‘Sizing the family up’
When Monica left South Africa with her mother, she was not yet certain of a place at a British university. It was unusual at the time for a South African to go straight into an Oxford or Cambridge undergraduate course, and though creditable, Monica’s second-class matriculation was not outstanding. But she was armed with determination, a partly British background and what might today be called social capital. Having embarked for England on the Windsor Castle at East London, mother and daughter stopped off at Port Elizabeth where they visited Collegiate. Miss Anderson pressed her former pupil to enrol at Westfield College, University of London, the least prestigious of the institutions Monica had selected, which she rejected when it offered her a place. She recalled later that ‘Pan’ had said she would never get into Girton: ‘When you are told a job is hopeless, it jolly well puts your back up and makes you want to tackle it straight away.’ In first class on the ship were novelist John Galsworthy and his wife; in second class, Monica and Jessie participated in the organised amusements but fended off the ‘party of professional music hall people’ at their table, whose aim seemed to be to ‘keep the whole saloon laughing, and to monopolise the conversation’. Monica and Jessie assumed ‘a “we are not amused” expression’. At dances, Monica took to the floor once or twice with the young woman sharing their cabin: she was not, wrote Jessie to David, a girl whom ‘young men make up to readily!’1
While staying with MacGregor and Hunter relatives, Monica spent much of April in interviews – a further entry requirement – at London, Oxford and Cambridge. In preparation, she anxiously considered ‘Responsions, Little Go’ and similar arcane trials. St Hugh’s, Oxford, offered her a place, subject to passing Responsions; she turned down Westfield’s offer, though the college continued to press her to accept. The Girton interview was preceded by a ‘very cordial’ meeting with Miss Clover, the college secretary, at her London club. No further examinations would be necessary, and though she could not promise Monica a place, ‘to a mother’s prejudiced eye’, wrote Jessie, it seemed she ‘was really keen on getting the girl from the wild and woolly South’.2
Because ‘one did not want to seem too plutocratic!’ Monica and Jessie went by bus rather than taxi to the Girton interview. They had lunch at the high table, sitting opposite Gwladys Jones, director of studies in history. They talked apparently at random, though Monica ‘felt all the time … that all there were sizing the family up!’ Miss Jones, who showed her around the college, seemed ‘thoroughly convinced of [Monica’s] ignorance’, and that she was ‘rather young’. Other girls had fared better in the examination, and there were four applicants for every vacancy. But Jessie was right: Miss Major, Mistress of Girton, and Miss Clover had ‘taken rather a fancy to our dear girl – and want[ed] to have her’. Monica sent a telegram to David with the single word ‘Girton’, and later wrote: ‘It’s a splendid egg not to have another exam.’ As her school magazine noted, she was ‘the first Collegiate girl to enter Cambridge without having already got a degree’.3
Monica and Jessie returned to relatives in Edinburgh and Glasgow, and Monica spent much of the time reading up on unfamiliar British history, fretting as to whether she needed coaching. Later, she would paint this period in sombre tones: ‘Dull summer. Why live? What’s worth while. Lonely.’ Jessie felt that Monica was overworked, reading most of the day and again in the evening, though this may have been an escape from boredom. She seems not to have received any formal coaching, but Gwladys Jones did send her a reading list. Monica engaged actively with non-South African history in ways apparent throughout her later life, already drawing parallels between South Africa and Britain. She became interested in the Industrial Revolution, ‘and the similarity between the agricultural conditions in England about 1750, and the conditions in the Native Territories now. If people would only wake up they would see that native S.A. is about to go through her industrial revolution, and if they will only learn from History, they can avoid all the horrors of 19th century factories, and cramming people together in towns.’4
Apart from attending a reception where she met the brothers John and Fred Moir, founders of the African Lakes Company, a significant presence in the part of Tanganyika where she and her husband Godfrey subsequently worked, Monica did not attend the Free Church annual assembly. Perhaps to mollify her father, she claimed to be ‘breathing in the atmosphere’. She went on picnics to the Lammermuirs and elsewhere, rummaged in Edinburgh’s second-hand bookshops, visited art galleries, attended a meeting of the League of Nations Society Union, and went for a one-week tramp in the Borders. David joined the family in August, and letters dry up until her parents’ return to South Africa.5
‘Cambridge has really wound its fingers around me’
Arriving at Cambridge station in early October 1927 amid the ‘seething mass’ of students, Monica threw herself into college activities. She formed friendships that were to be important to her throughout her life. She instantly related to Elizabeth Wilson (later Graham), but initially found fellow history student Bice Crichton-Miller condescending. She was ‘a little scared of her’, she admitted, but wrote to Jessie three months later that ‘she’s our sort’. Monica and Elizabeth ‘brewed cocoa in the approved fashion’, and investigated the League of Nations Union, the Debating Club and the English Society. Shy though Monica was, though not too shy to consider joining the drama club, she defended the League of Nations from the floor at a debate just weeks after her arrival at Cambridge. She met with Miss Jones and was given an essay to write. She signed up for hockey practice, and played regularly. She was delighted with her room in the main Girton building. She ordered a bicycle, the general mode of transport for Cambridge undergraduates. She went to the Student Christian Movement (SCM) ‘Freshers’ squash’ and intended joining the Presbyterian Union. She saw Shaw’s Pygmalion, which she read beforehand, ‘so I knew it was quite all right’, unlike some of the ‘grubby things’ at the Festival Theatre she later criticised. She even admitted to being a Girl Guide, though limiting her involvement to the ‘good deed’ of playing the organ in the college chapel for a week. She remained faithful to the Scottish Sabbath. One Saturday evening she read Trevelyan’s essay, ‘Clio: a Muse’, before midnight, as ‘I refuse to work on Sundays’. Monica happily punted on Sundays, however.6
In Cambridge, despite her Scottish background, and the assumption by many English-speaking South Africans of the time that ‘home’ meant Britain, or specifically England, Monica identified with South Africa. As she wrote from Edinburgh in December, ‘I’m still South African, in spite of the joys of Cambridge, and I resent terribly spending Christmas in a town … I detest crowds.’ A year later, she said she was pleased her parents were going to stay in South Africa. Yet, though some English traits mystified her, such as it being bad form to show enthusiasm, Monica came to love England. Nevertheless, ‘you can’t help belonging to S. Africa when you have been born there’. Sarah Gertrude Millin’s The South Africans resonated with Monica – ‘everything she said … seemed to strike an answer inside me’ – though subsequently Monica emphatically rejected Millin’s essentialist attitude to race. At this stage, Monica’s patriotism was that of a liberal white South African, regarding the ‘native problem’ as crucial, but not yet seeing people of all races as full fellow citizens. Yet, as a young South African unusually familiar with black society, Monica was far from typical: stranded with a heavy case with a broken handle ‘I set it on my head and marched home in great style … I had not lost the art, in spite of being civilised for nearly six months now.’ More than in Cambridge, where she was constantly busy, in Edinburgh she was sometimes homesick, though wryly so. She would have to give up using red ink, she wrote, as it ‘smells of the cliff path on a hot day after rain, and the thought … is upsetting’. Homesickness, she wrote to Jessie, was part of caring for ‘people and places so ferociously, as we do’. David was lucky not still to be in Scotland, ‘this cold and icy country’. Gardening linked her to South Africa. Unabashed by her love of colour she decorated her room with boughs of glowing rosehips and haws from the Cambridgeshire hedgerows, remembering also to send her father seeds of beech, horse-chestnut and rowan, which she packed carefully in damp charcoal.7
‘Cambridge,’ said Monica, using an unusually sensual image, ‘is the one place out of S.A. which has really wound its fingers around me.’ Returning from Christmas in Edinburgh, she said she loathed the ‘rows of grey uniform houses, and smug terraces’, though conceding, ‘I’m a horrid snob I know.’ Monica loved to be able to say nonchalantly that she was at Girton, where ‘it’s so thrilling to feel you belong’. Cambridge was ‘a dream city … I think it’s the beauty of it that clutches one.’ She relished the ‘Victorian flavour’ of Girton: ‘One can sort of feel the people who went before, still here.’8
From the start, Monica had a clear vision of what a university education should entail. The short, intense Cambridge terms were packed with impressions and activities, and though diligent, she was contemptuous of narrow specialism. As she said of a lecture by author and critic Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, it ‘could not count as “work”, not being in my shop, but it certainly was “education”’. The Cambridge system suited her, with the multitude of student societies and the emphasis, embodied in wide-ranging extracurricular weekly coachings, on producing well-rounded graduates. For political science she ‘read all the big people like Dante’ even if secondary sources might be more useful for examinations. She attended a lecture on medieval architecture by George Coulton, of no relevance to the tripos, ‘but first class for “general intelligence” … There are so many people at college who are simply corking at their own “shop” but utterly lacking in general intelligence’, a quality that, for her, was a priority.9
