Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [71]
I found the atmosphere of the LSE congenial, and its library, then still in the main building, a good place to work. It was full of central Europeans and colonials, and therefore markedly less provincial than Cambridge, if only by its commitment to social sciences such as demography, sociology and social anthropology, which were of no interest on the Cam. Curiously enough, the subject that gave its name to the school was at that time – and indeed had always been – both less distinguished and less enterprising than at Cambridge, though it attracted some very brilliant junior talent, which alas found no lasting posts in Houghton Street.
I must in some ways have felt more at ease in the LSE student atmosphere, and certainly with its women students, for I established a lifetime friendship with two of the girls I met there, and later married another, though less permanently. Three of my LSE communist student contemporaries became lifetime friends: the historian John Saville (then still known as Stamatopoulos or ‘Stam’), his companion and later wife, Constance Saunders, and the impressive James B. Jefferys, who made the transition from a Ph.D. in economic history to wartime convenor of shop stewards at Dunlops, and – less successfully – back again to research, for he became a victim of the Cold War ban on communist academics. It was through another LSE contemporary that I maintained, or rather re-established, links with Austria: the sporting, bushy-haired charmer Tedy Prager, who later got his economics Ph.D. under Joan Robinson in Cambridge, more in tune with his ideas than the LSE’s Robbins and Hayek. Sent by his family out of harm’s way from Vienna, having got into trouble resisting the Austrofascist regime after the civil war of 1934, he abandoned promising careers in Britain and in the ruins of postwar Vienna, to which, like almost all Austrian communists, he returned from British exile.
In the summer vacations the Cambridge student Party militants went to France to work with James Klugmann. With Margot Heinemann, James was my link with the heroic era of Cambridge communism before my time. (Both remained communists to the end of their lives.) Margot, one of the most remarkable people I have ever known, had been John Cornford’s last love, to whom he wrote one of his last poems from Spain, which has since become an anthology piece, and later partnered J. D. Bernal. Through a lifetime of comradeship, example and advice, she probably had more influence on me than any other person I have known.
James had been the Party’s acknowledged co-leader with John. For most of the Cambridge student militants he was and long remained a person of enormous prestige, even a sort of guru. I assume that, of all the student communists of his time, he was the one in closest touch with the International, for after graduation, abandoning an academic future for which he was admirably suited, he moved to Paris as Secretary of the Rassemblement Mondial des Etudiants (RME) (World Student Assembly) a broad, but Party-controlled international student organization. On my way to see him there once I recall crossing the path of one Raymond Guyot, a French heavyweight and for several years the Secretary-General of the Communist Youth International. It operated out of one of those small dusty Balzacian backstairs offices so characteristic of unofficial pre-war politics, in the ill-named Cité ś Paradis, a gloomy dead-end in the 10th arrondissement, and later in a more ambitious locale on the Left Bank. Its most obvious public activities were to organize periodic world congresses, which Cambridge and