Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [64]
The only other fellows with whom I had contact were the Tutor and Dean, and the history teachers. The Tutor, Donald Beves, was a large, peaceful, broad-beamed man whose passions were amateur dramatics – he was a celebrated Falstaff – and collecting Stuart and Georgian glass, which he displayed in his comfortable set of rooms, from which he surveyed the disciplinary problems of the young with an intermittent attention to administrative detail. His field was French, and he kept in regular touch with that country by touring its restaurants during vacations with friends in his Rolls-Bentley. He is not known to have published anything on its language or literature. Many years later, since his surname had five letters and began with a B like Anthony Blunt’s, some journalist, misinterpreting a leak, suggested that he might be the notorious ‘third’ or ‘fourth’ of the Cambridge spies for whom every editor was then looking. The idea of Donald Beves as a Soviet agent struck everybody who had ever met him as even more absurd than the suggestion, which was also floated for a moment at the peak of the espionage mania, that another closet bolshevik was the genuinely distinguished Professor A. C. Pigou, fellow of King’s for fifty-seven years, the founder of welfare economics, and reputed (with the great physicist J. J. Thompson) to be the worst-dressed man in Cambridge. Still, Pigou, another lifelong bachelor, was at least a pacifist, when not reflecting on economic matters and inviting intelligent, athletic and handsome young scholars to climb the crags from his cottage in the Lake District.
Actually, with one alleged exception, the links of King’s dons with intelligence were with the British rather than the Soviet secret services. Kingsmen, headed by the small, roly-poly later professor of ancient history, F. E. Adcock, had set up the British codebreaking establishment in the First World War, and at least seventeen King’s dons were recruited by Adcock for the much more famous establishment at Bletchley during the Second World War, including probably the only genius at King’s in my undergraduate years, the mathematical logician Alan Turing, whom I recall as a clumsy-looking, pale-faced young fellow given to what would today be called jogging. The person generally understood to be the local talent-spotter for the secret services – most Oxbridge colleges had at least one – was the Dean, Patrick Wilkinson, an exceptionally courteous and agreeable classical scholar with a constant half-smile and a tall head with very little hair that put me in mind, I don’t know why, of Long John Silver in Treasure Island. To everyone’s surprise he returned after the war from Bletchley a married man. Unlike the Provost, he was genuinely, deeply and unselfishly devoted to the college and its members. For many years he was responsible for the annual college report which provided full, if sometimes not completely explicit, obituaries of all Kingsmen without exception, however obscure: a document as elegantly written as it was (and continues to be) sociologically invaluable.
Cambridge in the 1930s no longer paid much attention to the object of medieval universities, instruction for the professions requiring special forms of knowledge – the clergy, the law and medicine – although it made provision for the early stages of training for them. Its purpose, at least in the arts, was not to train experts, but to form members of a ruling class. In the past this had been done on the basis of an education in the classics of ancient Greece and, above all, Rome, largely achieved by instructing the young in such esoteric practices as writing Greek and Latin verse. This tradition was far from dead. Something like seventy-five people (as against about fifty each in history and natural sciences) won scholarships or exhibitions in classics in the 1935 scholarship examination, most of them, of course, from the public schools, since not many grammar schools like my own taught Greek. But increasingly since the late nineteenth century history (centred on the political and constitutional