Monica paid a price for her eclecticism, as her poor performance in the ‘Mays’ examinations demonstrated, but in a wider sense it was precisely her breadth of interest that helped make her the anthropologist she eventually became. Anthropology lay in the future, however: in early 1928 Monica considered becoming a teacher, probably staying at Girton for a fourth year to do a teaching diploma. She maintained this interest in education, though her vision of what it might involve altered as her ambitions rose from school-teaching to the possibility of working ‘for a women’s college at Fort Hare, that might one day be like Girton’.10
Clearly appreciative of the opportunities open to her, Monica attended, for example, a lecture by poet John Drinkwater and struggled through another in French by Paul Valéry; she also heard the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov and attended a debate on peace and imperialism involving fascists and supporters of the League of Nations, followed by coffee with Gwladys Jones: ‘People who have lived here always and who have often had the chance of seeing great men, don’t appreciate the opportunities here, nearly so much!’ She was not dazzled by eminence, though. George Trevelyan’s inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of History disappointed her, but she continued to admire Gwladys Jones ‘immensely’, describing her as ‘a very purposeful person’. For one thing, Miss Jones tolerated her student’s many spelling errors, which was ‘a great comfort’ even though Monica feared her work might be regarded as ‘careless’. She enjoyed medieval history, but disliked the coachings of medievalist Helen Cam, who failed to understand Monica’s spelling difficulties and told her to be ‘more careful’. Though Helen Cam was ‘Labour, and strong S.C.M. and all she ought to be and has been exceedingly nice to me’, Monica disliked her: ‘I don’t like her voice, and she laughs.’ While the ‘dry and dusty legal side’ of English constitutional history depressed Monica at the time, later on she said she had greatly enjoyed it. Others might come to Cambridge ‘to loaf or row, or talk in the Union’, but she intended to give a good account of herself, ‘and I don’t want to let down Miss Jones’. Even so, while claiming to work seven hours a day, Monica enjoyed the Christmas holiday period: so many ‘frightfully useful things to do, outside actual work’. During this time she did, however, read older historical works, including parts of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which students were instructed to read ‘for our style if for nothing else’.11
Faced with examinations in May, she told her father she was ‘slogging’: ‘Up till now I have been getting educated. Slogging is not educative, but I don’t want to plough “Mays.”’ She passed, but was ashamed of her ‘beastly third’. However, Miss Jones and Miss Cam considered her work ‘very satisfactory indeed’. A year later, preparing during the 1929 Easter vacation for the first part of the historical tripos, a more important examination than ‘Mays’, she and Elizabeth stayed at Hunstanton, a resort on The Wash. The Mistress ‘was great on E. coast air!’ It was a dismal place with trippers, and miles of mud at low tide. The digs were serviceable, but hideous: ‘I had never realised how unpleasant it is to live in congealed uglyness [sic] … real uglyness is, I think, about the most depressing thing in the world.’12
Monica continued to maintain that it was a waste ‘to grind over books all day, and miss the Societies and Clubs’. Despite indifferent examination results, she justified her approach through a kind of religious rationality. This involved independent thinking, which explains her enthusiasm for George Bernard Shaw: ‘really it’s a part of one’s education to see G.B.S.!’ He was a ‘great teacher’, even though she often strongly disagreed with him. Monica cited Archbishop Temple’s assertion that it was essential to be honest with oneself, even to the point of losing one’s faith, for, as seventeenth-century Anglican priest John Cosin declared: ‘Faith is the other side of knowledge.’ She was impressed by an address to the SCM by Bice Crichton-Miller’s father on the topic of religion and progress, demonstrating ‘how man’s religion had evolved from Fetisism [sic] through the Mythological stage to Christianity’. These persistent motifs in Monica’s intellectual and spiritual life may explain her inclination towards anthropology.13
Though history as taught at Cambridge was somewhat limited, not only geographically but also thematically, Monica found her studies useful in exploring other fields. She attended ‘an Anthropological lecture’ by Miles Burkitt, just back from South Africa, who gave an account of his investigations of ‘bushmen drawings and flints and things’. She exclaims, ‘I was nearly out of my seat, when he came to relate how he had made wonderful finds at Middledrift, and had picked choice specimens out of the sloot in front of the hotel! There were other men there who had been studying Anthropology in S. Africa and you positively breathed an atmosphere of hominess. It was refreshing.’ Anthropology had already gripped Monica’s imagination, as would archaeology.14
History opened numerous intellectual doors, but brought with it knowing references to an accepted canon, even in playful undergraduate entertainments. Monica and other Girton first-year history students were invited to coffee and historical charades by senior students. Scenes like Macbeth’s murder of Duncan, Cincinnatus abandoning his plough, and the sacred geese saving Rome were enacted. Miss Jones and Miss Cam acted a scene ‘and entered into the spirit of the thing perfectly and splendidly’. In a ‘fresher’s rag’ soon after, Monica played Edward III at the siege of Calais. Her friend Elizabeth said Monica suited the part because ‘she would be good at looking scornful – apparently the main business of Edward’. Yet Girton encompassed more than mere cosiness and arch allusions, and could bring different worlds into unexpected focus: Monica talked to one of the ‘History Scholarship people’ who told her she wanted to go to South Africa as a missionary. ‘I think she’s awfully clever, but unfortunately not my idea of an ideal missionary – frightfully morbid, and an appaling [sic] cockney accent. That sounds snobbish, but you know what I am getting at. She says she had a vision of all the exam papers before hand which also sounds rather unpromising.’15
Though Monica perceived herself as a liberal, questions of race soon presented themselves in new ways, disturbing her preconceptions and paternalistic views about coloured people in Britain. Monica said she was perceived as ‘rabid pro native!’, yet, on visiting Munira Sadek, an Egyptian Coptic student she had met at a Labour meeting, she confessed to thinking it odd to be ‘fraternising with coloured people here when I so disapprove of them coming over at all’. Munira and her Egyptian nationalism were, however, interesting, ‘and you must be decent to them if they do come’. Munira, ‘much more like an English girl than any Bantu I have met’, soon became a good friend: ‘the only non-European whom I ever forget is not European’. Monica began to understand Munira’s nationalism, but found it difficult to come to terms with the nationalist sensitivities of many Indian students. She was more attuned to Tagore’s views. ‘He calls Nationalism “Organised Selfishness”,’ she said, declaring, ‘I rather agree with him.’ Racism was a ‘dragon’ which might be slain by ‘courage and faith’, but though the problem seemed to melt away in the context of the 1929 SCM Liverpool conference, Monica acknowledged that it was ‘much more complicated at home’. Her friends were amused and mystified when Monica insisted that the reference to her as a ‘native’ of South Africa in an official letter be changed. She met Roseberry Bokwe, son of Rev. John Knox Bokwe and brother of her friend Frieda, who was studying medicine at Edinburgh, and thought he had ‘awfully good manners – not in the least gauche or forward – a very creditable product of Lovedale and FH’. Roseberry spoke well at the Liverpool SCM meeting, and in Monica’s opinion ‘he was getting through remarkably quickly for a Bantu’.16
Monica was dubious about the fortnightly ‘international teas’ intended to bring together students from the colonies and Britain. Women in particular, she felt, might find the interactions difficult without giving offence on a racial or gender basis. Though people found her reservations ‘silly and unnecessary’ she did not feel justified in encouraging young women ‘who don’t understand conditions abroad’ to attend. She noted the difficulties two women had experienced in extricating themselves from a theatre invitation by an insistent Indian student. She felt herself in a dilemma, ‘for holding the opinions I do about race equality, I feel awfully bad about speaking against the teas, yet I can’t honestly think they are good’. It is possible that her South African background, while inevitably making her aware of race, also gave her a more subtle understanding of its implications than that of her British friends. She was impressed by an Anglican service she attended in November 1928, led by Rev. Charles Freer Andrews, a supporter of Indian independence and intimate friend of Gandhi, who was familiar not only with India but also with South Africa. Andrews referred extensively to the colour bar in South Africa, particularly as practised in the church, which led Monica to say: ‘It did make one ashamed for one’s country.’ By contemporary South African standards Monica was both thoughtful and tolerant on the matter of race; intellectually and personally, however, she struggled with the issue, and it would be facile to ascribe her subsequent racial attitudes to her early experiences at Lovedale. The connection with those early experiences was more indirect than it might seem. In May 1928, when her friend Alix Berwick was elected president of the Cambridge International Teas organisation, Monica wrote that this was a preferable appointment to the South African Ida Russell: though a less competent organiser than Ida, Alix was ‘never self conscious with coloured men, as we South Africans inevitably are’. Monica candidly declared this ‘self-consciousness’ to be the ‘chief difficulty’ faced by South Africans. While Cambridge nudged her towards increasing liberalism, it was far from easy shrugging off the South African racial incubus.17
