10
Anticipation
Few in 1914 had foreseen the nature of the ordeal before them. Few in 1939 had any illusions about the trial they were about to face. The greatest treasures of the Fitzwilliam Museum and of the University Library were moved to safety in remote locations in Wales and Cornwall. The celebrated stained-glass windows of King’s College Chapel were removed at a cost of £75 each, though the vast Victorian west window was left in place to take its chances. Members of Berkeley College, Yale met the costs of this precautionary exercise, the glass being partly stored in the cellars under the neighbouring Gibbs Building and in other safe underground locations in the city. It had long been customary for the bells of Great St Mary’s to be rung nightly between nine and nine-fifteen to summon students home to their colleges. This ceased in 1939, as the ringing of church bells was to be the signal for an enemy invasion.
The war in the air
The threat from the air was seen as menacing and imminent. Members of the University Officers’ Training Corps and University Air Squadron were called up immediately. Of the pre-war members of the University Air Squadron, 128 would be killed in action. 70 would be awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, 17 the Distinguished Service Order and four the Victoria Cross.
As Director of Air Defence Research, John Cockcroft (1897–1967) was the mastermind behind the radar system which was crucial to the victory of the RAF in the Battle of Britain. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1951, he became the first Director of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell, pioneering the peaceful use of atomic energy for power generation.
Market Square
Despite the importance of its railway yards to freight movement in a region with a massive military presence, Cambridge suffered only the intermittent attentions of the Luftwaffe, although, being on the flight path to industrial Coventry, it experienced some 424 air raid alerts and received hits from 118 high explosive bombs and more than 1,000 incendiaries. In June 1940 an air raid flattened Vicarage Terrace, Barnwell, killing nine. In 1941 Mrs Robertson, wife of the Regius Professor of Greek was killed by a bomb while on duty as an air-raid warden. In 1942 bomb damage was inflicted on the Union Society, the Round Church, the Catholic Church, Whewell’s Court and in Jesus Lane, where ten buildings were demolished and more than 120 damaged. There are still visible bomb-damage scars on the walls at the junction of Jesus Lane and Bridge Street. The worst damage was, however, inflicted by a fire in 1941 which devastated some 80 yards of Pembroke’s new buildings along Downing Street – started by a cigarette smoked by a member of the RAF Training Wing accommodated there. The total Cambridge toll for the war was 29 dead and 70 injured.
Participation
In terms of mobilisation, humanities students – judged to be the most expendable – went first. Students of science, engineering and medicine were more likely to be assigned to ‘reserved occupations’. This category also included university teachers, though many ignored this exemption to serve in the armed forces or in the greatly expanded ranks of the state’s wartime bureaucracy. Dons left behind consequently took on additional burdens of teaching, administration and academic supervision as well as such novel challenges as firewatching. To minimise hazards to men moving around in the pitch dark, ornamental chains and posts were removed from college courts.
Extraordinary times require extraordinary measures. In January 1940 the Cambridge Review reported in apparent wonderment that following the closure of the regular military academies at Woolwich and Sandhurst, the university was prepared to admit numbers of aspirant students who would otherwise have gone there – ‘thus for the first time there may be members of the University who have never studied a word of Latin in their lives.’ Short specialist courses were designed for members of the armed forces, especially the Navy, signallers and the RAF, who occupied billets in nine colleges. The university also exercised its administrative ingenuity to formulate a course in military studies by which its own undergraduates, who had broken off their courses to serve, could be awarded an ordinary degree on the strength of their contributions to the war effort.
