Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [61]
Cambridge has changed so profoundly since the 1950s that it is difficult to grasp just how isolated and parochial the place was in the 1930s even academically – apart from the incomparable national and international distinction of its natural sciences. With the exception of its world-class economics, it refused to recognize the social sciences. Its arts subjects were, at best, patchy. However implausible it seems, outside the natural sciences most of the university took little interest in research, and none in higher degrees such as Ph.D.s which were regarded at best as a German peculiarity and, more likely, as a lower-middle-class affectation. Even on the eve of the war Cambridge contained fewer than 400 research students.4 It remained essentially a finishing school for young men and a much smaller number of young women, operating a double standard. Getting a Cambridge First, or the rarer ‘starred’ First, was, indeed, extremely hard, but it was even more difficult not to get a degree at all, because ‘passes’, or even the bottom layer of Third class honours, were virtually given away. I recall a discussion at an examiners’ meeting for the Economics Tripos in the early 1950s – I examined the economic history papers for some years – when we decided, not entirely with tongue in cheek, that anyone who knew the difference between production and consumption should pass the line. It was typical of this dichotomy that such degrees were known (among dons) as ‘Trinity Thirds’, for Trinity, Isaac Newton’s own college, contained plenty of young men of this description as well as, at this period, probably more Nobel Prize winners and aspirants than any other educational institution of its size on the globe. At the time I arrived in Cambridge one future Nobel laureate (R. L. M. Synge) was already a research student in biochemistry, another (J. C. Kendrew) was just about to start his first year.
The university and college authorities would certainly have been amazed and appalled by the Cambridge of 2000, filled with ‘science parks’, business negotiations with global entrepreneurs and ‘Cambridge’s spires (that) dream not of academe but of profit’.5 Theirs was a modest, introverted country town on the edge of East Anglia. Lacking industry it was not so much overshadowed as blotted out by the university, on which it largely depended in an antique way, by providing the colleges with porters, servants and landladies for the majority of the university’s young men for whom there was no room in the actual college buildings, and multiple incentives for 5,000 undergraduates, assumed to be fairly well heeled, to spend more than their allowances. By later standards it had surprisingly few places for eating meals out, although the Arts Theatre, one of Maynard Keynes’s many initiatives, had just opened, and included what set out to be a fashionable restaurant. It had ten cinemas. (Filmgoing was sufficiently familiar at the High Tables for an essay De Fratribus Marx (On the Marx Brothers) to be set in 1938 for one of the Classics prizes.)
What made Cambridge parochialism worse was that the place circumscribed within college walls the lives of the dons who lived there all the time – unlike undergraduates who spent only twenty-four weeks a year there – many of them bachelor scholars, then still so common. The Second World War, which sent so many of them into the wider world – if sometimes no further than the codebreaking centre at Bletchley – was still in the future. Some of them, one felt, knew about the world beyond Royston, ten miles south of Cambridge, only by hearsay. Indeed, compared to Oxford, Cambridge University was surprisingly remote from the centres of national life, which may explain why, unlike Oxford, none of its twentieth-century alumni became prime minister. Norfolk, where dons went on holiday, not to mention Newmarket, the famous racecourse, seemed a good deal closer than London.
Such was the place I came to, from a family no member of which had ever been to a university and a school which had never sent anyone to Cambridge.