‘Disagreeing with a person should be no reason for not knowing them’
Monica wanted to learn more about British politics, but feared that involvement in political clubs would be too time-consuming. Nevertheless, she was persuaded to attend meetings of the Labour Study Circle on race and internationalism, where she committed herself to speaking about contemporary issues in South Africa, including ‘Native Movements – Nationalistic etc.’, as part of a series on the colonies. Her presentation to the Study Circle was an ordeal. She stammered and hesitated, but ‘had lots to say, and people asked heaps of questions’ and discussions continued until late. She agreed to do a paper on administration in African colonies, to be discussed over two weeks during the following term.18
Monica met Eddie Roux at the Labour Study Circle in her first year. He was a communist, she told her father, adding immediately that her Girton friends ‘quite understand I am by no means a socialist’. Roux was a South African botanist, doing research at Cambridge from 1926 to 1929. He lent her Lord Olivier’s The Anatomy of African Misery, which she found ‘extraordinarily good’ and the discussion of South African conditions ‘horribly true’, though she regarded a paper by Roux on West Africa as ‘muddled’. She hoped her father did not think her ‘an awful goat doing all of this’, but ‘having such strong opinions on the native question [herself] it seemed rather stupid to chuck away the chance of persuading others’. Monica gravitated towards the moderate left, but she was open-minded. She undertook to attend a Conservative meeting the following month and to lead a discussion on South African politics. In preparation, she asked her father for information concerning acts restricting African liberties, which were currently being passed. Writing to Jessie, she said ‘our views would more nearly approximate’ those of Labour. Meanwhile, Gwladys Jones encouraged her protégée to specialise in something like ‘“race”, outside history proper’ for the general essays that were a feature of Cambridge’s undergraduate teaching. Monica encountered the serious young men of the Labour Study Circle who thought everything could be reduced to economics: one of them looked at her as though she was ‘mad’ when she maintained that ‘sheer love of adventure’ was nearly as responsible for imperial expansion as economics. Still, she found the meetings ‘fun’ and continued to voice her opinions as they looked on ‘in amused toleration’, which clearly cut both ways. She appreciated the attitudes of the men she met: ‘they talk about sensible things and don’t regard girls as brainless jellies, merely to frivol with’. She mocked student political meetings even while she participated in them, believing that the attempts of inexperienced students to draw up government policies were ‘presumptuous bosh’.19
Especially in her first year, Eddie Roux and Irene (‘Bis’) Biss were Monica’s main link to organised politics. Elizabeth said that Monica was ‘only labour because of Bis’. With Roux Monica argued constantly, but they became good friends. He was ‘much the nicest’ of the left-wing activists, so that Monica confessed: ‘I’m afraid I danced rather a lot with Roux [at a Labour Study Circle social]. I like him awfully in spite of appalingly [sic] casual manners and a Dutch accent to match.’ She found his ‘truly Rouxish’ eccentricities endearing, for example when he gave visitors milk instead of tea because of the latter’s supposedly harmful effects. She and Roux went to a film about southern Africa and, delighted to see Lovedale and other South African scenes, ‘behaved very badly commenting and talking all the way through … it was so nice going w. someone with whom you could talk undiluted S. Africa’. Monica was introduced to the ideas of the communist left through Roux: together with Sidney and Rebecca Bunting, he was one of three South African delegates to the Comintern’s Sixth Congress in July–August 1928. Despite generally disagreeing with Roux, she nonetheless pulled her mother up sharply when she sent her some anti-communist South African press cuttings. Though Monica held no brief for communism, she rose to their defence: ‘I do maintain most strenuously that it is a calumny to represent them as setting up black against white. The whole idea is to have no racial distinctions but a republic with native and European on equal terms’. Even more tartly, Monica regretted the fact that her mother did not ‘think Roux sounds nice’, and asserted: ‘[he] really is very nice apart from his opinions, and disagreeing with a person should be no reason for not knowing them’. She reassured her mother, however: ‘Don’t imagine I’m going “Bolshy”’. Monica and Bis sometimes critiqued Roux’s articles ‘before they went to be printed in horrid little communist rags’. Roux, some five years older than Monica, often adopted a superior tone. He invited her to attend the meeting of the Heretics at which Jack Driberg was to speak. She ought to join, he said: ‘It would help your mental and moral development considerably.’ He pulled her up on precipitate judgements, such as her reference to historian W.M. Macmillan as ‘partizan’ [sic]. ‘Why the hell shouldn’t Mac be partizan?’ he countered. Though Roux enjoyed pointing out perceived illogicalities in Monica’s Christian beliefs, for example in an article in the South African Outlook (edited by Monica’s father) which called for ‘scientifically trained Christian Native medical practitioners’, his respect for Monica’s opinions is evident, as when he sent her the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) manifesto he had drafted for the 1929 general election.20
On his return to South Africa, Roux faced both professional and political ordeals: he was blocked from university posts, and though he left the CPSA in 1936 in the wake of a political purge, he remained an independent figure on the left. He continued to write to Monica, sparring with her in his confident and critical style: ‘you hold up your hands in horror at politics and the politicians and then fly from this bad world to the bosom of Jesus’. He addressed her as ‘Dear Hunter’, whether with ironic formality, or respectfully as equals in the middle-class manner of the time. Though they argued fiercely, there was genuine affection. Indeed at this stage he seems to have held her attention as much as Godfrey Wilson did. Roux was above all honest, in Monica’s opinion, ‘so you know where you are when you are talking to him’. He played an important role in ensuring that she was never bewildered by or afraid of communism. The friendship endured, with Roux, his communist days long past, becoming professor of botany at the University of the Witwatersrand; always energetic and opinionated, he often visited his old friend at Hogsback.21
Monica’s engagement with social and political issues tended to be primarily through organisations, often Christian, which were devoted to peace and welfare. She was not political in the party sense, and preferred bodies such as the International Student Service, which responded to social distress in the United Kingdom and Europe. Monica noted that Cato Smuts, one of General Smuts’s daughters, was a key Cambridge organiser. At the beginning of Monica’s second year she regretfully withdrew from Labour Club activities and turned down a seat on a women’s union committee, though she continued with the SCM and remained involved with the League of Nations Union into her busy third year.22
Monica also became involved in various Cambridge religious societies, and meekly answered questions from her father about her religious practice and whether she smoked. She responded that though most people smoked, she did not, and had no intention of doing so. Also, she continued to read the Bible every night, and regularly used the Daily Light he had given her, adding that, although she realised the importance of ‘method’, she preferred to study what interested her at the moment rather than follow a predetermined plan. In the Labour Study Circle, most ‘did not seem to consider Christianity a practical possibility’, yet she argued back strongly. Because she wanted to hear honest criticisms of missionary activity, Monica did not reveal her background, which nevertheless gave her access to church and mission networks such as an SCM missionary breakfast where she heard the missions secretary, Margaret Wrong, speak. Monica met her again later at Girton where they reminisced about Miss Wrong’s visit to Lovedale, and Monica was invited to stay over with her in London early the following year.23
Monica’s correspondence clearly describes her Cambridge experience, with her letters to her mother being especially candid, describing not only her day-to-day life but also the intellectual issues she encountered. She was less forthcoming about matters that might distress her parents, for example a taxi accident she was involved in upon her return to Girton on 13 January 1928. She had five stitches to her face, but Monica made light of this. The ‘poor little girl far from home stunt still works admirably’, she wrote, reassuring her parents that the stitches were not expected to leave a mark. By April she still had a prominent scar, and later yet was still losing large amounts of hair, ascribed to the after-effects of ‘that silly old smash a year ago’. Sadly for one who so enjoyed natural scents, the accident also had a permanent effect on her sense of smell. About to return home some five months after the accident, Monica warned her mother: ‘I still look a trifle ferocious with a scar on my cheek.’ Three years later, in 1932, she wrote that she was still ‘frightened of cars’ after being ‘smashed up in Cambridge’. Decades later, in 1960, she claimed that she had ‘survived’ the incident by ‘the feeling of being lifted up, of assurance, and peace which came … through my mother’s prayers’.24
By the end of 1927, Monica had investigated becoming, as she called it, an ‘au père’ in France, applied for a League of Nations Union grant to attend sessions of the League in Geneva the following September, planned a fortnight on an Anglican social service campaign among Cambridgeshire fruit pickers, and booked to attend a conference on the International Teas movement. ‘I hope you don’t object,’ she wrote to her parents, assuring them that ‘quite the right people from College’ would be accompanying her. She nevertheless defied parental disapproval of a planned walking tour in the Lake District with two South African women friends in mid-April, admitting afterwards, however, that she found the ascent of Helvellyn ‘rather more than I had bargained for’.25