A Home Guard contingent attracted both college staff and servants, many of them veterans of the First World War, like Hugh Heywood (1897–1987), Dean of Caius, who had been an army chaplain. Some 12,000 ‘evacuees’ descended on the city and university. Apart from bewildered children these also included staff and students from the London School of Economics, Queen Mary College, London and Bedford College, London. Bart’s Medical School was lodged at Queens’, the University of London’s School of Oriental Studies at Christ’s, and civil servants at Caius, Corpus, Trinity and Sidney. The population of Cambridge thus rose from 78,000 to 90,000. Newnham accepted mothers and children from London’s raffish Soho district, which must have been something of a revelation for both sides of the arrangement. Newnham undergraduates’ war work ranged from the simple task of fixing coloured rags to camouflage netting to assembling transmitters for paratroopers. By May 1940, 60 enemy aliens had been interned. Having run out of money and fearing arrest, Dutch Nazi agent Jan Ter Braak shot himself dead in an air raid shelter on Christ’s Pieces; a subsequent search of his lodgings revealed a portable radio transmitter and forged documents confirming his true identity and purpose.
A Cambridge Cassandra
When World War Two broke out Richard Stone (1913–1991) was working at Lloyd’s, which led some in Whitehall to assume, quite wrongly, that he knew all about shipping; so he was directed to the Ministry of Economic Warfare to monitor the movement of strategic imports into neutral countries. Stone personally interpreted this to mean that he should focus on the movement of tankers, especially Italian ones. In May 1940 he noted that all known Italian tankers were suddenly diverting from their usual routes and guessed they were under orders to make for home or neutral ports in anticipation of an Italian declaration of war. Estimating that all the ships would have reached their assumed destinations by 10 June 1940 he predicted that Italy would declare war on that date. The very suggestion caused outrage among the Italophiles of the Foreign Office, who interpreted the Italian build-up of kerosene stocks as entirely explicable by the need to keep a devoutly Catholic nation well supplied with altar candles. Needless to say, Italy did declare war on 10 June. Richard Stone eventually returned to Cambridge to become the founding father of applied economics in the university, receiving the Nobel Prize for his efforts in 1984.
Boffins
The First World War had demonstrated conclusively the fundamental significance of science and technology for the successful prosecution of modern warfare. For the first time, the British state had seen the need for a strategic science policy and had cobbled together the machinery to formulate and administer it. The onset of conflict in 1939 therefore led to a far more systematic and successful mobilisation of the nation’s intellectual talents.
With shipping space at a premium, nutrition experts Robert McCance (1898–1993), Reader in Experimental Medicine, and his collaborator, Elsie Widdowson (1908–2000), set out to establish how far the nation’s dietary needs could be met from food grown in Britain, rather than imported. The standard weekly ration they devised consisted of one egg, one pound of meat or fish, six ounces of fruit, five ounces of sugar, four ounces of cheese and four ounces of fats. The bulk of the diet was to consist of unrationed vegetables and brown bread, supplemented by a quarter of a pint of milk a day. To prove the viability of their formula, McCance and Widdowson and two student volunteers, James Robinson (1914–2008) and Andrew Huxley (1917–2012), followed it rigorously for three months. To test their fitness McCance and Robinson then cycled to the Lake District in less than three days. The four then spent ten days hiking across the fells. On one day McCance and Huxley climbed 7,000 feet and covered 36 miles in less than 12 hours, burning off 4,714 calories in the process. McCance and Widdowson also conducted a series of experiments on the body’s absorption of calcium from bread. As a result, every wartime loaf was reinforced with a supplement of calcium carbonate – and still is to this day. McCance and Widdowson’s definitive study, The Chemical Composition of Foods (1940) became the nutritionists’ Bible; the sixth edition was published in 2002. McCance went on to conduct experiments investigating shipwrecked sailors’ survival at sea and became CBE and FRS. After the war Widdowson helped rehabilitate malnourished orphans in defeated Germany and eventually also achieved long overdue recognition as FRS, CBE and CH. James Robinson became a distinguished physiologist in New Zealand. Andrew Huxley won a Nobel Prize and became FRS, OM and Master of Trinity.
