist. Together with a youth called Maurice Cornforth he joined the CPGB and henceforth sported a hammer-and-sickle badge on his jacket in Trinity. After this dual recruitment, Clemens Palme Dutt – a CPGB activist like his younger brother Rajani – visited the university to consult Dobb, who in June 1931 began organizing a proselytizing cell. The 1930s were the decade of conversion: in Britain 12,000 a year were received into the Catholic Church; communist and Catholic recruiting drives among Cambridge and Oxford undergraduates often had the same targets. Philip Toynbee, who joined the Oxford University communist party in 1935 and became its recruiting officer, visited the rooms of potential recruits only to find a famous Roman Catholic proselytizer, Father Martin D’Arcy, already ensconced in them. Both creeds hoped to find a similar doctrinal amenability in the youths whom they approached.11
Energetic younger dons recommended dialectical materialism to thoughtful undergraduates. Patrick Gordon Walker (one of the stalwarts of the Oxford Labour Club) invited undergraduate historians into his rooms at Christ Church in order to convince them that Marxism provided ‘objective laws of historical change’ that were both scientific and infallible. The young Hugh Trevor-Roper, who was told that ‘everything falls into place’ once the Marxist philosophy of history was accepted, felt in the mid-1930s, as he embarked on adult life, that ‘the vast pageant of history, hitherto so indeterminate, so formless, so mysterious, now had, as it seemed, a beautiful mechanic regularity’. Similarly, in Cambridge, Burgess became infatuated by historical determinism, which gave him the comforts of a requited lover. ‘The Marxist testaments explained all that had ever happened, all that was happening, and all that would happen, and what each person should do to help it all along,’ according to Michael (‘Micky’) Burn, who was one of Burgess’s boyfriends. ‘Nations, empires, epochs, fell into place as predictable stages in a perpetuum mobile of scene-changes.’12
Some people’s education merely gives a fixed direction to their stupidity, as Lord Cromer said. Misogyny was rampant in Cambridge colleges. Male undergraduates broke down the gates of the women’s college Newnham in order to celebrate the vote in 1921 to exclude women from admission to the university. ‘This is a man’s University, and I can see no reason whatever why women should not form a University of their own,’ declared a graduate of Pembroke, Lord Portsea, in 1923. ‘There is no question that the sexes do not work well together in the University sense of work. There is the human animal, and the other animal.’ A writer in 1940 conceded that such women as the fourteenth-century Countess of Pembroke had been valuable as ‘pious Foundresses’ of segregated all-male colleges, but denied that there could be benefits in treating twentieth-century women as equal members of the university: ‘The most serious indictment of the women students, apart from the fearsomeness of the women which those students nearly always become unless they marry quickly and forget it all, is the complete pointlessness of their being there.’ Women were not admitted to full membership of the university until 1948.13
Despite the brilliant reputations of Keynes and his colleagues at King’s, of the mathematicians, philosophers and scientists of Trinity and of Lord Rutherford’s team at the Cavendish Laboratory, insular complacence provided the keynote at many Cambridge colleges. The Senior Proctor of the university, an economist named Claude Guillebaud, wrote in 1934 with Anglocentric condescension of middle-class dictatorships in Italy and Germany, ‘and the picturesque personalities of Mussolini and Hitler’. This sort of sour put-down passed for clever wit in senior common rooms. John Bull smugness was unshaken by the arrival in the 1930s of such émigrés as the Budapest-born economist Péter Bauer, the Berlin-born biochemist Ernst Chain, the Freiburg-born scholar of Roman law and rabbinical studies David Daube, the Viennese-born molecular biologist Max Perutz, the Kiev-educated historian Michael (‘Munia’) Postan and the Austrian jurist and medieval historian Walter Ullmann. ‘The bulk of the dons I have met are dull and provincial,’ Postan reported to an anthropologist friend in 1935. ‘They read little, know less and are smug and conservative in the worst Edwardian manner. They sneer at “fellows with ideas” or tell funny stories about Americans … It is all very painful and explains why so many of the young scientists here turn communist.’14
Lord David Cecil, the Oxford literary critic, whose family had lived in Hatfield House for 350 years, said after visiting dons in Cambridge colleges, ‘One feels that they have accidentally inherited the place and haven’t yet learnt how to live in it.’ Hugh Trevor-Roper mused about ‘the curiously unsympathetic, strained, correct, unintellectual atmosphere of the university there, compared with the Oxford atmosphere which, though often boring and even coarse, is at least alive’. Maurice Cranston who visited Cambridge to give a lecture which he had spent three weeks preparing was shocked by his reception: ‘Cambridge isn’t Oxford; I was treated with a mixture of crude lifemanship [competitiveness] and plain rudeness,’ he wrote in 1954. ‘Trinity high table turned out to be a workhouse board, and the dinner was gastronomically lower than Lyons’ [Corner House], but there was plenty of wine, and I just gulped it down. For two hours before I had been sitting with my host, he offering no sherry, no conversation and no response to my increasingly nervous efforts to make it.’15
Young Marxists of the 1930s were intolerant of constrictive policing in the British Isles but acquiesced in the murderous political policing of the Soviet Union. Party members in Cambridge were indignant at the authorities’ treatment of the aged trade union leader Tom Mann, who spent two months in Brixton prison for refusing in 1932 to be bound over to keep the peace after calling for a day of action against unemployment. Two years later, their ire was renewed when Mann and Harry Pollitt of the CPGB were prevented from addressing a mass demonstration against unemployment in Hyde Park, by being arrested under Lord Sidmouth’s Seditious Meetings Act of 1817 for speeches they had made in Wales. Notes of Mann’s speech, taken by two constables named Onions and Fudge, had him denouncing ‘the rotten ruling class’ responsible for this ‘tyrannical age’: ‘now is time for … class action. We must take control of the points of government – railways, dockyards, shipyards, telephones, wireless stations and use them for our cause. The workers are our weapons.’ Mann and Pollitt certainly thought in these terms; but the constables had taken notes only on passages in the speech that they considered ‘strong’, and had not recorded all that was said. Denis Pritt, representing Mann, played court-room tricks to discredit their abilities as note-takers. His humiliation of the police witnesses ensured Mann’s acquittal to the delight of CPGB members in Cambridge, who were indignant about Onions and Fudge, but indifferent to the enormities of the Gulag.16
