Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [65]
The essential elements in a Cambridge education outside the natural sciences were the weekly essay written for a private session with a ‘supervisor’, and the Tripos, the degree examination in two parts, at the end of a one-year and a two-year course. Lectures were less important. They were mainly aimed at those who relied on the notes taken in the so-called ‘bread-and-butter courses’ to get them through the Tripos. Good students soon discovered that they could get more out of an hour’s reading in the magnificent libraries of college, faculty and university than an hour’s listening to undemanding public speech. Except for the ‘Special Subject’ taken in one’s last year, I doubt whether I went to any lecture course consistently after my first term, other than M. M. Postan’s economic history lectures, lectures so intellectually exciting – at the time I wrote about ‘that air of revivalism that pervaded’ them8 – that they brought the brightest of my generation of history students out at nine a.m. Good students might end by hardly going to lectures at all, but nobody seemed to mind. We learned more from reading and talking to other good students.
Not that getting a degree, let alone a good degree, was the only thing in the minds of young men and young women who found themselves in a place as full of interesting things to do as Cambridge, and with more leisure to do them than most other adults. I myself found no difficulty in combining enough academic work to do well at exams, with active undergraduate journalism and pretty full-time activity in the Socialist Club and the Communist Party. And that without counting such time spent on extra-curricular talking, social life, punting on the Cam, the pursuit of friendship and love, etc. There seemed to be time for almost everything. Perhaps the only two activities I started but gave up were taking the university course in Russian from the formidable Elizabeth Hill – which has confined me to remaining a purely western cosmopolitan – and the Cambridge Union, whose debates were commonly regarded as the training ground for future politicians. I cannot remember why I decided to give up the Union, although my early efforts had been encouraged by the then President, whom I discovered later to be a non-public Party member. It certainly saved money.
As soon as I arrived, my politics had been discovered and I was immediately invited to join the Cambridge Student Branch of the Communist Party. I eventually became a member of its ‘Secretariat’ of three, the highest political function I have ever occupied. The memoirs of a contemporary are mistaken in saying I became its Secretary in 1938, but correct in observing that I was not a natural leader figure.9 Still, its two most prestigious leaders had gone: the dark and handsome John Cornford, whose photograph was on all progressive Cambridge mantelpieces, to fight and die in Spain; James Klugmann (see below) to Paris. Its most obvious nursery of revolution was the set of rooms, bursting with posters and leaflets, in Whewell’s Court, Trinity, just below Ludwig Wittgenstein, shared by the American Michael Whitney Straight and the biochemist Hugh Gordon. However, Trinity was the centre of graduate rather than undergraduate communism. That was, somewhat unexpectedly, Pembroke College, which, in addition to one of the rare communist dons (the superb Germanist Roy Pascal), sheltered a number of comrades, including two of the main organizers, David Spencer and Ephraim Alfred (‘Ram’) Nahum, a squat, dark natural scientist with a big nose, radiating physical strength, energy and authority. He was the son of a prosperous Sephardic textile merchant from Manchester and, by general consent, the ablest of all communist student leaders of my generation. As a graduate