Viennese-born Max Perutz (1914–2002) arrived in Cambridge in 1936, aged 22, and joined the staff of the Cavendish Laboratory. The German annexation of Austria in March 1938 changed him from a guest to a refugee, banned from paid employment. Desperate to re-establish his status, Perutz showed his work on using X-rays to investigate the structure of haemoglobin to Professor Bragg, who immediately arranged a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, which enabled him to appoint Perutz as his research assistant, thus saving his scientific career. It also enabled Perutz to bring his parents to England, rescuing them from the Holocaust. Like so many other refugees, however, in May 1940 Perutz was nevertheless rounded up as a security risk and sent to the Isle of Man and then to Canada before being called in to the bizarre Habbakuk project, a fantastical plan to create a permanent aircraft-carrier out of ice and wood shavings, to be anchored in the mid-Atlantic. Perutz was in fact uniquely qualified to contribute to the venture as his pre-war work in crystallography had included a definitive study of how snow is turned into glacial ice. After the war Perutz would return to Cambridge, where his time was more usefully employed in uncovering the structure of haemoglobin, which gained him a Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1962. He was subsequently furnished with a CBE, OM, CH and FRS. His last publication was a volume of essays intriguingly entitled I Wish I’d Made You Angry Earlier (1998), on the pursuit of scientific knowledge.
The code-breakers
The activities of the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire remained secret for some 40 years after the end of the war. As late as 1982 the publication of The Hut Six Story by Gordon Welchman (1906–1985), a former maths don at Sidney Sussex, was sufficient to cause official concern and cost the author his affiliation to the US security establishment. Welchman, who was primarily responsible for cracking the German army’s fiendishly complex Enigma code, was only one of a crucial cadre corralled into Bletchley, more coming from Cambridge than from any other university. In a brief chapter of fewer than six pages devoted to the Second World War, the official History of the University of Cambridge, merely notes in passing that ‘a notable contingent was recruited for the celebrated intelligence think-tank at Bletchley’ and then passes on to its major preoccupation with the freezing of professorial posts.
One of the youngest Cambridge recruits to Bletchley Park was Harry Hinsley (1918–1998), who had only just finished the second year of his history degree. In 1943, aged 24, he was sent to the USA to negotiate the first agreement between British and American codebreakers. In 1946 he served as secretary to the top-secret conference which agreed to perpetuate this cryptographic alliance. He went on to become Sir Harry Hinsley, Vice-Chancellor, Master of St John’s and Professor of the History of International Relations.
Dillwyn Knox (1884–1943), a King’s classicist with a lifelong addiction to puzzles, had served in the Admiralty’s Room 40 during the Great War, when his ear for metre had helped to break the German admirals’ flag code by recognising repeated snatches of poetry which established a crib from which the rest of the code could be unravelled. At Bletchley he broke the Italian naval code and was thus directly responsible for enabling Admiral Cunningham (1883–1963) to be forewarned through intercepts of the movement of an Italian battle group which he devastated in a decisive night action off Cape Matapan in 1941. Another brilliant stroke of intuition led Knox to predict correctly that many of the four letter settings used by German signallers for the Enigma cipher machine would be swear words or girls’ names. Dying of cancer, Knox worked from his bed to the last, only getting up to dress for investiture with the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) by a Palace emissary.
Philip Hall, FRS (1904–1982), a maths don at King’s, worked on the Italian and Japanese diplomatic codes. Maxwell Newman, FRS (1897–1984), another mathematician, from St John’s, made a crucial contribution to the designing of the proto-computer known as Colossus. Other recruits included Chess Master Hugh Alexander (1909–1974), who worked on German naval codes and went on to head the Government Communications HQ at Cheltenham, and Geoffrey Barraclough (1908–1984), an expert on medieval German history, who monitored Luftwaffe traffic during the Battle of Britain.
The most celebrated of all was Alan Turing (1912–1954), another King’s maths don, who, as a postgraduate, had already demonstrated a precociously brilliant interest in the possibilities of machine computing. Having helped to break the German naval cipher and design vital components of the machinery for handling high volumes of decoded data, Turing after the war went on to make foundational contributions to the emerging field of artificial intelligence. A prosecution for homosexuality cost him his security clearance, and arguably had a connection with his death two years later from cyanide poisoning. A verdict of suicide was recorded and in 2009 Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued a public apology for the ‘appalling way he was treated’ by the government.
Jet set
The jet engine was developed too late to exert a decisive influence on the conduct and outcome of World War Two; but it was a product of that war nonetheless and, indirectly, of Cambridge – not so much the birthplace of the jet as its nursery.