‘I laughed inside myself at times’
At this stage, Monica often referred to herself as a snob. Though partly self-deprecating, she was alert to class and insistent on her place in the social hierarchy while at the same time, in the spirit of noblesse oblige, she was anxious not to mortify those who were less educated or less privileged than herself. In London she stayed with her college friend Kathleen Earl’s lower-middle-class family and described its amicable chaos and sometimes prickly pride to her mother: ‘I laughed inside myself at times, but did not, I trust show any surprise, or concern, at the general clutter.’ Kathleen’s mother was a social climber who ‘smoked in the street (which I can not stand) and laughed like ——— [sic] but with it all she was awfully decent, and really kind … I was awfully glad that I had gone. It is fascinating studying different types of people and I certainly found some new ones there.’ On the other hand, an encounter with a ‘rather ladhie dah-ish’ Hertfordshire girl annoyed Monica, and she wished she had been wearing her Girton blazer to establish her credentials; in the next sentence she admits that she was always scared ‘of appearing snobbish’. After meeting Bice Crichton-Miller’s family, who were acquaintances of her father, Monica said: ‘It is jolly to be greeted cordially all over G.B. because people “knew your people”.’26
Though the convention at Girton and Newnham was to look shabby and earnest, Monica enjoyed good clothes as letters to her mother attest, for example the reference to ‘seriously feminine and school girlish burble’ while choosing an evening frock with friends. She desired ‘good things’, like the half-dozen silver teaspoons she bought at Brook and Son, the leading Scottish silversmiths of the time. When her parents sent £10 as a twenty-first birthday gift, she spent £8 on a string of pearls, expressing disgust for ‘imitations’. Invited out in London in June 1928 she again proclaimed herself a ‘hopeless snob’, saying she ‘simply adore[d] dashing around in a taxi in evening dress, and eating chocolates’. When she ‘queued in a plebian [sic] fashion’ for the sixpenny gallery to see a performance of The Constant Nymph, she felt her ‘allegiance to the Labour Party waver at the effort’, admitting that she felt ‘still rather early Victorian’. Her amusement at the expense of the policeman who took evidence after her taxi accident was class-inflected: she and Elizabeth had a ‘priceless time’ with him. He took, she said, nearly an hour to write the statement in his own words, and ‘insisted on talking of “Miss ’unters testimony” and the “’ospital”’. Monica subjected all classes to the same scrutiny, however. At a performance of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, she noted the ostentatiously highbrow audience reading the Times Literary Supplement and ‘rabid socialist journals’ between acts; from there she went on to listen to the Irish poet James Stephens read his verse. The audience was equally highbrow, but generally less smart-looking: ‘there were a lot of scruffy girls – obviously Irish, and everyone knew everyone else’.27
Monica was contemptuous of what she perceived as the nouveau riche: she was ‘good at looking scornful’, as Elizabeth once commented. She disdained the people lunching in Swan and Edgar’s department store. It ‘was enough to make anyone dislike wealth – heaps of coarse looking people overdressed and overeating, and all looking blasé and miserable. One thing I refuse to acquire and that is the fashionable blasé manner.’ She disliked vulgarity and display, but valued quality: ‘it is necessary to be decently dressed to keep up ones self respect and avoid an “inferiority complex”! Don’t laugh, it’s jolly true.’ She was confident in her judgements, defiantly admitting to a liking for all the ‘wrong’ pictures of her friend Philip Rowntree, scion of one of England’s elite intellectual families, ‘but I’m blowed if I am going to rave over things I don’t like, and give up my love of barbaric colour’. She resented pretentiousness, but respected intellectual prowess, a distinction nicely displayed in the shift in attitude to Bice Crichton-Miller and her family. Though shy and subject to giggling fits – ‘people just laugh if I ever say that I am shy, but it sort of eats you up sometimes and makes you brusque and horrid feeling’ – Monica was fluent and forceful in conversation and debate, intrepid in travel and social interaction, and increasingly aware that ‘you learn a lot from talking to people’. ‘I adore watching people,’ she wrote. The company of three Danish women she met in France, solicitous about her solo travels in Europe and critical of her inclination to study ‘rather than listen to their burble’, disgusted her: ‘I can’t bear being pitied.’ She was delighted to be in a society where it was possible to be friends with different sorts of men, and a greater contrast than that between Phil Rowntree and Eddie Roux ‘could hardly be imagined’. There was an absence of sexual pressure too, and Monica was grateful that ‘you can be such friends together without people getting silly’.28
Around ‘special friends’ Monica and Elizabeth, a ‘family’ grew. Though Monica was critical of what she saw as this ‘rather poisonous’ Girton phenomenon, which tended to prevent members from getting to know anyone outside of it, she nevertheless found it ‘useful and comforting’; as she gained confidence and experience, she came to enjoy its easy familiarities, while also cultivating a much wider circle. Particularly important members of Monica and Elizabeth’s ‘family’ were Alix Berwick and Munira Sadek, the latter being ‘a most desirable person to have in the family – awfully clever and attractive’. The group referred to each other by the names of animal characters in A.A. Milne’s popular Christopher Robin series which appeared at about this time. Monica was ‘Rabbit’, Elizabeth ‘Pooh’ and Alix ‘Beetle’ (Alexander Beetle, ‘Rabbit’s last and smallest friend-and-relation’). ‘Eeyore’ was later to appear in Monica’s life with altogether more troubling connotations.29
Not all of Monica’s close friends were part of ‘the family’. Her relationship with Bice Crichton-Miller seems to have been less chummy and more cerebral. Monica’s close friend Irene Biss (later Spry) went on to become an eminent historian and social scientist in Canada. Monica felt at home when she visited the Biss family, who had ‘fruit salad for Sunday Pudding, and mats instead of carpets’, and was distressed when Bis took up a scholarship in Philadelphia: ‘it’s beastly when all your friends are at the ends of the earth’.30
Monica was a member of Odtaa (One damn thing after another), a society comprising Girton’s intellectual and social elite of which, in her first year, she stood in awe. Monica was perhaps too religious, conventionally moral, insufficiently bohemian, possibly too foreign, either to gain or wish to gain full acceptance by this set. Odtaa was ‘high-brow of the high-brow … and I hardly know them’, she wrote of the group that included ‘Kitty Klugman, a Jewess, reading Moral Sciences, and about the most brilliant person in College’. Another, not mentioned by Monica, was Queenie Roth, soon to marry renowned critic F.R. Leavis, and a major literary critic in her own right. In Monica’s first year, she was ‘flabagasted’ to be invited to a meeting of what she said was ‘popularly supposed to consist of the fifteen or twenty best brains in Girton’. The left-wing academic and commentator Delisle Burns was to talk on colonial policy, and Monica was seen as an obvious participant. Fortified by the presence of her friends Bis and Munira, the latter the only other first-year invited, Monica asked many questions, though she quailed at arguing with Burns, who was ‘rather down on missionaries’.31
Kitty Klugman and Margaret Thomas were at the Geneva League of Nations conference that Monica attended in September 1928. They all went swimming together and talked at length, and it was there that Klugman and Thomas invited Monica to become a member of Odtaa, which she found ‘very flattering’. One of the first meetings Monica attended as a member was the address on ‘Women in Fiction’ by Virginia Woolf, an expanded version of which was published the following year as A Room of One’s Own. Monica referred to ‘Mrs. Woof’, a misspelling, not a jibe, for she was unaware at the time that Woolf was ‘one of the leading lady novelists of the age’. If Monica’s recollection of the audience’s reaction is accurate, it indicates a surprisingly conventional approach on the part of the female undergraduates. Monica acknowledged that Virginia’s generation had fought for the rights of women, and praised her thesis that women should have the space and income to exercise their creativity. Nevertheless, Woolf, in her ‘long earrings … and flowey [sic] dresses … amused us as an antiquated type – the suffragette’. She failed to see, Monica said, the ‘point that the best of a woman’s creative art does, and ought to go into making her home and her children. The sort of impression she gave was that a career was the main thing and a home only a side show.’ In later years Monica continued to emphasise the importance of women’s child-rearing and home-making roles; as a young mother, she said that her career was forced on her rather than having been freely chosen. Fifty years on, Monica reflected on Virginia Woolf’s presentation, stating that she had not cared for it at the time: ‘I thought her fearfully old fashioned and precious, then.’32