Cambridge undergraduate communists were similarly riled by Lord Trenchard, the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, proposing in 1933 that Scotland Yard should undergo technological modernization, with patrol cars linked by radio to a central communications room. Trenchard recommended forming an officer corps of university-educated men, who would be excluded from membership of the Police Federation to ensure that they did not share the outlook of the rank and file or be at risk of imbibing the Federation’s milk-and-water trade unionism. Constables were to be given police housing and recreational facilities that would distance them from their working-class neighbours. The left found these plans sinister and oppressive – indeed fascistic. George Lansbury, the Labour party leader, speaking in a Commons debate, called Trenchard’s proposals ‘a downright piece of class legislation’. The sequel, he predicted, would be that Trenchard, who was a marshal of the Royal Air Force, would organize police aerial bombing raids on working-class protesters: ‘Yes, a couple of aeroplanes did fly over a body of men at Coventry and we were threatened with what would happen.’ Echoing the complaints of Jack Hayes against General Macready in 1919, Lansbury warned that the Metropolitan Police was being turned into a ‘semi-military’ force. ‘Trenchard’s proposals’, David Guest concluded in an agitprop magazine called The Student’s Vanguard, ‘illustrate almost every point in the Marxist theory of the capitalist state.’17
Guest, like Dobb, was a member of Trinity College, as were Blunt, Philby, Burgess and Cairncross. Some of the greatest minds of early twentieth-century England were Fellows of Trinity: the mathematician G. H. Hardy, the philosophers Moore, Russell, Whitehead and Wittgenstein; the classicist A. E. Housman; the historian George Macaulay Trevelyan. The Master until his death in 1940 was the Nobel physics laureate J. J. Thomson, ‘who, by virtue of his knowledge of the smallest particles, attained the Mastership of the greatest college in either university’, as A. S. F. (‘Granny’) Gow (a Fellow of Trinity) wrote in his Latin epitaph. ‘Loud-mouthed, toothless and unkempt, he married an unpleasant wife, thanks to whose money he was able to leave eighty thousand pounds sterling to his heirs, a house filthier than a pig-sty to the college, and to posterity an unforgettable model of avarice.’ College life fostered spiteful resentments among those Fellows who were not working hard enough.18
The first of the Cambridge spies to reach Trinity was Anthony Blunt, who entered the college in 1926 and originally studied mathematics. In his first year, he was shy, disheartened, relatively poor and ill-dressed. In 1927 he changed his course from mathematics to modern languages: he already had perfect French and excellent Italian, but now turned to master German, which was the primary language of art scholarship. His first real love affair was with Peter Montgomery, the scion of Ulster military gentry. Sexual exchanges relaxed him, he dropped his defensive pose of sardonic misanthropy and evinced a dry sense of humour. In 1929 he became the lover of Virginia Woolf’s nephew Julian Bell, a rumpled, rumbustious and sturdy youth, who pursued Blunt for a quick inquisitive trial of a new sensation: his sexual energies were otherwise always directed at women. Blunt’s other undergraduate squeezes included Claud Phillimore, subsequently an architect who specialized in reducing extraneous wings of over-sized country houses during the cash-strapped 1950s. Phillimore’s father Lord Phillimore campaigned against Stalinist slave-labour tactics, and in 1931 sponsored legislation attempting to ban imports of timber and other commodities from penal colonies in the Gulag. He later commended Marshal Pétain for making a truce with Hitler in 1940 and decamped to South Africa in disgust at socialist post-war England.
Kim Philby reached Trinity three years after Blunt, at the early age of seventeen, in 1929. During his first Cambridge terms his chief avocation was music: he listened to Beethoven records, and played the French horn. Scores of his college contemporaries were strenuous outdoor types who ran with the Trinity Foot Beagles, competed in point-to-points at Cottenham and raced at Newmarket. Philby developed a hardy wanderlust which showed that he was tougher than the swaggerers. For three successive years he forayed into the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire and its Balkan hinterlands. In 1930 he bought a second-hand motorcycle with side-car, and visited Budapest and Vienna with Tim Milne and another friend Michael Stewart (British Ambassador in Athens, 1967–71). Bosnia in 1931 and Croatia, Montenegro, Albania and Serbia in 1932 were added to his tally. He chose the worst hovels to sleep in overnight, and bought the cheapest train tickets (he supposedly made his passage through Bosnia in the cattle trucks). He became proficient in German, and gained passable knowledge of Hungarian and Serbo-Croat.
Ignoring the reservations of The Plebs, Cambridge had taken half a dozen former coal-miners on scholarships from the Workers’ Education Association, including Harry Dawes and Jim Lees. In both these men Philby found a rare and invigorating authenticity. It was possibly under the influence of Dawes that Philby switched from history to economics in his third academic year. Years later Lees recalled Philby as dour, austere and abstemious about alcohol. Other contemporaries remembered him as earnest, virtuous and unassuming.
Guy Burgess entered Trinity as a scholar in 1930. James Klugmann followed him there a year later. Klugmann’s Gresham’s clansman Maclean went in the same month to Trinity Hall – a pretty college wedged into a small site adjacent to the much grander Trinity. During the summer vacation of 1931, Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government disintegrated in financial crisis, and was replaced by a coalition government. In October, as Klugmann and Maclean settled into their colleges, the Labour party was annihilated at the polls in the general election by an alliance of Tories, Liberals and the rump of MacDonald’s supporters. The omens of convulsive breakdown seemed unprecedented to Klugmann, Maclean and Burgess, and the possibilities of change looked illimitable. ‘Life seemed to demonstrate’, said Klugmann over forty years later, ‘the total bankruptcy of the capitalist system and shouted aloud for some sort of quick, rational, simple alternative. There was in this period a very strong feeling of doom, doom that was not very far off.’19
Philby was a strenuous Labour canvasser in that general election in the rural constituency of Cambridgeshire. He was joined on the rounds by Denis ‘Jakes’ Ewer, the only son of Norman Ewer and afterwards an invertebrate zoologist; but their activism was unavailing. The Conservative candidate in Cambridgeshire, Captain Richard Briscoe, trounced his Labour opponent, and later told the Birmingham Post that if only Hitler and Mussolini could relax with a good game of bowls once a week, European peace would be untroubled.