Born the son of a factory foreman in the engineering city of Coventry, pint-sized Frank Whittle (1907–1996) only succeeded in joining the RAF as a boy apprentice at the third attempt but, as early as 1928, he claimed that it would be feasible to construct an entirely new type of aero engine, capable of unprecedentedly high speeds at high altitudes. In 1930 Whittle filed a patent for an engine driven by jet propulsion. Although he was promoted to commissioned rank and became a test pilot, his ideas were dismissed with derision by the Air Ministry.
Entering Peterhouse in 1934 as a mature student of 27 to read mechanical sciences, Whittle met with encouragement rather than scepticism and in 1936 joined with two former RAF officers to found Power Jets Ltd. The following year, in which he was awarded a First, Whittle performed a successful ground test of his first prototype jet. Roy Lubbock (1892–1985), Whittle’s Peterhouse tutor, arranged a year’s postgraduate study for Whittle to enable him to work full time on his engine, in contrast to the niggardly six hours a week allowed by the Air Ministry. The onset of war reversed the negative attitude of officialdom and made funds available for rapid development work, leading to the first jet-powered flight in May 1941. In 1944 Power Jets Ltd was taken over by the government and the jet-powered Gloster Meteor took to the skies to intercept German V-1 flying bombs.
In 1948 Whittle left the RAF with the rank of air commodore and was knighted. He subsequently received a tax-free government gratuity of £100,000 and, in 1986, the Order of Merit, in recognition of his work. At the age of 70 Whittle was appointed a research professor at the US Naval Academy at Annapolis. The Whittle Laboratory at Cambridge was opened in 1971.
They also served
K H Roscoe (1914–1970) of Emmanuel College, a keen sportsman and sapper in the pre-war university Officer Training corps distinguished himself with the Welsh Guards in a rear-guard action at Boulogne before spending five years as a PoW, during which time he taught himself French and German and escaped and was recaptured three times. Roscoe eventually broke free from a ‘death march’ column fleeing before the advancing Americans and was belatedly awarded the Military Cross. Returning to Cambridge he became the founding father of the study of soil mechanics and a lieutenant colonel in the Officer Training Corps.
Former antiquarian book-dealer Alan ‘Tim’ Munby (1913–1974), another five-year PoW, penned verse in the style of Betjeman, ghost stories in the style of M R James and a prison camp guide in the style of Baedeker. Munby returned to found the Cambridge Bibliographical Society (1949) and compile a definitive guide to Cambridge college libraries (1960). As librarian of King’s, Munby would be entrusted with the care of the personal papers of Rupert Brooke, E M Forster and J M Keynes. He also built up an outstanding collection of the works of Macaulay and pioneered the use of booksellers’ and auction catalogues as historical sources.
Between 28 and 31 March 1944, Trinity College was taken over for a comprehensive, top-secret briefing for leading commanders of the projected invasion of Europe. St John’s Combination Room housed ‘a beautifully constructed model of Normandy and its beaches’. Four days after D-day, Lt Gen Bucknall (1894–1980) found time to write appreciatively to G M Trevelyan, the Master of Trinity – ‘I hope that some day I might be able to explain to you fully how the plans laid at Trinity helped to mould the course of history’, concluding his missive with the laconic understatement that ‘We have a stiffish fight coming.’
As Britain’s leading economic guru, J M Keynes sacrificed his health and ultimately his life for the war effort. Following a severe heart attack in 1937 he had cut back on his many commitments but answered the call to become a Treasury adviser, devising policies to pay for the war and control the threat of inflation. Allied co-operation obliged him to make six visits to the US in as many years, most notably to the 1944 Bretton Woods conference which devised the post-war monetary system and at which the delegates gave him a standing ovation. His last contribution was to negotiate a crucial but controversial US loan, which enabled the exhausted UK economy to make the challenging transition from war to peace. Despite these many trials Keynes also championed the Council for Encouragement of Music and the Arts, which later evolved into the post-war Arts Council.