In her second year at Girton, Monica received ‘a most thrilling … invitation’ from Kitty Klugman, Margaret Thomas and Kathleen Raine to make up a fourth woman in a skiing party of eight in Switzerland. Kathleen Raine, she said, ‘is more or less regarded as the beauty of Girton, and though very charming, is somewhat unapproachable’. However, the dates clashed with the forthcoming SCM conference in Liverpool on ‘The Purpose of God in the Life of the World’, which she had committed herself to attending, thereby providing a convenient excuse, perhaps, for not going on what she may have perceived as a forbidding, if ‘thrilling’, enterprise. The conference was followed by a stay in Cleveleys, Lancashire, with Alix Berwick, whose clergyman father was head of a preparatory school, and another in Didsbury, Manchester, with her uncle George MacGregor and his family. In an institution as small as Girton, with fewer than 200 students, there could hardly have been firm divisions among the brightest young women, of whom Monica was certainly one. But in the end she was, socially at least, more comfortable with A.A. Milne nicknames, the SCM and welcoming relatives than going on skiing holidays with Girton’s most gifted and their men friends. The Odtaa coterie tends to fade from Monica’s correspondence, though in January 1929 she and Munira gave a ‘jug’ for ‘Klugmann and Thomas and Reine [sic]’, roasting chestnuts and drinking coffee. Soon afterwards she had tea with Kitty Klugman, ‘my high-brow acquaintance’, and the two women discussed Virginia Woolf, who strangely discomfited Monica. Rather oddly for a voracious reader, Monica told her mother, ‘needless to say I have not read anything of hers’, though soon afterwards she wrote to say that she had now read A Room of One’s Own.33
‘Life’s such an adventure at the moment’
For Monica, the 1928 summer vacation was eventful, even momentous. It began with a fortnight in June at a camp at Wisbech for fruit pickers, ‘the lowest type from the East End’, looking after their babies and toddlers and being addressed as ‘nurse’. The pickers were cheerful and resilient and she liked them very much, notwithstanding the lice in the children’s hair and the need to boil clothes.34
By July, Monica was in France. She organised a two-month stay through her MacGregor relatives. She stayed not as an au pair but rather as one of a number of paying guests from various parts of Europe improving their French. She was to meet her hostess Mme G. Casalis in Paris, and then travel with her to Chambon sur Lignon, in Haute Loire, a centre of French Protestantism. Though Mme Casalis herself had not been a missionary, she had married into a family of Basutoland missionaries from France who were well known to the Hunters. Monica described her as an impressive figure: ‘tall and dignified and capable and wears black, with a trailing widow’s veil, but her skirts are short’. Mme Casalis appreciated Monica, telling her that she ‘would get somewhere in the world’, and this was because ‘I did what I said I was going to do, and jolly well stuck to it!’ Monica’s French improved in Chambon, so that she was able, for example, to read the ‘most racy’ reminiscences of the nineteenth-century Basutoland missionary Eugène Casalis, grandfather of Mme Casalis’s late husband. But she was a hesitant speaker, and, in a phrase that she would later use frequently, Monica lamented: ‘I am such a rabbit at languages’. To her father, Monica observed that ‘France lives in her history – plasters Paris with it, talks about it, and sings about it.’ She had thought England militaristic, but France was far worse: ‘it’s rather depressing when you feel as I do about disarmament’. She probed French understanding of the nationality – ‘(I meant race)’ – of the many Africans she saw in Paris, often in military uniform, but was told simply that they were French, which failed to satisfy her.35
Mme Casalis was an excellent housekeeper, intensifying Monica’s intolerance of other French establishments: ‘I carry a cloth and duster in my suitcase nowadays.’ The Frenchmen visiting Chambon were a ‘poisonous crew … they stare abominably’; but she was sorry when Paul, the doctor son of the Casalis family, left for Paris: he ‘had the manners and outlook of an Englishman’. As in England, she found ways of stressing her South African heritage: coming from a country where sour milk was drunk as amasi, Monica horrified the English girls when she ‘joyfully accepted a plate of sour milk – it’s the chief superstition of England that you must not touch “bad milk”’. Similarly, at a picnic, Monica ‘borrowed a bucket in which to draw water for lunch. I carried it off on my head’.36
Pursuing, as always, comparisons and parallels with South Africa, she noted how French peasants worked ‘desperately hard’ on small subdivided fields with little in the way of modern equipment. Though she detested big English estates and ‘capitalist organisation of agriculture’, peasant agriculture was not likely to flourish without a highly developed cooperative system. That was what South Africa needed, ‘individual peasant proprietorship if you like, but co-operation in buying, marketing, use of modern equipment etc.’ which might be grafted onto communal agriculture ‘if we are quick enough’. To her mother, Monica wrote: ‘I am interested in studying the country around, and methods of farming, and conditions of work.’ She listened to the ‘clippity-clop’ of the drovers’ sabots as they drove the cows home at night. There were no hedges, she said, and the Chambon peasants cultivated patches of wheat, barley and potatoes; these were scattered around the village, with its lively communal life and numerous cafés where patrons conversed. The women wore white starched caps and black frocks on Sundays, the men blue blouses and black felt hats. The country was glorious, and she referred her mother to Robert Louis Stevenson’s travels in the area. The hay, cut with scythes, was brought home in wagons drawn by cows rather than oxen: ‘it is most picturesque when you can sit and watch, but it must mean desperately hard work’. Already, Monica was a close and sympathetic observer of rural life.37
On leaving Chambon, Monica’s train meandered towards Geneva, her next destination. The fields of maize along the Rhône were ‘a sight for sore eyes’. She was en route to a student conference on ‘The British Commonwealth of Nations Foreign Policy and the League’, organised by the British Universities League of Nations Society. This was linked to the Geneva School of International Studies, directed by Professor Alfred Zimmern, the British classicist and liberal, perhaps even utopian, internationalist. In 1928, the League of Nations epitomised hopes for a peaceful world. The apparent oddity of a conference in Geneva on the British Commonwealth is explained by the notion that the Commonwealth should be seen in relation to the League’s wider internationalism. Monica agreed with the Irish Free State delegates that dominions were independent nations not subordinate to Westminster.38
It was at this conference that Monica first met Godfrey Wilson. He is a crucial presence in this story, and remained so even after his self-inflicted death in 1944. Intelligent, humorous, charming, radical, literary, devout, though also depressive, Godfrey deeply influenced Monica, as she influenced him. She was thirty-six when he died, but for the rest of her life she would be in emotional, intellectual and spiritual dialogue with the shade of Godfrey Wilson.
‘It was my son who became the anthropologist’
Originally Derbyshire farmers, the Wilsons became city merchants and clergy, producing a lord mayor of London and a bishop of Calcutta. Godfrey’s father was John Dover Wilson, one of the most distinguished Shakespearean scholars and editors of his day, who for many years was also an inspector of schools and a professor of education. Godfrey’s grandfather was Edwin Wilson, a draughtsman and illustrator. Edwin worked for the Natural History Museum in London and subsequently for the Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company, owned by Charles Darwin’s son Horace and Albert Dew-Smith. Though only an employee, Edwin Wilson was treated like a partner, and when the company no longer required the services of an illustrator, he was given the lithographic equipment and he set up his own business. A consummate craftsman who regularly did work for the Cambridge University Press, Edwin was, however, a poor businessman, and the family struggled financially. His authoritative work in the ten-volume Cambridge Natural History is particularly noteworthy. A major graphic artist, he was, however, regarded as an artisan at the time.39
Godfrey’s paternal grandmother, Edwin’s wife, was Elizabeth Dover. She came from a family of Buckinghamshire farmers, fallen on hard times through her father’s quixotic will which made care of the children of his deceased brother a first charge on the estate, even if land fell in value. In the agricultural depression this was ruinous, and the farm was sold to benefit a surviving cousin, leaving Elizabeth and her sisters unprovided for. Elizabeth was delicate, had six children in quick succession between 1881 and 1890, including twins, and endured genteel poverty. She broke down and was committed to a mental asylum, where she died in 1927, twelve years after her husband. When she was removed to the asylum, unpublished novels were discovered under her bed. Her youngest granddaughter and Godfrey’s much younger sister, Carol, later Carol Jeffrey, reports that Elizabeth was never mentioned in the family; moreover, Edwin’s committal and repudiation of his wife sits uneasily with his devout Anglicanism.40
Godfrey’s mother Dorothy was the daughter of Canon Edward Curtis Baldwin, rector of Harston, Cambridgeshire, and Caroline Maria Lowe, daughter of a Lincolnshire rector. The couple married in 1875 and had a son, Godfrey Theodore Baldwin, who, like John Dover Wilson, attended Lancing College. Godfrey Baldwin went to Hertford, formerly his father’s Oxford college, later also that of Godfrey Wilson, where he became friends with the older John Dover Wilson. The Harston vicarage was a vacation meeting-place for Godfrey Baldwin’s circle of friends, including John Dover Wilson, who was attracted to Dorothy. When Godfrey Baldwin died in a drowning accident, Dorothy called on John for support, which brought the couple even closer together. There were difficulties caused by the parents’ insistence that John adhere more strictly to the doctrines of the Church of England, but in the end the couple became engaged and were married in July 1906.41
John Dover Wilson had grown up in Cambridge, and was much influenced by the anthropologist Alfred Cort Haddon. The latter was celebrated for the Torres Straits expeditions, which helped to transform British anthropology from an armchair study to a discipline based on ethnographic fieldwork. Eventually, however, scholarships to Lancing, as well as Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, led Wilson away from anthropology, towards Elizabethan scholarship, so that he later said: ‘In point of fact, it was my son who became the anthropologist.’42
