Enemies Within

by Richard Davenport-Hines

  Reade was a rarity in the Oxford of the 1920s. ‘We were avid for experience, and did not care overmuch if some of it turned out to be wasted,’ his contemporary Edward Sackville-West recalled, ‘for the twenties was the last great period of Privilege.’ The writers who most influenced this Oxford generation were Gide, Proust, Freud, D. H. Lawrence and Norman Douglas, the latter with his cult novel of cynical sensuality, South Wind. There was a ‘general reversal of values’ among the young literary intelligentsia: ‘private life took place in public, and public life in private’, according to Sackville-West, who in middle age claimed that he had been to bed with the youthful Donald Maclean.7

  During the 1920s the CPGB attitude to Oxford and Cambridge universities was ambivalent. An editorial in The Plebs, a Marxist magazine edited for a time by Dobb, denounced the provision by Oxford’s Extra-Mural Department of a two-year course of study free of charge for selected trade unionists: ‘the policy of Oxford in making this offer is to endeavour to deprive the trade union movement of its most promising brains’. The Plebs objected to class fluidity. Workers who had attended university would ‘fight violently against going back to factory or mine’. An Oxford education guaranteed that they would betray their class by finding ‘remunerative occupation amongst the under-strappers of the employing-class’.8

  Turning communist became fashionable in Cambridge colleges because of Maurice Dobb. Dobb was a north London draper’s son and a Leninist who thrived on crisis. Marxism became his imperative faith. ‘It is largely true’, he told a Cambridge meeting in 1920, ‘that man is not ultimately influenced by reason, but in the main finds reasons for what he wants to believe.’ Dobb was an ideologue on a quest for coherent ethical laws, true definitions and unselfish ruling principles; a class warrior, too, who wanted a dictatorship of the proletariat in which the bourgeoisie were cured of their ‘old psychology’. To the detriment of his academic career, he gave his best energies to promoting the cause of socialist equity for almost thirty years. The intellectual dishonesty and coercion of Lysenkoism, whereby thousands of Soviet biologists were dismissed, imprisoned and even executed for questioning the nonsensical Stalinist orthodoxy on genetics, finally disillusioned him in the late 1940s. Dobb formed the first communist cell in Cambridge University in June 1931. Without his leadership it is doubtful that communism would have been so influential in his college, Trinity, or in the wider university. He was crucial in creating Cambridge’s ring of five by setting Philby on the course that led to his recruitment by the NKVD.9

  Dobb’s account of his visit to Russia in 1925, which he compiled as a retort to Keynes’s criticisms of Soviet tyranny, is basic to understanding the development of the Cambridge communist mentality after 1931. Comparisons between capitalist individuality and Marxist collectivism were all to the latter’s advantage.

  Trains run on the main lines in Soviet Russia efficiently & to time – in fact on the Moscow–Leningrad line they have brand new wagons-lit which are the very acme of luxurious travelling. The telephones work, if anything, better than in London. The Nevsky in Leningrad – perhaps the most wonderful street in Europe – is gay with arc-lamps & lighted shops at night, thronged with people in & out of cafés, or the gardens of former palaces, where orchestras play Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov & Scriabin, with trams racing down at a terrifying speed merrily ringing their bells. In Moscow the streets are as clean as is compatible with cobbled surfaces; new Leyland motor buses rival the crowded tram-cars.

  Dobb admired the public parks, ‘with their cleverly worked Soviet designs in flowers, but disregard for the lawn-mower’. The performing arts were as good as those in Vienna. ‘Compared with anything in Western Europe, of course, standards of efficiency are exceedingly low. The Russian, with a temperament much like the Irish, is a charming and kindly creature who will promise one anything on earth in order not to seem unkind … but of elementary ideas of time, neatness, thoroughness … he seemed to me woefully devoid.’

  Leningrad and Moscow throbbed with zeal, Dobb continued. ‘There’s a hope in men’s eyes, and a sturdy determination among the young men and women who march in demonstrations.’ Factory workers knew that the unstoppable power of collective ownership was preordaining communist supremacy over capitalism. Echoing The Plebs editorial that deplored workers getting privileged Oxford experience and bettering themselves, Dobb admired the class immobility that he found in the Soviet system. Russians who sought to use education as a means to abandon their class, or regarded job promotion ‘as a reason for dressing-up in a stiff white collar & assuming the dignity of a “superior” person’ were despicable: ‘all one’s qualities as a “gentleman” which command respect, if not servility, in the bourgeois West, count in Russia for nothing, except for laughter & contempt’. At the frontier, where his train halted on his departure from Russia, Dobb disdained the Latvian customs official, ‘dressed as in a comic opera to show you that he was an officer & a gentleman, [who] displayed deference for my British passport & my bourgeois manner’. His disgust swelled on the journey from Riga to Berlin at ‘the fat, perfumed, wanton prosperity of a trans-continental restaurant car!’