Another angle
Brian Thompson’s painful but hilarious memoir of a fractured upbringing, Keeping Mum: A Wartime Childhood (2006), recalls Cambridge from the perspective of a new inter-war suburb. Following Brian’s birth in 1935 in Lambeth, Thompson’s parents rented one of the ‘Homes for the Future’, uncertainly located in a social limbo between Drummer Street bus station and Cherry Hinton, then ‘a bucolic village decorated with straw wisps’. Gypsies still left their coded marks on the doorposts of hostile houses but modernity was represented by a cement works, a commercial apple orchard and Marshall’s airfield. For the small boy, Cambridge was ‘simply a town’, its colleges only significant as places where neighbours worked in the kitchens.
The outbreak of war gave Thompson’s misanthropic but ambitious father, a Post Office engineer, the chance to reinvent himself. Courtesy of the RAF, this ‘very, very gifted man without a real idea in his head’ disguised his colour blindness to fly as a navigator on 28 missions, including D-day and Arnhem, and eventually emerged as a pipe-smoking, moustachioed member of the officer class. Deprived of her husband’s regulatory presence, the boy’s mother, meanwhile, drifted rapidly into a chaotic non-routine of domestic neglect, until a shaft of sunlight arrived from across the Atlantic. ‘After 1942 the streets were stiff with Yanks, ambling along … fitter and cleaner than the miserable bundles of khaki they occasionally encountered.’ For Peggy they represented a ‘good time’, cartons of Lucky Strikes and a repetitive illusion of romance; for Brian a resented intrusion, unmitigated by placatory offerings of candy bars, an unwanted baseball bat and a school atlas to enable a current escort to indicate the whereabouts of Indiana.
Shuttled between relatives in various run-down parts of blitz-battered London, Brian Thompson eventually returned to a small, private boarding-school near Fenner’s cricket ground, where he subsisted on whale meat and potatoes cooked with the skins on. Near his home there was a camp where Italian PoWs sunbathed and played bowls with home-made woods. Out on the road to Newmarket he explored a scary graveyard for the scorched and shattered skeletons of B-17 bombers. When the hostilities ended, Brian’s still warring parents opted for a semi-detached marriage while he proceeded to grammar school, supplemented by self-education courtesy of Gustave David’s Saturday market ‘stall of waifs and lost souls’. It tickled him to think, as he purchased Penguin No 48 A Passage to India, that ‘for all I knew E M Forster … may have been standing next to me in the flesh when I passed my money across.’ Eventually, very much against the odds, Thompson read English at Cambridge and went on to become a playwright, film-maker and biographer – in Oxford.
In memoriam
Of the more than 100 US airfields in East Anglia, a dozen were within ten miles of Cambridge. The US Eighth Air Force, thousands of whose members lie buried at Madingley, sustained more than 26,000 casualties during the war, almost half of the total USAAF losses. At the end of the war the Eighth was granted the Freedom of Cambridge. An entire gallery at the Imperial War Museum, Duxford, is devoted to their story. The ceiling of the back bar of the Eagle pub in Bene’t Street still bears many of their squadron numbers and nicknames, flamed onto its smoky surface with Zippo lighters or candles – in Clive James’s memorable words:
… a portent, doubly hideous for its innocence, of their own fate, and a grim token of the fiery nemesis they were bringing every night to the cities of Germany. Unwittingly they created a hall of fame, a temple of the sacred flame, a trophy room for heroes.
It is still there. Look for 222 Squadron, which flew out of Duxford.
Cambridge fatalities in the Second World War were far fewer than in the First. Nevertheless, Peterhouse, a small college, lost 60, Christ’s 115, Queens’ 116, Pembroke 149 and Trinity 389. Supplementary panels bearing the relevant names were appended to previous college memorials. Many expressed similar sentiments to those of the Pembroke inscription – ‘With the same courage and the same love of their country these also laid down their lives.’ Trinity opted for a more poetic quotation from 1 Samuel 25:16 ‘They were like a wall around us night and day.’