From 1904 to 1905 John Dover Wilson taught at Whitgift School, Croydon, which Godfrey also later attended. Wilson took up a lectureship in English at the University of Helsingfors (Helsinki), Finland, which was then part of the Russian Empire. He sympathised with the radical agrarian Socialist Revolutionaries, attended meetings of the first Duma in Petrograd, and wrote regularly from Helsinki for The Manchester Guardian. When war broke out in 1914, he collaborated with, among others, Alfred Zimmern, later a presence in Monica and Godfrey’s lives, on The War and Democracy, a work produced in the fraught early wartime period and dedicated to the Workers’ Educational Association. Wilson contributed two chapters to the book, one of which made a qualified, somewhat uneasy case for Britain and France’s autocratic ally, Russia. John Dover Wilson was not an ivory-tower academic, and nor was his son in years to come.43
Dorothy, pregnant, returned from Finland, and Godfrey was born on 31 July 1908 at Harston, his maternal grandfather’s home. He attended Whitgift School from 1919 to 1927. In his final year he was a prefect, editor of the Whitgiftian, secretary of the school debating society, a company sergeant major in the Officers’ Training Corps, and a school librarian. He played rugby for the Cross House first XV: ‘a useful forward, although rather on the light side’ who nevertheless showed ‘plenty of dash and [fought] hard’. There are indications that he was not happy at Whitgift. ‘You do harp on the boarding-school!’ his mother wrote during a family debate about sending his younger sister Carol to boarding school when war broke out in 1939. Carol reported her saying to their father: ‘We don’t want another one to cast it in our teeth that we’ve done the wrong thing.’44
Decades later, Carol painted a picture of a strict household whose activities were centred around her father’s work. He was ‘a revered and distant figure in some ways’. Her mother, she recalled, though dutiful and austere, was prone to capricious likes and dislikes of people. Born in 1927, nineteen years younger than Godfrey, the last time Carol saw him was when she was a girl of eight. The household she described was probably unchanged from Godfrey’s own childhood years, though his recollections are more sanguine, with idyllic summer holidays where he fished and rowed and read The Wind in the Willows.45
Godfrey was a gifted student. The school magazine records his various academic prizes. In his Higher School Certificate, he got a distinction in Greek in 1926, and one in Latin the following year. He was placed first among those who won entrance scholarships to Hertford College, Oxford, in 1927. Godfrey did ‘Greats’, Literae Humaniores, Greek and Latin, as well as ancient and modern philosophy. Because it was a four-year course, he only graduated the year after Monica. Greats was considered the pinnacle of academic achievement, and Godfrey was awarded a first in his finals in 1931.46
At Hertford, as the Whitgiftian facetiously put it, Godfrey ‘play[ed] tennis and attend[ed] League of Nations meetings’, two activities he had in common with Monica. He was an excellent tennis-player, and became secretary of the college Lawn Tennis Club. Like Monica, he was heavily involved in the SCM and was secretary for the university from 1929 to 1930. He was involved in an SCM study of slums in 1929, and was probably involved in organisations such as the Oxford University Labour Club, the Toynbee Hall Settlements Movement, the YMCA and Toc H. Godfrey was a key organiser of a mission promoted by the SCM in February 1931 and conducted by William Temple, Archbishop of York, later of Canterbury, an advocate of radical social reform who was perhaps the greatest Anglican churchman of his day.47
‘The only woman I have ever met with whom small talk was unnecessary’
Monica met Godfrey when they were both twenty years old. In a letter to her father she mentioned that, just before leaving Geneva, she enjoyed ‘some marvellous concoctions in an obscure little café near the ’Varsity’ with ‘Geodfry [sic] Wilson’. To her mother she said that Godfrey was ‘one of the nicest people I’ve struck’. The atmosphere was clearly romantic: ‘The River and Lake are marvelous at night – lights strung up everywhere, and the water a limpid green.’ Monica gave a witty sketch of her new admirer: ‘Geoffrey [sic] and I only discovered one another the last Sunday. He’s little and ugly and is Oxford and reads classics (a dreadful list against one man!) but I liked his voice and his taste in poetry and he approved of my shiny nose, so we got on rather well!’ The journey back to England had a deliriously exhausted, sexually charged air, the British group taking third-class compartments in a night train to Paris, sleeping little, talking much. The previous evening there had been a farewell dinner at a lakeside café, followed by boat trips and dancing: ‘we had just come off the Lake and were hardly dry, much less tidy; but we did not care a button, and danced for ages’. Since their tickets did not oblige them to remain with the group, Monica and ‘Geofrey [sic] Wilson, one of the Oxford men’ she had ‘got to know rather well … tore across Paris’ to catch the boat train from Saint-Lazare. Godfrey resolved confusions over luggage and on the train to Dieppe she describes herself and ‘Geodfrey [sic] … as mad as hatters’, playing up to a group of gullible American passengers with ‘all the outrageous Varsity shop we could think of’. Monica ‘wallowed in the unwonted luxury of not having to look after’ herself as ‘Geoffrey [sic] was most awfully good to me’.48
Godfrey did not delay getting in touch after they returned to England, and apparently lent her a book of George Meredith’s poetry. ‘The approach is important,’ he wrote, recommending that she should begin with the sonnet ‘Lucifer in Starlight’, followed by five other named poems ‘and then wallow at will’. He confidently declared, ‘I am not going to try and tell you how much I enjoyed the last few days at Geneva, because I know you know it already.’49
Monica finished the vacation in Edinburgh, where she met Donald Henderson and Malcolm McVicar, both sons of Lovedale missionaries, who accompanied her to the local Palais de Dance. Soon afterwards she was plunged back into Girton’s many activities, among them punting and rowing, and, once she had passed as a ‘captain’, sculling in a whiff, a somewhat unstable one-person boat barely above the waterline, about two feet wide and ten feet long.50
Monica claimed to be ‘quite “unbitten”’ by men and enjoying herself immensely: ‘“In maiden meditation fancy free!”’ she said in late 1928. But she was not really ‘unbitten’: as well as the Geneva encounter with Godfrey, in some notes she had made on 8 July, prior to meeting him, she said she would ‘renounce Africa for Phil today. I know him for a good man. We could work together.’ This is probably a reference to Phil Rowntree, with whom Monica frequently went punting, dancing and to the theatre. For a time he featured prominently in Monica’s life, but in November he became engaged to an art student. Perhaps putting on a brave face for her mother’s benefit, or perhaps beginning to focus on Godfrey, she remarked: ‘Phil can be treated in a more brotherly fashion than ever now.’ She described the situation as ‘so satisfactory’, and said, ‘it’s easy to enjoy everything when you’re twenty and feeling very fit and have some very good friends – besides life’s such an adventure at the moment. I’m purposely trying to do as many different things as I can while I’m over here.’51
Monica packed an extraordinary amount into the 1928–29 winter vacation. By Christmas she had already attended an Oxford and Cambridge Social Study Week at Toynbee Hall, Tower Hamlets, in London’s East End. This was the centre of the settlement movement which aimed to bring rich and poor together in the pursuit of social justice. She visited a cold storage depot where she ‘nearly got frozen beside the little pigs’, as well as Billingsgate Market by night, and also factories, docks and youth clubs. She attended lectures by trade unionists and employers. She visited Welwyn Garden City, an experiment in town planning aimed at overcoming problems resulting from rapid urbanisation and industrialisation. The idea of quasi-political settlements like Toynbee Hall appealed to Monica, though she was not blind to the contrived nature of some of the community interaction. At a dance with dockers, ‘everyone kept dropping bricks, for it was extremely difficult to distinguish between the dockers’ women folks and us’. On a subsequent visit to Cambridge by some of the dockers, the Girton women entertained their wives. The occasion was enjoyable but stilted: ‘social barriers are so much greater here than they are between any Europeans at home, and you can’t expect people to get on together if they don’t know one another’.52
Monica spent Christmas in Edinburgh, where she went to ‘a very posh dance at MacVittie’s Rooms’, in stark contrast to another she attended at the Palais de Dance. The Palais, she said defensively to her mother, was teetotal, ‘simply Edinburgh propriety solidified’. There were small tables where one could sit with one’s party, far preferable to the nooks for ‘sitting out’ at private dances, and ‘much less spooney’ too.53
Meanwhile, the correspondence with Godfrey proceeded, though haltingly. He had been unable to attend the SCM Liverpool conference because of a ‘large and ugly examination’. Replying three weeks later, Monica apologised for ‘the complete failure’ of what is indeed a pedestrian letter, signing off formally as ‘Monica Hunter’. Godfrey attempted to re-establish contact by asking whether she had managed to get hold of George Meredith’s collection, Modern Love. In May 1929, indicating how little he knew about Monica’s activities at the time, and perhaps fearing that she might be about to sail for South Africa, he wrote: ‘You are the only woman I have ever met with whom small talk was unnecessary and I find every incident of the last evening at Geneva is still as fresh as the morning after.’ Could she, he asked, come with him to the Commencement Ball on 24 June? Or at least meet him in Cambridge or Oxford for a day? His grandfather was vicar of Harston, near Cambridge, and still lived there: he himself had been born and christened there. Could they have tea in the vicarage garden where he could ‘bathe [his] soul in [her] presence’? Godfrey went on to declare that he had ‘grown up’ somewhat since their last meeting, and that, while enjoying life, he was also beginning ‘to learn how to pray’. With apparent insouciance – ‘cheerio ching ching!’ – Monica told her mother that she would be unable to accept Godfrey’s invitation to the ball as she would have arrived in Cape Town by then.54