The triumph of the National Government over socialism aroused bitter fury among the radical intelligentsia, who felt betrayed by the Labour old guard and by social democracy. The Cambridge University Labour Club collapsed. Dawes then organized the Cambridge University Socialist Society as its radical new replacement. Philby joined CUSS at the instigation of Dawes, attended its meetings, became more politicized and finally served as its treasurer in 1932–3. Another CUSS activist recalled Philby at this time: ‘you would not have picked him out for distinction. He seemed then a useful bureaucrat, the sort who would have made a good career in Unilever.’20
Around the time of the 1931 election Maurice Cornforth married Klugmann’s sister Kitty, a Girton graduate and communist. In the Cornforths’ rented rooms above a pawnbroker’s shop, or at tables in the Lyons Corner House tea-shop, Guest, Cornforth and their acolytes plotted their revolutionary work. Guest had a puritan’s dislike of what Dobb called perfumed, wanton prosperity. He would have preferred a paper bag of prunes to a glass bowl of ripe peaches. In his Trinity room, which was bare except for a bookcase, a piano and a picture of Lenin, Guest instilled a select group of susceptible acquaintances with iron, Marxist discipline and held tireless tactical planning sessions. He insisted that it was the duty of communist students to excel at their work in the university just as much as if they were communist proletarians working in factories. Disciples had to read Das Kapital chapter by chapter. Marxist jargon such as ‘the negation of the negation’ or ‘the transmutation of quantity into quality’ was bandied during sessions which might last all night. ‘We did not understand half what was said, but were stimulated to go on reading,’ one of the study-group recalled. Members of the cell sold copies of the Daily Worker on street corners and canvassed support in working-class districts. The Cambridge Marxists were as puffed up with spiritual pride as the Weimar communist Leonhard Frank, who had coined the slogan ‘Left, where the heart is’. Their embrace of virtuous causes, such as ‘humanity’, ‘peace’ and ‘progress’, inflated them with the exhilarant gas of their own rectitude. If they were always right, others must be wrong.21
Guest’s group – many of them Dobb’s disciples – hailed the Soviet Union as a great socialist nation, albeit flawed by Russian national character. The cruelty of Stalin’s dictatorship – its enforced agricultural collectivization, its liquidation of the intelligentsia – was treated as a necessity to protect the great socialist experiment. Guest’s friend M. Y. Lang recalled the prevalent mood:
The philosophy student, led by the sophistry of a Whitehead or Wittgenstein to despair of the possibility of even interpreting reality, was electrified by the discovery that over in Russia they were actually applying a philosophy which claimed to change the world. The thrill of discovery gave way to the white heat of indignation. We felt ourselves surrounded by a wall of intellectual dishonesty, ivory-tower escapism, and apologetic accommodation. We felt in duty bound to smash that wall … we became inspired missionaries for a new integration of thought and action, a new science of life.22
Party members ambushed targets in Trinity Great Court or took them captive by unheralded visits at tea-time. They indicated their disposition by code-phrases such as ‘Old Herrick was a status quo poet’ or by saying of the film The Private Life of Henry VIII, ‘Propaganda for the National Government, isn’t it?’ Then they could nudge conversation towards their eternal subject, class-struggle, and the victorious inevitability of proletarian dictatorship. The creed that class war was the motor and throttle of progress was irreconcilable with belief in government by consent. Devout communist undergraduates upheld the mechanical fallacy that twentieth-century beauty inhered in immensity and functionalism: towering grain silos, hydro-electric dams, airship hangars, gasometers were the new abbeys. To renegade communists, Guest and his comrades were no better than political pimps. ‘The Comintern’, as Arthur Koestler said, ‘carried on a white-slave traffic whose victims were young idealists flirting with violence.’23
Philby tried to convert some unlikely men to Marxism. He approached his Trinity tutor John Burnaby, who had survived grim military service in Gallipoli and Flanders, and was Europe’s leading expert on the theology of St Augustine. Burnaby had an officer’s trim moustache, an ascetic’s stern lines, and was an eloquent Christian preacher, who later took holy orders and became Regius Professor of Divinity. Philby tried to convert this upright man – the author of such works as Amor Dei and The Belief of Christendom – to dialectical materialism. Interviewed by Courtenay Young of MI5 in 1951, Burnaby called Philby ‘a militant Communist’ who had in his view converted Burgess to Marxism. Young reported, using the codename PEACH for Philby, that of the pair, Burnaby ‘regarded PEACH as the dominant factor’. Philby did not apply for membership of the CPGB until 1934, a year after his graduation from Cambridge, and never received a party card; but Burnaby assumed that his pupil was a card-carrying partisan. ‘I would be surprised’, he told Young, ‘if PEACH had not been a Party member as his Communism was so deep-seated that it would be inconsistent with the sincerity of his character if he were not also a Party member.’ Burnaby’s account of Philby’s impact on Burgess is convincing. Burgess in turn told Harold Nicolson that he had been primed for the anti-colonial struggle by reading William Shuster’s The Strangling of Persia (1912), an account of Edwardian English and tsarist Russian diplomatic intrigues which had ‘a seminal effect’ on him as an undergraduate.24
On the extreme left, there was no one in Oxford as fervent, patient, timely and well placed as Dobb was in Cambridge in 1931–2. Philip Toynbee, who was a CPGB activist in Oxford, said that his comrades there showed ‘ruinous insensitivity’ in trying to convert undergraduates. Their proselytizers appeared in college rooms ‘grinning and rinsing their hands like very bad salesmen’. The Oxford party’s ruling cohort were dishonest almost as a principle, Toynbee added. Robert Conquest, who read politics, philosophy and economics (PPE) at Magdalen from 1937 and like many of his friends joined the CPGB from motives that were compassionate and unselfish, later estimated that there were about 30 overt and 170 clandestine party members in the university. ‘But’, he added, ‘when you have a party that was headed by Philip Toynbee, it’s not very serious.’25
A weightier figure was Arthur Wynn. The son of a professor of medicine, Wynn had read mathematics and natural sciences at Trinity College, Cambridge, joined the CPGB and was living in Germany when the Nazis took power in 1933. There he married Lieschen Ostrowski in order to give her the protection of a British passport. After bringing his bride to England, they were watched and evaluated by the NKVD talent-spotter Edith Tudor-Hart, who had recently approached Philby to spy for Moscow. Similarly, in October 1934, Tudor-Hart and Maly recruited Wynn as agent SCOTT. Wynn pursued postgraduate studies in Oxford, where he became a busy NKVD recruiter in 1935–8. There he met a fellow party member Margaret (‘Peggy’) Moxon whom, after divorcing Ostrowski, he married in 1938. In the same year, using the joint alias of Simon Haxey, the couple published an influential book, Tory M.P., arguing that parliament was dominated by employers who oppressed the workers, suggesting that bank directors and arms manufacturers should be ineligible as parliamentary candidates, reiterating that there was a capitalist conspiracy to foment war for the profit of munitions makers, and noting that Conservative leaders by their investments were financially benefiting from rearmament. This bestselling polemic by Wynn and Moxon was an indignant and oddly pompous piece of class warfare, which drew innuendoes from a mass of conscientiously researched facts.26
Wynn entered the recruiting-grounds some seven years after Dobb’s cell was formed. His contacts were less entrenched in their party commitment by the time of the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact in August 1939, after which their activism mostly ceased. Toynbee renounced communism in December 1939 following Russia’s invasion of Finland. The Oxford-undergraduate communism of Denis Healey did not prevent him from becoming a major in the Royal Engineers, Secretary of State for Defence in 1964 and deputy leader of the Labour party. Wynn’s tally of short-term recruits included a future Labour politician Bernard Floud and a future colonial governor Andrew Cohen, but they did not amount to a ring of Oxford spies. The young Americans who came to Oxford as Rhodes scholars however did.27
Crane Brinton, who was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford in the late 1920s, and later did wartime service as chief of research and analysis at the London outpost of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), forerunner of the CIA, said that most American Rhodes scholars were ‘disappointed with Oxford and disappointed with their achievement after their return’. They were, explained Brinton, ‘horrified by its preciousness, by the free and easy habits of the undergraduates, and especially by their intellectual and moral irreverence’. One event changed all this: the Oxford Union debate of 1933 which resolved by 275 votes to 123 that the house would in no circumstances fight for its King and Country. Most of those voting were loyal citizens of a country that was then committed by the Kellogg–Briand pact of 1928 to the outlawing of war: few of them were, as Beaverbrook’s Daily Express fulminated, ‘woozy-minded Communists and sexual indeterminates’. The Oxford undergraduate memory moves in cycles of three years: its enthusiasms are ephemeral; the King and Country vote did not matter long in Oxford. But in the United States ‘the Oxford Oath’ became the focal point of a student peace movement. Thereafter, on Armistice Days, hundreds of thousands of American students boycotted classes and attended anti-war meetings. Inspired by the Union’s pacifist vote, the brightest of them applied for Rhodes scholarships at England’s oldest university. By 1936 the Warden of Rhodes House, Carleton Allen, was lamenting that an increasing number of American Rhodes scholars were communist sympathizers: ‘It is not a circumstance which is palatable to oneself, but clearly we can do nothing and ought to do nothing about it.’ He accepted that many of the best youngsters of their generation wanted to prove their social conscience, modernity and capacity for faith by communist displays, and trusted that this might prove, like most Oxford trends, transient.28