Members of the medieval university were required to affirm their status in clothing and appearance. Peterhouse statutes of 1338 ordered that ‘the scholars of our house shall adopt the clerical dress and tonsure … and not allow their beard or their hair to grow contrary to canonical prohibition, nor wear rings upon their fingers for their own vain glory.’ King’s College statutes of 1443 banned ‘red and green shoes, or secular ornaments or fancy hoods … or swords or long knives … or girdles and belts adorned with gold and silver …’
Such restrictions survived the reformation of religion. In 1575 law professor William Soone (c.1520–1580), advised a foreign friend that ‘the common dress of all is a sacred cap; (I call it sacred, because worn by priests); a gown reaching down to their heels, of the same form as that of priests.’ In fact, university regulations a decade later were much more prescriptive and detailed than that, prohibiting the wearing of then-fashionable stuffed garments, which exaggerated the contours of the body, and instead requiring that gowns be made of ‘woollen cloth of … sad colour’, with standing not falling collars, and a hood of ‘the same or like cloth and colour’. Further prohibitions outlawed the wearing of velvet or silk or any embroidered item or any garment with fancy stitching, lace or slashes to reveal the lining.
Anticipating a visit from William Laud (1573–1645), the authoritarian Archbishop of Canterbury, who had taken a keen personal interest in conditions at Oxford, in 1636 the authorities had a pre-emptive report compiled on Common Disorders in the University, including a list of inappropriate current fashions – ‘Roses upon the Shoe, long frizzled hair upon the head, broad spread bands upon the Shoulders and long large Merchants’ Ruffs about the neck, with fair feminine Cuffs at the wrist’. In the event the inspectorial visit never materialised.
Some undergraduates endured the additional tyranny of continued parental interventions. In 1624 Lady Katherine Paston wrote to her son William at Corpus Christi:
I do send thee a new suit of satin to wear this commencement, as also a pair of silk stockings, points, garters and shoe strings and a silver girdle … have a great care to wear thy clothes neat and clean, it is a great Commendation to see a young man … neat, without spots and dirtiness …
In 1625 she sent a suit of damask and in 1626 another, a girdle, two shirts and two ruffs and gave permission to buy a newly-fashionable beaver hat. Other parents had the opposite problem of curbing their offspring’s desire to cut a figure. In 1680 one wrote to the Master of St Catharine’s:
Let the milliners etc. be forbidden to trust him; he hath clothes enough for a quarter of a year … watch him for speaking untruths, to which he is so prone; as also to chop and change his clothes so as to cut and alter them to my great detriment…
If metropolitan fashion-consciousness obtruded on provincial Cambridge, officially approved costumes remained de rigeur for formal occasions. In 1748 the Universal Magazine published illustrations of 24 different modes of academic dress, ranging from a vice-chancellor to a college servant. These showed, for example, that while doctors of divinity wore a mortar-board, doctors of law or physic or music wore a soft cap. There was still a distinctive outfit for the son of a nobleman – 60 years later Byron would exult at the effect produced in Hall when he donned his for the first time and looked, by his own account, ‘Superb’ – which, at £100, it should have. Another gown, to be worn on festival days only, cost at least another £50. Trinity undergraduates likewise had their own distinctive purple gowns, trimmed in silver or gold. There was even a special dress for a Master of Arts in mourning.
Sporting colours
Sartorially speaking, sport remained a casual concern, as testified by a cricketer who played in the first match against Oxford in 1827 – ‘We had no colours … we wore pretty much what we liked … Knee-breeches and thin gauze silk stockings, doubled up at the ankles, formed a popular costume’. 60 years later it would be very different, as newcomers were advised that ‘in the matter of hats, there is safety in the ordinary hard round felt; even a straw hat should not be brought up, as the colour of the straw and of the ribbon will depend on the College Club which is eventually joined.’
There was one sport which, even in late Victorian times, had no dress code – literally, as Gwen Raverat remembered:
All summer, Sheep’s Green and Coe Fen were pink … for bathing drawers did not exist then … to go Up River, the goal of all the best picnics, the boats had to go right by the bathing place, which lay on both sides of the narrow stream. These dangerous straits were taken in silence, and at full speed. The Gentlemen were set to the oars … and each Lady unfurled a parasol, and, like an ostrich, buried her head in it … until the crisis was past and the river was decent again.