Monica and Godfrey’s relationship might easily have amounted to a few heady days in Geneva and a correspondence that petered out. But Godfrey was in his own way as determined a character as Monica, and she agreed to meet him in Cambridge on Saturday 1 June. He planned an early-morning canoe trip and swim on the river; breakfast at his grandfather’s home; a walk and sandwich lunch; and in the evening Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Gondoliers. All this proved sufficient to keep the relationship alive during Monica’s long vacation in South Africa.55
Godfrey worked hard to maintain contact in the first half of 1929, and far from pining, Monica continued her numerous activities, adding some new ones like skating on the frozen Fens. She went on a walking tour in North Wales in April, managing sixteen miles in mountainous terrain on the first day. The cleanliness of the villages impressed her, as did the villagers and their bilingualism, reminding her of South Africa. Back at Girton, she and Elizabeth abandoned their specifically Presbyterian activities, and as a consequence the ‘ardent souls in college’ regarded them as ‘black sheep’. Monica also could not stomach the evangelical Cambridge Women’s Inter-Collegiate Christian Union, and instead threw herself into SCM work, becoming secretary of the Girton branch and running a study circle on comparative religion: ‘I have never felt more committed to any job in my life and have been having night-mare [sic] about it all week.’ She did not rein in her attendance at social events, however. With touching innocence, she described the atmosphere of a ‘jug’ to celebrate a twenty-first birthday: ‘It was a wild show – there were fourteen of us and we consumed an unconscionable amount of crumpets and “deadlies” and birthday cake and chestnuts, and sang, and sat on the floor, and ducked for apples, and were generally horribly rowdy.’56
‘All the lectures so far have been bad’
In March 1928, Monica first mentioned that she had been ‘bitten with the idea of swapping over to anthropology’ in the second part of her degree course. She considered economics, but on further investigation thought it beyond her. She would discuss her plan with Miss Jones, she told her mother, and then ‘expand on the anthropology stunt fully’. Errors in government, education and mission work in Africa were commonly held to be ‘due to lack of anthropologists and people who understood primitive native customs’. History still interested her, and anthropology would ‘come in handy’, being useful as ‘vocational training’. Gwladys Jones encouraged her to make tutorial presentations on South African issues. With the elimination of the dubious ‘skull measuring [hog]wash’, Monica was keen to embark on a study of ‘Bantu social customs’ which might be ‘combined with teaching in a native school, or (if I am lucky) at Fort Hare’. She had attended a meeting of the anthropological club with Bis as well as Hester Law, the only anthropology student at Girton. She had also met the head of anthropology, Thomas Hodson, as well as the subject tutor, ‘a Mr Leaky [sic], the son of missionaries in East Africa’. To Monica’s relief, both men said that there was no point in staying in Cambridge over the 1929 long vacation, which her parents were pressing her to spend at home. None of the anthropologists would be there to assist her, and in any case the Cape was the 1929–30 special study focus. Soon afterwards, she went to see Louis Leakey in his rooms, which ‘smelt so good, with heaps of skins and pots and stools and things from home!’57
At about this time Monica encountered Jack Driberg, who turned out to be her lecturer the following year. She had gone with Eddie Roux – ‘as mad and as nice as ever’ – to a meeting of ‘The Heretics’. As usual, Monica keenly observed the people around her, noting the ‘arty’ women ‘with jolly splashes of colour – reds and greens – in their dress’. Driberg addressed the audience on ‘The Government of Africa as it Ought to Be’. Over fifty years later she recalled Driberg regarding her ‘with extreme suspicion’: he criticised missionaries, arguing that the dual mandate system was unworkable. Monica conceded that ‘some of his ideas were sound’, but told him he had twice contradicted himself. Still, she found Driberg ‘a nice old guy, with friendly eyes’ (he was forty at the time), and when he asked who she was, Monica introduced herself as ‘a missionary’s daughter’. He was taken aback, and said he hoped he had not hurt her feelings. ‘I explained that I was much too used to criticism to mind, but was dying to argue with him, so we are going to argue next year when he will probably be one of my professors.’ Driberg lived on for Monica as an archetype of how not to do anthropology. In the late 1970s she said that he ‘sought isolation – a sort of anthropological zoo or game reserve’. She reflected then on the irony of the progressives she had met in Geneva during her work on the Z.K. Matthews biography believing that any contact with the west was damaging to ‘undeveloped people’. They were, she said, ‘back full circle to J.H. Driberg’.58
Monica was relieved at her parents’ approval of her decision to do anthropology in her third year. She now began to think that a teaching career might be temporary, perhaps lasting two years; afterwards, if her parents wanted her ‘back at home any time’, she could do anthropological research on her own. This bold plan, hinging partly on her parents’ eagerness to have her close by after her long absence abroad, she proceeded to put into action, apart from the teaching.59
Monica saw her planned move to anthropology as a continuation of, rather than a departure from, her historical studies. She revelled in political science and economic history, though less so in English constitutional history. Her approach was historical, specifically related to contemporary concerns. Even as an undergraduate, she was beginning to be perceived as knowledgeable about agricultural smallholdings in Africa, prematurely so, she felt. Though ‘one of the fundamental questions in native policy’, she was disquieted when Handley Hooper, African secretary of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) who had been long engaged with such questions in Kenya, wished to meet her to discuss the issue. The historical aspect led her to anthropology; for instance, having read Prothero’s English Farming Past and Present, she wrote to her father that the book had excited her interest in ‘the likeness between the present conditions in the native reserves and land questions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries before the enclosures’. She sent him a sheet of ‘Questions on Native Land Tenure’; thanking him subsequently for his response, she noted that ‘it’s rather important for S.A. to decide whether small peasant holdings are good from an economic point of view, or whether some sort of communal culture is better’. Though Monica drew on her father’s knowledge, she differed from him regarding the question of rural development. She shared his horror of big industrial towns, feeling ‘half choke[d]’ by Edinburgh, and a train journey through Crewe, Wigan, Preston ‘and other unmentionable smokes and smells’ reminded her how grim industrial Britain could be. Yet she contended: ‘I do not think that we can, or are intended, to carry on nowadays without the full use of machinery. I think that factories of limited size, in country districts are the line on which to go. That’s why I was so interested in Welwyn Garden City, with its limited population and surrounding belt of agricultural land.’ Similar issues arose in relation to a ‘splendid address’ at Newnham by the radical cleric Charles Andrews. Typically of Monica, even though she admired him, she maintained a certain scepticism. The Gandhian idea of passive resistance appealed to her, and though she was ‘wildly interested’ in Andrews’s views on home industries, she remained unconvinced of their ‘economic possibilities’.60
While sailing home to South Africa, Oscar Oeser, a doctoral candidate at Cambridge, brought Jan Smuts to second class on the first Sunday morning, and introduced him to the ten students on board, including Monica. ‘We had a great old pow-wow. He was frightfully cordial’, Monica wrote, saying that Smuts returned at intervals to what he called his ‘Sunday School’. It is likely that Monica and some of her fellow students had attended Smuts’s Sidgwick Memorial Lecture on ‘Democracy’ at Newnham on 30 November 1929. She reports that he greeted them: “‘hullo children” (we still remain the Kindergarten)’. In later years, Smuts wrote a foreword to Monica’s Reaction to Conquest. Mentioning the shipboard meeting, Smuts stated that he had ‘warned her against [being] … unduly preoccupied with the larger political aspects of our native problems’, urging her instead to ‘cultivate a disinterested scientific outlook’. But Monica had little patience with Smuts’s policy towards Africans: their interests were, she believed, first to be sacrificed whenever he faced opposition. Later, in a memorandum for Keith Hancock, Smuts’s own biographer, Monica said that she had been astonished that a man of such insight ‘should be blinded by skin colour’.61
David Hunter’s diary suggests that, once home, Monica spent time with her mother and father at Lovedale and Hogsback riding, playing golf and visiting relatives. It is likely that she also considered how to approach field research in the area, and read relevant literature at Lovedale and Fort Hare, for she had already decided the previous year to transfer to anthropology as ‘a good background for beginning to study Bantu social customs’.62