Mary McCarthy wrote of a Yale graduate in the early years of the New Deal, ‘Marxism was to become for Jim’s generation what an actress had been for the youths of the Gilded Age’: an exciting, furtive rite of passage into manhood. American Rhodes scholars who took to Marxism in the mid-1930s included Daniel Boorstin, Duncan Lee, Peter Rhodes and Donald Wheeler. Boorstin and Lee were hoodwinked by their experiences on a visit to Soviet Russia organized by the Stalinist barrister Dudley Collard in 1937, but neither sought party membership in Oxford. Boorstin joined the CPUSA after returning to Harvard in 1938, and Lee on his return to Yale in 1939. Boorstin left the CPUSA following the Nazi–Soviet pact, and became an eminent opponent of doctrinaire politics and the historian of American consensus. Lee, however, became the best-placed communist agent to infiltrate wartime American intelligence in the form of the OSS. In a memoir later prepared for the NKGB in 1945, Wheeler described himself as a member of the agrarian proletariat, born on a primitive farm in Washington state, and as having joined the CPGB while at Oxford in 1935. After leaving Oxford, he worked for communist-front bodies involved in the Spanish civil war, then returned to the USA as a union organizer in government agencies. He joined the OSS on its formation, and was immediately an important Soviet source.29
Rhodes, who had been born in Manila with the patronymic of Beutinger, had taken a new surname after his mother shot and killed his father at Caldwell, New Jersey in 1916. This name-change long predated his arrival as a Rhodes scholar at Oriel College, Oxford. He joined the CPGB, and organized a proselytizing summer camp for the unemployed at the Thames village of Clifton Hampden in 1935. Gordon Fagg, landlord of the village’s Barley Mow pub, complained to the police that the campers sang ‘The Red Flag’ in his bar and spoke disloyally of the royal family. In 1936 Oxford police questioned Rhodes after he had shouted abuse at a fascist meeting. Although he was obviously a middle-class American, Rhodes claimed to the police that he was an English proletarian who worked as an assembler at the Pressed Steel works at Cowley. After the expiry of his Rhodes scholarship, he became a Paris-based journalist, visited Spain in 1937 (ostensibly to investigate the plight of refugee children) and returned to London in 1941 as a member of the Foreign Monitoring Service, with a desk in the US embassy.
Aside from the Rhodes scholars, one of Wynn’s recruits – Jenifer Williams, who read history at Somerville – needs attention. Her father was a former Liberal parliamentary candidate for Oxford and a judge at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague. Rebelling against the high-minded and salubrious idealism of her parents, she volunteered to work in Rhodes’s communist-front summer camp for the unemployed in 1935. Her experiences there, including an affair with an unemployed milkman, induced her to join the CPGB. In doing so, she replaced the ample latitudinarianism of north Oxford with the rigid, cramping doctrines of Marxism. Her feelings in 1935–6 were conditioned by erotic pleasure and the fact that every party member was assigned a role and made to feel significant. Her first assignment, which was given to her by the Balliol historian Christopher Hill, was to recruit her friend Isaiah Berlin to the CPGB; but she knew this to be impossible. Like her friends Floud and Toynbee, she was exasperated by the ineptitude of the Labour party, and its hapless responses to regional unemployment and to the rise of fascism in Italy, Germany and Spain. She was aware of the cruelties of Stalinism, but took comfort from a letter sent to her in 1936 by an intellectual Englishman who had just returned from Russia: ‘all the things that one is inclined to be worried about, restrictions on liberty, a failure to reach our standards of taste in something or other – all the things, in fact, which don’t fit in with our oh so well-educated lives – simply don’t seem to a genuine worker as sources of trouble’. Her rationalization in old age of her party membership was based on the balance of evil: ‘Hitler’s march into Austria in March 1938 seemed more important than Bukharin’s execution three days later.’30
Williams was placed third out of 493 civil service candidates in 1936 and entered the Home Office, which was the recommendation of both the Civil Service Commission and her CPGB contacts. She was handled by Arnold Deutsch @ OTTO, who groomed her as a penetration agent. One of the attractions of party membership had been the camaraderie, but she was deprived of this as a secret member, from whom even a party card was withheld. Her Home Office work on juvenile delinquency, children’s homes and reformatories held little interest for Moscow. Under the influence of Herbert Hart, whom she married, she turned against Stalinist totalitarianism and towards Labour constitutionalism. Her party activism had petered out, she said, by 1939.
Some of the American Rhodes scholars shed their communist sympathies after the Nazi–Soviet pact of August 1939. Many of Wynn’s recruits similarly proved too fastidiously bourgeois to forgive either the pact or the Soviet invasions of Poland and Finland. Oxford, however, seems to have been more fallow ground than Cambridge. Cambridge was generally reckoned to be the more scientific university, and the supposed scientific nature of Marxism attracted scientists to the CPGB in the 1930s, but none of the ring of five was a scientist. So what were the other institutional, geographic and temperamental factors?
In the seventeenth century Cambridge had been a Roundhead city and Oxford a stronghold of the Cavaliers. Puritanism persisted in the Fenlands university throughout the twentieth century: in Oxford people were more comfortable with personal fulfilment and less pleased by self-mortification. The countryside surrounding Oxford abounded with hosts and hostesses who encouraged the politically ambitious young and introduced them to political sponsors. The Churchills at Blenheim, Lady Desborough at Taplow, Lady Astor at Cliveden, Margot, Countess of Oxford and Asquith at Sutton Courtenay, Lord Birkenhead at Charlton and Lord Tweedsmuir at Elsfield were among the political patrons and power-houses within easy reach of Oxford. Visiting youngsters there were allured by the possibilities of serving powerful interests. There were no comparable houses near Cambridge: Kipling’s reclusive daughter at Wimpole and the enfant gâté Lord Fairhaven at Anglesey Abbey had no interest in running political salons. Few tourists visited Cambridge in the 1930s: it was not on the road towards Shakespeare’s Stratford-upon-Avon, and its chief London rail terminus, Liverpool Street station, was a grim deterrent to tourists in ways that Oxford’s Paddington was not. ‘Oxford in vacation is as crowded and noisy as Hammersmith Broadway, which much of it resembles,’ wrote a graduate of King’s in 1940, ‘while Cambridge in vacation just lives quietly from one market-day to the next.’31
Cambridge was the more insular university, in which undergraduates tended to be unnerved by the risks to their personal integrity of mainstream political commitment, but calmer about joining the outer margins. Undergraduate politics were overt in Oxford: there was less shame in conventional party ambitions and engagement; there were fewer jibes about political careerism among the young. The Oxford Union debating society in Frewin Court was a better nursery of political leaders than its Cambridge counterpart in Bridge Street. Of prime ministers since 1900, only three graduated from Cambridge: Balfour, Campbell-Bannerman and Baldwin, all Trinity men, and all in power in the century’s earliest three decades. By contrast, Asquith, Attlee, Eden, Macmillan, Douglas-Home, Wilson, Heath, Thatcher, Blair, Cameron and May were graduates of Oxford. Between 1920 and 1970 some 77 of the 161 permanent under secretaries who attended university were Oxford graduates: Cambridge lagged far behind from the 1940s. This is indicative of where the mainstream current flowed, and where the stagnant backwaters stood. The Oxford don Richard Crossman, on a visit to Cambridge in 1953, noted of the ‘keen Socialists’ who entertained him at King’s, ‘somehow they are detached from practical politics’: Oxford’s difference from Cambridge, he decided, was that in his university ‘life is public affairs, not private affairs’. Two years later E. H. Carr, moving fellowships from Balliol to the former college of Blunt, Burgess, Cairncross and Philby, reported: ‘Cambridge is infinitely more remote from the world than Oxford.’32
Another possible deterrent to Oxford communism were MI5 agents. Two Oxford undergraduate communists of the 1920s – Tom Driberg and Graham Pollard – are known to have been reporting communist activities within the university. There were probably others in the 1930s of whom we as yet know nothing. Driberg, whose serpentine activities recur throughout this book, was a shifty, squalid, over-publicized character (known as M/8 in MI5 files). Pollard was the more significant agent, as witnessed by his designation of M/1.