Dandy dons
In the city itself, by contrast, the strictest propriety was maintained and as late as the eve of the Great War the official Students’ Handbook made it clear that ‘on Sundays cap and gown must be worn in the courts and grounds; but students going for a country walk may wear ordinary dress provided they do not pass through the streets’ – quite how this was possible was unexplained.
Dons’ eccentricities – manifested in a bewildering variety of mannerisms – often extended to their dress. A C Benson thought that a don should wear the ‘style-before-last’ and himself favoured shapeless flannels. Professor Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863–1944), by contrast, was accused of giving lectures ‘rather too carefully dressed for Cambridge’. In his off-duty hours ‘Q’ favoured full riding-gear – ‘a suit of emphatic checks and a brown bowler hat and brown leather gaiters’. According to Bertrand Russell, Aldis Wright (1831–1914), Vice-Master of Trinity, never appeared outdoors ‘without a top hat. Even once when he was roused from sleep at three in the morning by a fire, the top hat was duly on his head.’ Philosopher George Edward Moore was a caricature of the absent-minded professor – ‘his gown was always covered in chalk, his cap was in rags or missing … He would go across town to his class with no more formal footwear than his bedroom slippers’. The economist A C Pigou favoured white gym-shoes with black laces and at High Table wore ‘a double-breasted lounge jacket filched from a parcel of clothes that his aunt was sending to a Church Army shelter.’ The critic F R Leavis famously did not wear neckties and dressed, if the word can be used at all accurately with reference to one so fastidious of language, like a rather slovenly gardener.
There were, of course, also undergraduate poseurs. The exquisitely tailored future avant-garde novelist Ronald Firbank (1886–1926) affected imported ties and antique rings and, anxious to remain slim, ‘used to starve himself, go out for runs in all weathers etc.’ The poet Rupert Brooke ‘dressed in a coal-black flannel shirt, with a bright red tie and a suit of grey homespun’, calculated to throw ‘the fine colouring of his head into strong relief’.
Female fashions
The advent of female undergraduates and the permission for dons to marry inevitably brought a novel dimension to the Cambridge fashion scene but, according to Noel Annan (1916–2000), this was inhibited by a residual, moralistic evangelicalism:
A fashionably dressed wife would not only have been an extravagance but an act of submission to worldly vanity: and the Pre-Raphaelite cloaks and dresses which had been donned as a homage to beauty and a protest against the world of upper-class fashion degenerated in some cases into thick woollen stockings and flannel petticoats … worn as a badge of financial and spiritual austerity.
Gwen Raverat, who lived very near Newnham, thought its inhabitants wore deliberately dull clothes to show they were serious students. Dora Black (1894–1986) of Girton, future wife of Bertrand Russell, denied this – ‘we … did not wear severe shirt blouses with formal ties, nor did we drag back our hair; we were most fashion-conscious, much given to saucy hats, designed to impress male colleagues at lectures’. Frances Partridge (1900–2004) of Newnham recalled the challenge of the 1920s dance craze. She had only one, rather old, evening dress, trimmed inexpertly to make it look different for special occasions – ‘being impatient by nature I cut and stitched away at random, adding a bit of ribbon for a belt, elastic in the hem to give the fashionable “Turkish trouser” look … I must have looked a perfect fright and was lucky not to come to pieces in mid-tango’. Finally, in desperation, she dyed the dress an unfashionable black ‘and removed most of the front and all the back down to the waist, so as to give a startling décolletage which I vaguely shrouded in some pieces of gauze rather like wings. In this getup I was reported to look very “fast” …’
Shabby chic
The aristocratic Russian émigré Vladimir Nabokov, writing of the same era, was considerably underwhelmed by the masculine ‘style’ of the day:
The usual attire of the average Cambridge undergraduate, whether athlete or leftish poet, struck a sturdy and dingy note: his shoes had thick rubber soles, his flannel trousers were dark grey, and the buttoned sweater, called a ‘jumper’, under his Norfolk jacket was a conservative brown. What I suppose might be termed the gay set wore old pumps, very light grey flannel trousers, a bright-yellow ‘jumper’ and the coat part of a good suit.