Monica’s comments and experiences bear out Adam Kuper’s contention that Cambridge anthropology had, at this time, ‘become a backwater of old-style ethnology’. The head of department was a former civil servant, Colonel Thomas Callan Hodson, who had served in India. His most significant book, a classification of the races of India, was based on the ‘cephalic index’ that was coming under attack at the time, and which had no influence at all on Monica’s anthropological thinking. Monica found Hodson amiable, though unfocused. His teaching method was to encourage students to ask questions, which he then answered, ‘usually quite off the point’. His first lecture on ‘Primitive Thought’ was ‘exerably [sic] bad’, she thought: ‘it just amounted to good advice to colonial probationers’. These probationers, future colonial civil servants receiving the rudiments of an anthropological education, were ‘a rowdy lot. They sit and fondle their moustaches (that mostly are not there) and think themselves frightful Knuts.’ Hodson’s colleague Jack Driberg, with whom Monica had already crossed swords, ‘did his best to be shocking’ but at least ‘took quite a lot of trouble’. He was apparently sufficiently shocking for Jane Starfield, the only other woman in Monica’s anthropology class, to drop out. Monica found this ludicrous, and stayed put. Miles Burkitt taught prehistory. His lectures were badly structured and ‘disorderly’. Those by Roderick Sayce, who taught physical anthropology and material culture, seem often to have been chaotic: ‘People … rag poor old Sayce abominably,’ Monica informed her mother, to the point where he was ‘definitely rattled’ and ‘rather frightened’ of his students. Though Sayce had clearly lost his audience, Monica was interested in his field, namely evolution, heredity and environment. During the lecture-hall hubbub, Monica’s habit was to perch on the window-ledge so that she could distract herself with happenings outside.63
Although Monica enjoyed the small, friendly world of Cambridge anthropology – ‘You can’t share a skull with someone in pracs and maintain the English stoney silence and aloofness’ – there is an inescapable air of drift in her single year of undergraduate anthropology. Well into October, Monica was ‘just reading at large’, and had been given no essay topics. In January 1930 she was still trying ‘to get some written work’ out of Hodson. Anthropology was ‘enormous fun … such a chatty little shop’. She planned a flint workshop in her room in order to learn how implements were made in neolithic times, and she also drew up head-measurement indices. But to gain clarity, focused thinking was required, and ‘that’s the trouble about not writing any essays’. She eventually managed to prise some essay titles from Hodson, and three remain in the archive from late January to February 1930: one on social differentiation, another on the evidence for Tylor’s theory of animism, and the third on ‘Communal Elements in S.A. native life’. Hodson’s written comments, though positive, are not particularly enlightening. Monica and Jane invited him to tea after one coaching session, and she found that he was ‘choc à bloc [sic] with ideas and very enthusiastic about his subject … He gives you precious little information but makes me curious.’ Later that month, she reported that ‘for once’ she had a good session with him. Driberg’s first lecture was poor; in fact, ‘all the lectures so far have been bad’, even laughable, she wrote in January. This may explain her continued links with history and with Gwladys Jones in particular; indeed, Monica was gratified when invited to remain a member of the student History Club.64
Though the teaching was unsatisfactory, Monica seems to have made a thorough exploration of anthropological and related literature. Notes and references remain, written on the same yellow paper she would later use in Pondoland. She mentions many classic writers, or those writing in an earlier mode, such as James Frazer, Edward Tylor, Arnold van Gennep and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. In addition, Monica read up-to-date British and American writers such as Bronisław Malinowski, Melville Herskovits, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, Raymond Firth, Franz Boas and Edward Evans-Pritchard. She read the southern African anthropological writings of Isaac Schapera, Winifred Hoernlé, Werner Eiselen, Henri Junod and others, and consulted a range of mission, governmental, historical and other sources. Monica also explored literature from other disciplines such as sociology, biology, psychology and demography, by theorists such as Émile Durkheim, Thomas Huxley, J.B.S. Haldane, Freud and others. At this stage, she had a jaundiced view of Polish anthropologist Malinowski, observing that he was ‘talking through his hat’ in Sex and Repression in Savage Society. She distrusted what she considered to be his theatricality and desire to shock.65
When Monica consulted Hodson about the research she was planning in South Africa, he said, ‘I wish I could help you more but you can think things out for yourself.’ After her degree, she would be able to ‘settle down to hard thinking’. Advising that she should write as much as she wished and come back to it later, Hodson undertook to read her material as a ‘candid friend’. He went on to recommend that, for a fortnight before the degree examinations, she should refrain from working. Moving on from homely advice into a haze of generalisation, Hodson then held forth on the ‘pressure of the universal, and its relation with the particular, within the individual, [that] form [sic] the basis of so many of our problems’. Still, Monica remembered and benefited from one of Hodson’s opinions, at least: ‘actual cases are far more worthwhile than generalisations’.66
Monica told Godfrey that it was difficult to take Cambridge anthropology seriously, and though continually tempted by side-alleys, currently psychology, she was nevertheless excited by the subject and ‘enjoying work hugely’. Given Monica’s remarks, it is perhaps unsurprising that, when Godfrey came to study anthropology, he opted for the London School of Economics (LSE) rather than Cambridge.67
‘Next term I have schemes’
Godfrey continued to pursue Monica, fortifying links when he befriended Desmond Hobart Houghton, who was by then at Oxford, and discovering that he was ‘a sort of cousin’ of Monica’s. She, meanwhile, invited Oscar Oeser rather than Godfrey to the Girton College dance. Also, Godfrey arranged for Monica to meet him and his mother in London. Monica told her mother that she was ‘committed’ to a ball with Godfrey in Oxford in June 1930, though she had turned down his invitation to join him for a week’s hiking in the Lake District immediately thereafter. Her excuse was that she suspected her parents ‘would want [her] in Scotland’ during their forthcoming visit (the following April she arranged a trip of her own to the lakes, without Godfrey). After Christmas she joined a group of close friends on a skiing trip – ‘a perfectly amazing fortnight’ – to Freiburg-im-Breisgau in the Black Forest, where they stayed at a youth hostel. There is no indication that Godfrey had been invited. Though Godfrey himself did not attend, it seems likely that he had a hand in the invitation to Monica to attend dinner and Shakespeare readings at the home of Canon Baldwin, Godfrey’s maternal grandfather, who lived outside Cambridge. Monica was won over by the old man’s powerful delivery and by his charming manner, offering her his arm as they made their way to the formal six-course dinner. But towards Godfrey Monica remained tepid, telling him that she was unable to come down to meet his family again. Rather vaguely she said, ‘I hope we can meet sometime’, claiming that she was ‘so bad at writing’. Her parents arrived in England on 5 May, and Monica did not rush to introduce them to Godfrey, who clearly missed her presence: ‘you know it’s perfectly ridiculous but, except in Geneva, I’ve never had the privilege of seeing you except for a few hours at intervals of several months’.68
Just three weeks later, on 25 May, Godfrey proposed to Monica. She turned him down. He then wrote that his proposal had been ‘impudent and selfish’, coming as it did immediately before her final examination. Once again he referred to not being ‘grown up’, and expressed the hope that they might return to the level of their companionship with Christ, their ‘common Lover’. Monica wrote that his proposal had made her ‘proud and … humble’, and that she was sorry for hurting him, but ‘falling in love is so incomprehensible, and I just don’t mind about you that way’. She made no comment on their ‘common Lover’. Nonetheless, his apparently gauche and premature proposal may have warmed her towards him, though she claimed that the many uncertainties in her life made her ‘edgy and bad-tempered’. That year, on 23 June 1930, she accompanied Godfrey to the Magdalen College Commemoration Ball. Monica wrote on the programme that ‘Rabbitt’ would sit out only the foxtrot. After this, the correspondence between Monica and Godfrey became more frequent. He tried to persuade her to come to London in 1931 to study education under his father, and in one of the amusing letters he crafted so well, he reported on a visit to Canon Baldwin and his elderly clerical friends. They all dressed for dinner, with Godfrey wearing an oversized dress suit from a pawnshop, and drank Jubilee port and discussed Pusey and Newman. Later that June, Monica visited Godfrey’s family and, just before she and her mother left for Italy on 6 October, she arranged a meeting between herself, Jessie and Godfrey at a Lyons Corner House in London. Surgery had kept her father in hospital for much of his visit to Britain, and so he met up with Monica and Jessie in Genoa, whence they all embarked for the voyage round the east coast of Africa.69
Meanwhile, Monica’s immediate future was becoming clearer. Having obtained a first class for anthropology in the tripos, she intended to work on isiXhosa during the British summer. But instead she attended the International Students’ Service conference in Oxford in early August, hiked on Skye with Elizabeth Wilson, read novels, made frocks ‘and waxed fat’. Significantly, soon after leaving England with her mother, Monica heard that she had been awarded the Anthony Wilkin Studentship, without which she could not have embarked on her research. ‘I shall have seriously to set to work the minute we get home,’ she wrote to Godfrey, wryly remarking that at least she would not turn into a cabbage, ‘for there will always be the spectre of a promised report, stalking through the cabbage fields’. In March, Hodson had enigmatically stated: ‘Next term I have schemes.’ His schemes had succeeded. Monica was launched on her anthropological career.70