Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [68]
Who were the Cambridge reds? The question is easier to answer for the less numerous communists than for the CUSC. Before the era of anti-fascism and the Popular Front there were occasional aristocrats, such as the splendidly named A. R. Hovell-Thurlow-Cumming-Bruce, later a kind-hearted judge, who as a small child had played at Chats-worth, where he broke one of the Duke’s massive oriental vases, but mostly they came from the prosperous professional, or more rarely business, upper middle class – the Schlegels rather than the Wilcoxes (to use the convenient distinction in E. M. Forster’s novel Howards End). Noel Annan’s ‘intellectual aristocracy’ was represented, not least by the charismatic John Cornford, a great-grandson of Charles Darwin, but not dominant. The proportion of members from public schools was distinctly smaller in my time, that is after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, when the numbers both of the Party and the CUSC shot up. The grammar schools of England and Wales (though not their equivalents in Scotland) were almost certainly better represented in the Party, and certainly in its leadership, than in the general body of Cambridge undergraduates. The student Party’s chief local commissar at the time was a lean-and-hungry-looking mathematician from a working-class family, George Barnard of St John’s, who ended his career as President of the Royal Statistical Society and in a chair at Essex University and whose younger sister, Dorothy (Wedderburn), whom I got to know after the war, was to become and remain an intimate friend of Marlene and myself. Equally prominent, a little later, was Ralph Russell, a working-class classics student of steely bolshevik demeanour – we called him ‘Georgi’ after Georgi Dimitrov, the Secretary of the Comintern. The products of ‘progressive schools’ (Bedales, Dartington, etc.) were also likely to move left, as were the young of Quaker families. It has been suggested that Jews were slightly over-represented, but that is not my memory. Communism – irreligious and anti-Zionist – attracted very few in the small body of Jewish students at Cambridge, sympathetic to Liberals and Labour though these tended to be. If anyone in my time was regarded as a prominent Jewish leftist student, it was the South African Aubrey Eban (Abba Eban), destined for political eminence in Israel, whose Zionism kept him safe from communist temptation. Nor did the few Party members who were Jews think about their Judaism until, I think in 1937, King Street decided we should, and formed a ‘Jewish group’ or committee in London which ‘Ram’ Nahum and I reluctantly attended a few times before concluding that it had little reference to what we were doing. I remember the committee for my first encounter with the sort of East End communists who could not stop telling (extremely funny) Jewish jokes, a practice not characteristic of Party meetings in Cambridge.
No doubt this type of socio-cultural analysis throws some light on the distinction between Cambridge right and left, but it is less illuminating than another phenomenon, which still needs explanation. More than one observer might agree with Henry Ferns, that ‘the only element common to all the Communists I encountered (in Cambridge) was high intelligence’.4 In the 1930s the left attracted the intellectually brightest members of the student generation in the country’s elite universities.
Much larger though their numbers were, the members of the CUSC were also characteristically people of intellectual interests, although the club was sufficiently aware of the social dimension of life to organize a dancing class. It had the substantial advantage, not enjoyed by many undergraduate societies, of a large membership in both Girton and Newnham, whose idea of political activism, though just as serious as the men’s, was often less heavy. (The first Valentine I ever received was collectively