Formal academic dress remained spectacularly anachronistic, much to the delight of outsiders. When Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was made a Fellow of Magdalene in 1932 he wrote to his daughter that ‘if you had seen your Dad in a fair white linen surplice (most becoming) with his red D Litt hood trailing down his back, you’d have been impressed … I look very beautiful at meals in a simple black gown with ample sleeves …’ As late as 1955 the American poet Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) could still write excitedly to her mother that she was ‘quite loving wearing my black gown, which makes me feel so wonderfully part of this magnificent place! Sort of like Sacramental robes!’
During World War Two, when civilian living standards fell by 50 per cent, shabbiness was patriotic. Cambridge, chilly at the best of times, witnessed a revival of the medieval habit of wearing gowns and even overcoats indoors. Corduroys, formerly the sturdy garb of the working man, came into favour for their warmth and durability. Sir James Beament (1921–2005), a Fellow of Queens’, observed:
It seems surprising that, with clothes rationed, gowns were still made and had to be worn at night, but squares (mortar boards) were abandoned in 1942 because they became trophies grabbed in the black-out by US airmen with whom the streets of the city abounded. And, because gowns made us identifiable, a few of the pubs most frequented by the said airmen were out-of-bounds to the University ….
Austerity was not to last. In the mid-1950s the official Student Handbook underlined the resurgence of full-fledged sartorial snobbery with its strident admonitions:
Throw those corduroys away; this is not Nottingham University. If you want to wear undergraduate uniform (which we don’t particularly recommend, and which does not include any part of Army uniform!) it consists for lectures of sports jacket and flannels. Eminently preferable is cavalry twill trousers, and a blazer, but don’t, repeat don’t, wear a pullover with a blazer; it looks like Balham Tech if you do. Otherwise suits on high days and holidays and duffles any time at all. No macintoshes – this is NOT Balham Tech.’
The same publication insisted:
DO wear a gown after dusk or when in the University Library or Church, or in the Senate House, also in lectures and when paying calls on University officials. The gown must be worn ‘in decent order and in the proper manner’. It is not worn thus if worn over a sweater or by ladies in trousers …
As late as 1967 the unwary were advised that they would be committing a breach of discipline if seen smoking while wearing academic dress and equally if wearing a coloured blazer (i.e. not plain dark blue or black) ‘except on the way to or from a dinner at which blazers are worn with evening dress’. A glimpse of another world …
The sartorial wind was, however, already blowing in a quite different direction. In 1962 bespoke tailor Pratt, Manning and Co closed down, pronouncing its own sniffy epitaph – ‘thirty years ago students were proud of their dress and bought four suits at a time. Now they shuffle around in jeans and sweaters and do not have two ha’pennies to rub together.’
The banner of elegance is still flown, however, at robemakers Ede and Ravenscroft, whose premises at the corner of Trumpington Street and Silver Street are as stylish as their window displays. Founded in London in 1689, the company’s website cautiously claims that it is ‘thought to be the oldest firm of tailors in the world’. Having provided the robes for the coronation of William and Mary in the year of its foundation, the firm has held royal warrants from 13 successive monarchs. Apart from tailoring and the manufacture of academic, judicial and ceremonial robes, Ede and Ravenscroft also make wigs and offer dress hire and photographic services, aimed particularly at graduating students in all their (temporary) finery (www.edeandravenscroft.co.uk). At the other end of King’s Parade, by Great St Mary’s, Ryder and Amies, self-proclaimed ‘University Store’ for 120 years, also offer a comprehensive range of armorial plaques, college ties, bow-ties, scarves, cuff-links, caps, sweatshirts, T-shirts and even ‘hoodies’ (www.ryderamies.co.uk). Pembroke Street offers a similar selection in the bijou premises of the appropriately named A E Clothier (www.aeclothier.co.uk).