Graham Pollard, son of the great Tudor historian A. F. Pollard, won the senior history scholarship to Jesus College, Oxford in 1922. He was known among his contemporaries as a bibliophile and aesthete: he joined the decadent Hypocrites Club, and beat his fellow Hypocrite Evelyn Waugh in a spitting contest. To the dismay of his father he got only a third-class degree. Pollard had been a pupil at Willington preparatory school in Putney in 1909–16 – the school where Maxwell Knight was sports master in 1921 before embarking on his strange career which included being MI5’s most successful agent-runner. The Pollards lived in Erpingham Road, close to the school, and near Knight’s Putney flat. Knight’s biographer Henry Hemming suggests that the twenty-one-year-old sports master and his eighteen-year-old neighbour met in 1921, and that it was at Knight’s instigation that the undergraduate Pollard proclaimed himself (to the surprise of his fellow Hypocrites) to be a communist. After graduating, Pollard became junior partner in a Bloomsbury bookshop, ran the St Pancras branch of the Amalgamated Union of Shop Assistants, Warehousemen and Clerks, edited the magazine Distributive Worker and in 1924 married a communist called Kathleen (‘Kay’) Beauchamp. He and his wife joined the staff of the Daily Worker. Throughout he remained Knight’s highly valued informant. His commitment continued despite his wife’s imprisonment in 1933 for publishing an article criticizing the conviction of a communist called Wal Hannington. His resolve and utility began to diminish only in the mid-1930s after he had separated from his wife. He had long since left Oxford activism behind, but it is doubtful that he was MI5’s last agent inside the Oxford University cell of the CPGB who weakened or betrayed its work.33
Whereas the Cambridge Labour Club collapsed after the National Government victory in the general election of 1931 leaving a vacuum in socialist organization, Oxford’s Labour Club survived. This was partly because Oxford – unlike Cambridge – was ringed by factories, notably the Morris motor-car plant and its associated Pressed Steel works at Cowley. The strikes and other activism at Cowley in the 1930s influenced left-wing thinking in the university. Abraham (‘Abe’) Lazarus, a CPGB organizer in the south Midlands, was a charismatic force in both Cowley and the university: Jenifer Williams was one of his acolytes. But Lazarus’s influence was countered by David Lewis (né Losz), who had lived in a Jewish shtetl in Belorussia from his birth in 1909 until his family moved to Canada in 1921. Lewis was a native Yiddish-speaker, who learnt English by reading The Old Curiosity Shop with a Yiddish–English dictionary beside him. From McGill University he went to Lincoln College, Oxford as a Rhodes scholar in 1932. He was a committed socialist, whose Marxism was modified by his family’s experiences of Bolshevism. In university debates and on public platforms he put the case for ‘parliamentary Marxism’ with vigorous éclat. His brand of Marxist socio-economic analysis and constitutionalism, his rejection of revolutionary means and proletarian dictatorships, tripled the Labour party membership in the university in 1932–4 and stopped the communists from making headway.34
Above the level of student activism, Labour leadership was provided by several dons. Richard Crossman was elected to Oxford City Council in 1934. Gordon Walker contested the Oxford City parliamentary constituency at the general election of 1935. Both men were driven to socialist activism by first-hand experiences of Nazism during prolonged visits to Hitler’s Germany. Like others of their political bent at Oxford, they upheld social democracy under the influence of two luminaries, A. D. Lindsay and G. D. H. Cole. ‘Sandy’ Lindsay had been instrumental in inaugurating Oxford’s honours school of modern humanities (known as modern Greats, or PPE) in 1920, and was a progressive Master of Balliol in the years 1924–49. He was anti-totalitarian, not just anti-fascist, and gave hours each week to frank dialogues with the politically earnest young. With his engaging stammer, his social conscience and his deprecation of ideology, he influenced such undergraduate politicians as Denis Healey, Edward Heath and Roy Jenkins. Lindsay was ‘a big man with a profoundly religious spirit’, said an admiring colleague: ‘there was nothing namby-pamby about his kind of democracy’. He mustered impressive support as the Popular Front candidate at the famous Oxford City by-election of 1938.35
Second only to Lindsay among the Oxford social democrats was G. D. H. Cole, Ewer’s former Daily Herald colleague and university reader in economics from 1925. During the inter-war period, at moments of political crisis and economic stress, Cole made excitable remarks about the need for dictatorial socialism, and the redundancy of the capitalist conception of individual liberty; but his wife said that he was a Tory in everything except politics, and he proclaimed himself a pluralist. ‘I was repelled’, he explained in 1958, ‘by the Bolsheviks’ conception of a social philosophy based on rigidly determinist principles and involving the unquestionable class-correctness of a single, unified body of doctrine, regardless of considerations of time and place.’ Although he admired Bolshevik leaders for emancipating Russia from monarchical feudalism, he had realized by the Kronstadt revolt of 1921 that those leaders believed ‘that “class-enemies” had no human rights at all and could be killed or maltreated without any source of compunction’. Although this summary of his position depends upon selective amnesia, it is true that Cole’s general influence in the 1930s was anti-totalitarian, not just anti-fascist, and that he did not proselytize for the Soviet Union. He had, thought his Oxford pupil Royden Harrison, ‘a deep distrust of power, and was dismayed to find that those who exercised it repeatedly confused expediency with principle, and personal ambition with service to the good cause’.36
After a talk by Cole at an Oxford socialist Pink Lunch in 1932, Gordon Walker set out his credo – which diverged far from Cambridge notions. He rejected the Soviet model, and insisted upon English particularity: ‘abstracts and fundamentals must be allowed’, he conceded, ‘but we are politicians and we are Englishmen’ and so ‘our particular concern is English socialism for England’. There was little resemblance between the history of England and that of Russia: ‘even if the Marxist inevitable end is a true reading of history, England has half-escaped its applicability to her’. Gordon Walker disbelieved in long-term tactical planning (‘he goes furthest who knows not where he is going’), rejected ‘socialism imposed and maintained by force’, and wanted ‘no running after a vague equality. The ideal will be very near to the Medieval Church: of men chosen and promoted for their subservience to the main end.’37
There was another divergence between the two ancient universities. Male homosexuality was practised with some openness and reasonable acceptance in Oxford. The undergraduate letters and diaries of Evelyn Waugh, like the careers of Harold Acton, Brian Howard, Wystan Auden and Stephen Spender, show overt and fulfilled sex lives. Maurice Bowra coined the neologism Homintern, and described himself in the 1930s as a leader of the 69th International and a member of the Immoral Front. Men with sexual preferences that were criminal under the law of 1885 were elected as heads of houses in Oxford: some perhaps sexually abeyant, such as Cruttwell of Hertford in 1930, Stallybrass of Brasenose in 1936 and Smith of New College in 1944; but others – Bowra at Wadham in 1938, T. S. R. Boase at Magdalen in 1947, John Kelly at St Edmund Hall in 1951 and John Sparrow at All Souls in 1952 – demonstrably less so. In puritanical Cambridge, despite the exceptions of Maynard Keynes and his circle, male homosexuality was more culpable and repressed. Among heads of houses, Arthur Benson, who was Master of Magdalene until 1925, was virginal, while John Sheppard, elected Provost of King’s in 1933, became an absurd gibbering wreck. Predilections were supposed to be sublimated in Cambridge: Anthony Blunt’s research fellowship at Trinity was not converted into a full fellowship because of objections to his sexual activity, although there were plenty of bachelor dons in the college. The sexual climate was more clandestine, seething, tortuous and potentially dismal for men in the Cambridge colleges. Perhaps these uncomfortable local twists and frustrating deformities of erotic activity were a factor in young men’s choices of political expression and allegiance.
