Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [60]
After this brief intermezzo, let me return to Cambridge in the 1930s. It is first necessary to grasp, in spite of all apparent continuities, how different the place was then from what it is today.
I have had an association with Cambridge ever since I first went up for the scholarship exam in 1935, or rather with King’s, for (apart from arranging to examine me for a BA and a Ph.D.) the university has firmly kept me at a distance. On the other hand, my links with King’s College are unbroken. There is no time of day or night, no season of the year, and no phase of my life since 1935, when I have not looked from the humpbacked bridge over the river Cam, across the unbroken expanse of the great back lawn, to the extraordinary combination of the bleak Gothic rear of the chapel, giving no hint of the marvels inside, and the equally spare eighteenth-century elegance of the Gibbs Building: and always with the same astonished intake of breath as the first time. Not many people have been so lucky.
For young men who, like scholars of King’s, passed all their undergraduate terms within college, Cambridge was like enjoying the constant and envied public company of a universally admired woman – you might say it was like going to all one’s parties with Botticelli’s Primavera. (The domestic side of college life in the 1930s – peeing into the sink in the gyp room since the nearest bathroom and toilet might be three flights of stairs, a courtyard and a basement away – could be less inspiring.) However, even the majority of undergraduates who spent at least part of their years in some remote bedsit in a Victorian terrace could not escape the sheer force of seven centuries of Cambridge teaching and learning. Everything was designed to make us into pillars of a tradition reaching back to the thirteenth century, though some of the most apparently ancient expressions of it, such as the Festival of Lessons and Carols on Christmas Eve in King’s College Chapel, had in fact been invented only a few years before I came to the college. (Many years later this was to inspire a conference and book on The Invention of Tradition.)2 Undergraduates wore their short black gowns to go to lectures and supervisions, into the obligatory collective dinner in college halls and (with caps) whenever out in the streets after dark, policed by more amply gowned and capped Proctors, assisted by their ‘bulldogs’. Dons entered lecture rooms with their long gowns billowing and the squares planted with precision on their heads.3 Scholars read the Latin grace to the standing multitude before dinner and lessons in ancient chapels. (With tongue in cheek, the chapel dean of King’s made me read a piece of the book of Amos, the closest thing to a militant bolshevik preacher in the Old Testament.) The Cambridge past, like the ceremonial fancy-dress past of British public life, was not, of course, a chronological succession of time, but a synchronic jumble of its surviving relics. The glory and continuity of seven centuries were supposed to inspire us, to assure us of our superiority and to warn us against the temptations of ill-considered change. (In the 1930s they spectacularly failed to do so.) The main contribution of Cambridge to political theory and practice, as described brilliantly by the classicist F. M. Cornford in his little squib Microcosmographia Academica (1908), was ‘the principle of unripe time’. Whatever anyone proposed, the time for doing it was not yet ripe. It was powerfully reinforced by the principle of ‘the entering wedge’. Of course our undergraduate lives were lived at a level far below that of the master-operators of these principles, but those of us who became dons soon discovered