Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [63]
I had less contact with the college’s three serious historians. As professors, two no longer supervised undergraduates: the tiny, witty, eminent and unbelievably conservative F. A. Adcock, Professor of ancient history, and the impressive and craggy John Clapham, just retired from the chair of economic history, author of that rarest of products of history in interwar Cambridge, a major work on a major topic, namely the three volumes of his Economic History of Modern Britain (1926–38). He was a mountaineer, which fitted in with the ethos of King’s; but was also both a solidly married man and firmly attached to the North of England nonconformity from which he sprang, which did not. (Nobody would have guessed that both Provost Sheppard and Maynard Keynes came from provincial Baptist stock.) I wish I had learned more from the third, John Saltmarsh, who did supervise me, for he published hardly anything, but poured his enormous learning into the lectures I did not attend.
The man who from 1933 to 1954 presided over the college’s fortunes (which, though we did not know it, were growing rather satisfactorily thanks to the financial acumen of his backer, fellow-gambler and fellow-Apostle Maynard Keynes) was Provost Sheppard. He was then in his mid-fifties, but since his full head of hair had gone white during the First World War, he had adopted the character of an old gentleman, doddering round the college in dark suits of stiffish cloth and a stiff wing-collar, saying ‘bless you, dear boy’ to (preferably good-looking) undergraduates encountered on his way. He kept open house at the Provost’s Lodge every Sunday evening, and would sit on the floor among the young men pretending, or possibly actually trying, to light his pipe, to encourage conversation. It was on one of these occasions that I encountered my first Cabinet minister, a man of platitudes and pompous body language whom Neville Chamberlain had just appointed to co-ordinate British defence. Not unexpectedly, he confirmed all my prejudices against the government of appeasers.
Undergraduates enjoyed the Provost as a star music-hall turn, on and off the boards and in the lecture hall, which he treated as a stage. 7 He was not respected, but quite often sentimentalized, and he certainly sentimentalized himself. In fact, he was a lifelong spoiled child of quite appalling character, which, as he grew older, was no longer mitigated by the charm, sense of fun and liberalism of his younger days. As he grew older he became more passionately royalist. A classicist, he had long given up research himself, and was no longer taken seriously by others. A failure as a scholar and as the head of a college – he never had his brief stint as Vice-Chancellor, the usual reward for even moderately competent heads of houses – he became an active enemy to the pursuit of knowledge. King’s may have been the centre of the Cambridge beau monde in the 1930s, but it was not an academically distinguished college (except in economics, over which he had no control). He was against science. ‘King’s College, Cambridge?’ said the President of Harvard. ‘Isn’t that the place where the natural sciences are denounced from the chair?’ As undergraduates we had little idea of the malice and bitchiness behind the mask of camp senile benevolence. Still, though he is one of the few people in my life for whom I came to feel genuine hate, I cannot bring myself not to feel pity for his miserable last years, when, no longer Provost and unable to conceive of a King’s that was not an extension of his own personality, in visible mental decline, he chose the last of his roles on the college stage, that of a dishevelled King Lear standing by the college gates, silently denouncing the injustices done to him.