Owen Wansbrough-Jones, the senior tutor at Trinity Hall when Maclean was an undergraduate, described him to MI5 in 1951 as ‘not the kind of man to accept other people’s ways of thinking, without having thought them out for himself and studied all the relevant authorities’. He recalled Maclean as ‘a good athlete when it suited him to play games’, but generally as ‘the cat that walked alone’. Intellectually, he was outstanding, Wansbrough-Jones said. ‘Everything came easily to him … He would be inclined to feel – more often than not correctly – that in dealing with any of his contemporaries, he was dealing – relatively – with a fool.’ Wansbrough-Jones thought him of a type liable to join the CPGB.38
One of Maclean’s contemporaries at Trinity Hall was Jocelyn (‘Jack’) Simon, later Lord Simon of Glaisdale and a law lord. His father was Unitarian by religion and a stockbroker by profession: his mother’s maiden name was Mamelsdorf (anglicized in 1914 to Morland) and his maternal grandmother was a Rosenheim. Simon was thus a cousin of Klugmann and Kitty Cornforth, and was born in Belsize Park, where numerous Rosenheim cousins (including the Klugmanns) lived in affectionate proximity. These Jewish kinsmen were not mentioned when he was interviewed by Roger Hollis in 1956 about his early friendship with Maclean. By then he was a QC and Tory MP. He told how his parents had been friends of Sir Donald and Lady Maclean, and how he had attended Gresham’s with Maclean as well as Trinity Hall. He and Maclean played cricket together in the holidays, and skated on the Holland Park rink. Maclean made no secret of joining the CPGB in the winter of 1932–3, recalled Simon, who thought his friend’s conversion followed Hawks’ Club rowdies wrecking the rooms of Burgess’s Eton boyfriend David Hedley, then reading classics at King’s and a convert to communism. If Simon remembered correctly, the anti-Hedley hooliganism was a trigger event reminiscent of the smashing of Arthur Reade’s cherished possessions in Oxford eleven years earlier. Maclean made a show of his communism, said Simon, ‘by selling his wardrobe and replacing it with a rather scruffy set of reach-me-downs, and filling his bookshelves with Communist books’.39
Another of Maclean’s contemporaries at Trinity Hall was Alan Nunn May. He was typical of most Cambridge undergraduate communists of the 1930s in being a grammar school boy rather than a public school man. Born in Birmingham in 1911, Nunn May was the son of a prosperous brass-founder who was reduced to working as a salesman when his business failed after a fire. Paternal humiliation and anxiety status dominated Nunn May’s adolescence. As a pupil at Birmingham’s leading grammar school, he was influenced by Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front and Robert Sherriff’s play Journey’s End. He decided that his generation had been ‘conned’ by the governing classes about the war of 1914, the ‘Hang the Kaiser’ election of 1918, the Versailles peace treaty of 1919, the bogus Zinoviev letter of 1924 and above all the capitalist crisis after 1929. From the backwashes of Birmingham he saw ‘deliberate deception’ by the authorities on all sides: as he said, in self-justificatory old age, ‘this feeling that the Establishment was not to be trusted, that any officially sponsored line of thought had to be critically examined, grew on me. I felt that the ruling class had lost all claims to trust.’40
Nunn May won a scholarship to Trinity Hall, where he gained a first in physics. His academic mentor there was the fellow-traveller Patrick Blackett. Communist propaganda in 1933–6 against the private manufacture of armaments aroused Nunn May, who became convinced that capitalists fomented war to increase their profits from munitions. After leaving Cambridge he joined the CPGB and visited Russia in 1936. His party commitment was dormant from the German–Russian pact of August 1939 until the German invasion of Russia in June 1941. He then began supplying atomic secrets to the Soviet Union: his unmasking in 1945–6 was to destabilize the other Cambridge spies.
Francis and Roualeyn (‘Spider’) Hovell-Thurlow-Cumming-Bruce came under the Marxist sway at Trinity. They were the identical twin sons of Lord Thurlow, an Anglican clergyman who specialized in missionary work among merchant seamen. During the 1920s their father had been chaplain to the Merseyside seamen’s mission, with the quaint title of Rural Dean of North Liverpool, and during the 1930s he was rector of a parish in the vicinity of Durham collieries. Like Blunt and Maclean, the Cumming-Bruce brothers were reared in an atmosphere of self-sacrificing Christianity, with added exposure to social deprivation. Deciding that the Church of England gave no solution to the perplexities of their time, they found a new faith in dialectical materialism, which they studied under the aegis of Dobb and Cornforth. They enjoyed the cloak-and-dagger way in which they were given their little green CPGB membership cards. Their party membership, so Roualeyn Cumming-Bruce said in 1953, ‘was a mark of grace extended through Maurice DOBB only apparently when students had reached a certain state of political education’. The twins left the CPGB about the time that they graduated from Cambridge: their observations convinced them that ‘an Engels-world upside-down offered no future at all, and both reverted … to a more sober Labour Party line’. Francis Cumming-Bruce, on furlough in England after five years in the high commission in New Zealand and before his posting to its counterpart in Ottawa, was still sufficiently keen to attend the Labour party conference at Blackpool in 1944: he admired the party executive’s adroit management of the proceedings. He ended his official career as Governor of the Bahamas and a hereditary member of the House of Lords.41
Philby went to Berlin with his friend Tim Milne in March 1933 three months after Hitler’s accession to power. The German capital was festooned with Nazi flags and anti-Jewish notices: the German communist party, which had failed to halt the advance of Hitler’s political forces, was demonstrably in decline. Milne in old age suspected that this diverted Philby, ‘always a believer in the realities of power, away from international communism and towards the Soviet Union as a mainspring of resistance to fascism’. Philby graduated in June 1933 with upper-second-class honours in economics. On his last day in college, he asked Dobb’s advice on how to fulfil his commitment to combat fascism. ‘Ach,’ Dobb had said in exasperation in 1930, ‘these conventional intellectuals without any spunk!’ (He was talking about his failure to get Trinity colleagues to protest against the deportation of Edith Suschitzky, a Viennese communist who later took the surname of Tudor-Hart.) Dobb thought Philby had spunk: he gave him a letter of introduction to a Paris group, almost certainly Willi Münzenberg’s newly formed World Committee for the Relief of Victims of German Fascism. In doing so, he launched Philby on the course which led to his first meeting with Suschitzky and her initiation of his recruitment as a spy. It must be stressed that although Dobb recruited young men into the party, he had no direct hand in inveigling them into working for Moscow.42
One such youth was John Cornford, who became a ruling force in Cambridge communism during 1933. Reared by cultivated, tolerant, liberal and inquisitive parents, he rejected their values with righteous irritation, joined the CPGB, visited Russia and used masterful aggression to achieve his ends. ‘Keep Culture out of Cambridge’ was a slogan coined by him. In the magazine Cambridge Left he quoted some lines of Louis Aragon as a rallying-cry for students and intellectuals:
I am the witness to the crushing of a world out of date.
I am a witness drunkenly to the stamping-out of the bourgeois.
Was there ever a finer chase than the chase we give
To that vermin which flattens itself in every nook of the cities?
I sing the violent domination of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat
For the annihilation of that bourgeoisie
For the total annihilation of that bourgeoisie.
A Darwin great-aunt described Cornford as ‘poisoned by communism’, thinking ‘of nothing else but his political religion’, rude to his elders, dirty and scruffy. Steven Runciman, who knew him at Trinity, judged him ‘forceful, merciless, rather inhuman’. Runciman’s biographer Minoo Dinshaw pictures Cornford as one of the best-looking undergraduates of his generation, ‘with thick black curls and etched cheekbones worthy of some melancholy Russian princess’. He notes that Cornford, ‘a cold, narcissistic and unavailable heterosexual youth’, knew how to entice Blunt and other sexually susceptible youths into ideological havoc.43
Cornford and Klugmann transformed student politics in their university in 1933–4. They recruited a strong cohort within Trinity. Their acolytes then carried their disputatious propaganda into other colleges, forming undergraduate Marxist study-groups and mustering anti-war feeling in a period when Moscow rather than Berlin was thought by good communists to be London’s target. They held open meetings throughout the university, and distributed leaflets. Above all they waged a campaign of ruthlessly tactical conversations to influence, convert and recruit undergraduates. Their group was as insistent as Christian evangelicals, and knocked on doors with the zeal of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Klugmann had a canny sense of which Cambridge undergraduates were worth fostering and which university organizations were worth penetrating. The Cornford–Klugmann cell set out to arouse a robust anti-fascist temper among students, and to organize loyal groups of student revolutionaries. Marxism gave their acolytes the notion that all of literature, the visual arts and the learned professions (law, medicine) had to be studied anew, weighed again and relabelled. The belief in the absolute iniquity of their capitalist, colonialist and fascist opponents made them sure of their own invincible rectitude. Theirs was a total system to change the world.
One such acolyte was Egerton Herbert Norman, who had been born in Japan, where his Canadian father was a Methodist missionary, and arrived at Trinity with a history scholarship in 1933. He had lost his family’s exacting Christian faith and was ripe for conversion by Klugmann and Cornford: it was under the latter’s mentorship that he joined the CPGB. After holding a Rockefeller fellowship at Harvard, Norman joined the Canadian Department of External Affairs in 1939 and rose to ambassadorial rank while still, it seems, loyal to Moscow. The burden of his divided loyalties became so onerous that he finally killed himself.44
Charles Rycroft, the younger son of a fox-hunting baronet, was another acolyte. Before entering Trinity in 1933, he spent six months in Germany in order to learn the language. He found teenage excitement in attending Nazi rallies, watching street fights and distributing banned copies of The Times, which his brother sent wrapped in copies of Tatler. Arriving at Trinity, he discovered that only extreme left-wingers were interested in Nazi enormities. He joined the Society for Cultural Relations with the Soviet Union. ‘My conversion, however, had surprisingly little effect on my daily life, which continued to be that of a young man who is treating the university as a finishing-school first and as a seat of learning second. I went to sherry parties, May-week balls and point-to-points, and considered it bad form actually to be seen working.’ He did his necessary reading at home in the vacations so effectively that he got a first in the first part of the economics tripos, and was elected an exhibitioner. He took a 2.1 in the modern history tripos at the end of his third year. He was then elected to a studentship, which enabled him to remain at Trinity for a fourth year of perfunctory research. From his comrades Rycroft learnt:
that intensity, which I had previously thought a vice, was really a virtue, and also that I, poor thing, was decadent, a dilettante, a member of a dying class, precluded from the dialectic of history from ever having any understanding of the modern world or from playing any significant role in it. I was too young and innocent then to realize that passionate intensity is a sign of doubt rather than certainty, or to appreciate that envy and vanity lay behind their attitude towards me. Nor did I cotton on to the fact that their theories led to the conclusion that they, the educated cadres of the proletariat, would form the ruling class of the future.
Klugmann’s rooms were on the next staircase to Rycroft’s at Trinity. ‘He seemed to need little sleep, and I joined the Party after a marathon series of indoctrination sessions lasting far into the night. It had become a choice between joining and exhaustion.’ It became fashionable in Trinity, said Rycroft, to join the CPGB – ‘a recognized form of social climbing’. The undergraduate communist cell was sub-divided by party headquarters. ‘Nominally, “A” was the privileged cell; its members were supposedly the crème de la crème of the liberal intelligentsia, too original and gifted to be subjected to Party discipline.’ Their revolutionary duty was to infiltrate universities, government departments and metropolitan elites, and to hold themselves ready to restore cultural life after the chaos of revolution. The deceived innocents of ‘A’ cell, who thought themselves exclusive and privileged, had in reality been quarantined in order to protect simple-minded proletarians from contamination: so far from being admired or envied by the rank and file, they were disparaged as ‘social pansies’.45
On every Armistice Day (11 November) during the 1930s intimidating mobs of drunken undergraduates roamed through Cambridge requiring passers-by to fill the collecting boxes of the British Legion. Most dons kept inside their colleges during the afternoon and evening to avoid this patriotic thuggery. In order to exploit the justified resentment of this bullying, Dobb (abetted by Cornford and Klugmann) formed the Cambridge Anti-War Council, a communist front which helped to organize a march to the town’s war memorial on Armistice Day of 1933. There were counter-demonstrations from rowing and rugger hearties, who blocked the road near Peterhouse and bombarded demonstrators with flour, eggs, tomatoes and white feathers (some of which were worn with pride as trophies). The hooliganism was so rowdy that the police drew their truncheons. Fingers and noses were broken. Burgess clambered into a car piled with mattresses, which Julian Bell drove on the edge of the march to block counter-demonstrators and to deflect their missiles. This confrontation invigorated undergraduate resistance to established authority. Even apolitical youths such as Alan Turing were impressed by the anti-war marchers. Anthony Blunt recalled this street skirmish as the moment when the Marxist lightning-strike hit Cambridge. ‘We simply knew, all of us, that the revolution was at hand,’ Klugmann recalled in old age. ‘If anyone had suggested that it wouldn’t happen in Britain, for say thirty years, I’d have laughed myself sick.’46
Maclean wrote some fighting verses, entitled ‘Dare Doggerel. Nov 11’, which were published in the Trinity Hall undergraduate magazine The Silver Crescent, extolling undergraduate dissidents who:
Dared to think war-causes out,
Dared to know what they’re shouting about,
Dared to leave a herd they hate,
Dared to question the church and state;
Dared to ask what poppies are for,
Dared to say we’ll fight no more,
Unless it be for a cause we know
And not for the sake of status quo.
Not for the sake of Armstrong Vickers,
Not for the sake of khaki knickers,
But for the sake of the class which bled,
But for the sake of daily bread.
Rugger toughs and boat club guys
Panic-herd with frightened eyes,
Sodden straws on a rising tide,
They know they’ve chosen the losing side.47
In the winter of 1933 Maclean complained in Cambridge Left, of ‘the obscurity and the thin-bloodedness of modern writing’, which was, he thought, serving as ‘the unconscious propaganda of ruling-class culture’ because it was divorced from contemporary reality. By ‘reality’ he meant ‘the economic situation, the unemployed, vulgarity in the cinema, rubbish on the bookstalls, the public schools, snobbery in the suburbs, more battleships, lower wages, the genus undergraduate, and, above all, the rising tide of opinion which is going to sweep away the whole crack-brained criminal mess’.48
The National Unemployed Workers’ Movement, which had support from neither the Labour party nor the Trades Union Congress, organized the Hunger March which headed for a Congress of Action at Bermondsey in February 1934. The Cambridge University Solidarity Committee (chaired by Cornforth) arranged buses to take student sympathizers to Royston, where they marched for some miles in solidarity with the Hunger Marchers. Some undergraduates felt like impostors in a proletarian march and worried if it would be patronizing to buy packets of cigarettes for unemployed men. Their self-consciousness abated as they marched along singing ‘Pie in the Sky’ and ‘Solidarity Forever’ or chanting ‘Down with the Means Test!’ Maclean was glimpsed there by his friend Robert Cecil, striding arm in arm with an unemployed worker and his face suffused with ardour. ‘We believed’, Cecil recalled half a century later, ‘that if we could lose ourselves in dedication to a cause, this would solve our personal problems, to say nothing of the problems of the world around us. Commitment, we thought, like falling in love, would lift our hearts and minds above the complexities and frustrations of day-to-day existence.’49
Given the lurid and probably invented stories that began to circulate in the 1950s about Maclean’s sexuality, it is noteworthy that Cecil recalled: ‘he was handsome in an effeminate way, but was not regarded by his friends as a homosexual’. In July 1934, with his friends Roualeyn Cumming-Bruce and Anthony Blake, Maclean rented a holiday cottage at Saint Jacut de la Mer in Brittany. Cumming-Bruce had ‘a holiday diversion’ with a villager named Francine, while Maclean began ‘a passionate alliance’ with Francine’s sister Marie, who was older than him and married to a member of the Garde Mobile stationed elsewhere. ‘MACLEAN was seriously in love with the married sister,’ said Cumming-Bruce. The young men and women drank cider together, lazed on the beach and in the evenings joined villagers fishing for lobsters and crabs. Maclean and Marie would disappear behind rocks while Cumming-Bruce with Francine found another place where they could make love. This idyll ended when Marie’s irate husband returned to Saint Jacut seeking explanations, and the English boys decided that it was prudent to make a night-time getaway. For some months, recalled Cumming-Bruce, Maclean was pursued by amorous letters from Marie.50
Blunt returned to Cambridge briefly in January 1934 from a year’s sabbatical in Italy and Germany. According to his manuscript memoir, he noticed then that most of his friends had joined the communist party or were allied to it. In June of that year Klugmann graduated with a double first in French and German: in the autumn he returned to Trinity for postgraduate work on Balzac under the supervision of Henry Ashton, the Molière expert. Ashton was also the tutor of John Cairncross, whom he introduced to Klugmann. Cairncross had previously studied at the Sorbonne, and had been appalled by what he had seen on bicycling tours of Austria and Nazi Germany during his vacations. At Trinity Cairncross soon succumbed to Klugmann’s dialectic wooing: he became convinced that communism was the only force that could overpower fascism. In these same months Blunt, who had returned permanently to Trinity in September 1934, was converted to communism by Burgess, whose command of the Marxist dialectic of history impressed him, and by Klugmann’s long night-time exegesis.
Another new arrival at Trinity in October 1934 was to have a major impact on Blunt’s ultimate destiny. Michael Straight was a rich young American marxisant who studied economics under Dobb. Soon he was held by Klugmann and Cornford in nightly dialectical discussions. Their foxy and remorseless logic-chopping caught him for the Trinity cell. ‘I’m filled with a violent, uncontrollable love for them; an extraordinary sense of comradeship,’ he told his mother of Dobb, Klugmann and Cornford in 1935. He found in party activism, to use a line from Cornford’s poem about Kirov, his only constant certainty. In his college rooms he hosted late-night doctrinal discussions which ended with the participants standing in a circle and singing ‘The Internationale’ with booming confidence. The noise, Straight liked to say, hastened the death of the ailing Trinity Fellow A. E. Housman, but in truth Housman was already in a nursing-home. Even in disobliging details, members of the Cambridge cell liked to misdirect.51
John Maynard Keynes epitomized the liberalism, rationality, altruism and progressive faith of Cambridge in the 1930s. He visited Leninist and Stalinist Russia in company with his wife, who had been born in St Petersburg and many of whose family remained stuck there: his detestation of Bolshevist collectivization was inveterate; he upheld instead the creativity of competitive individual initiative. Always Keynes distinguished between the Comintern’s Bolshevization and native communist thinkers. ‘There is no one in politics today worth sixpence outside the ranks of liberals except the post-war generation of intellectual Communists, under thirty five,’ he told New Statesman readers in 1939. ‘In their feelings and instincts they are the nearest things we now have to the typical nervous nonconformist English gentleman who went to the Crusades, made the Reformation, fought the Great Rebellion, won us our civil and religious liberties and humanised the working classes.’ Perhaps it was so.52