  Dobb admitted that freedom was curtailed in Russia. ‘Members of the old régime are spied upon & watched. The Cheka, now the [O.]G.P.U., uses many of the weapons of the old Okhrana – spies in private households, offer of pardons to political prisoners if they will engage in espionage for the Government. There is a severe censorship, often like all censorships undiscriminating & stupid.’ Political prisoners in the Siberian Arctic were said to die of exposure or hunger, Dobb conceded, but there were extenuating circumstances. ‘One must preserve that sense of proportion which the intellectual so notoriously lacks. Russia emerged from invasion & civil war, is not only surrounded by foes, but has foes inside her boundaries, even in her Government offices.’ The oppression of the security forces was excusable because it bore ‘almost entirely on the bourgeois alone. The things which are forbidden to the worker are for the most part things which he does not want, or at least in Western Europe cannot usually afford. For him there is fairly free expression of opinion, because the whole essence of Communist theory is that Soviet rule should base itself on the consent of the masses & interpret their desires, & hence if the masses have a grumble, authority prefers it to be voiced aloud.’10

  Marxist converts after the 1931 crisis

  The hypothesis of capitalist equilibrium, which posited the impossibility of over-production, was refuted by the industrial rationalization movement of the late 1920s: Whitehall and the Bank of England induced competing steelworks, shipyards and cotton-spinners to merge and shut surplus factories, which aggravated regional unemployment. The Wall Street crash in 1929 and the abandonment in 1931 of the cherished idol of British capitalism, the gold standard that backed sterling, suggested to Dobb’s disciples that capitalism was decomposing. The electorate’s preference for reducing unemployment rather than lowering prices killed another sanctified emblem of British capitalism, free trade.

  A trigger was set on Easter Sunday of 1931. A fierce, single-minded Trinity undergraduate, David Guest, son of a former Labour MP, had gone to study mathematical philosophy at the University of Göttingen. He was detained at an anti-Nazi youth demonstration, was kept incommunicado and alone in a cell for a fortnight, and returned to England as a convinced communist. Together with a youth called Maurice Cornforth he joined the CPGB and henceforth sported a hammer-and-sickle badge on his jacket in Trinity. After this dual recruitment, Clemens Palme Dutt – a CPGB activist like his younger brother Rajani – visited the university to consult Dobb, who in June 1931 began organizing a proselytizing cell. The 1930s were the decade of conversion: in Britain 12,000 a year were received into the Catholic Church; communist and Catholic recruiting drives among Cambridge and Oxford undergraduates often had the same targets. Philip Toynbee, who joined the Oxford University communist party in 1935 and became its recruiting officer, visited the rooms of potential recruits only to find a
famous Roman Catholic proselytizer, Father Martin D’Arcy, already ensconced in them. Both creeds hoped to find a similar doctrinal amenability in the youths whom they approached.11

  Energetic younger dons recommended dialectical materialism to thoughtful undergraduates. Patrick Gordon Walker (one of the stalwarts of the Oxford Labour Club) invited undergraduate historians into his rooms at Christ Church in order to convince them that Marxism provided ‘objective laws of historical change’ that were both scientific and infallible. The young Hugh Trevor-Roper, who was told that ‘everything falls into place’ once the Marxist philosophy of history was accepted, felt in the mid-1930s, as he embarked on adult life, that ‘the vast pageant of history, hitherto so indeterminate, so formless, so mysterious, now had, as it seemed, a beautiful mechanic regularity’. Similarly, in Cambridge, Burgess became infatuated by historical determinism, which gave him the comforts of a requited lover. ‘The Marxist testaments explained all that had ever happened, all that was happening, and all that would happen, and what each person should do to help it all along,’ according to Michael (‘Micky’) Burn, who was one of Burgess’s boyfriends. ‘Nations, empires, epochs, fell into place as predictable stages in a perpetuum mobile of scene-changes.’12

  Some people’s education merely gives a fixed direction to their stupidity, as Lord Cromer said. Misogyny was rampant in Cambridge colleges. Male undergraduates broke down the gates of the women’s college Newnham in order to celebrate the vote in 1921 to exclude women from admission to the university. ‘This is a man’s University, and I can see no reason whatever why women should not form a University of their own,’ declared a graduate of Pembroke, Lord Portsea, in 1923. ‘There is no question that the sexes do not work well together in the University sense of work. There is the human animal, and the other animal.’ A writer in 1940 conceded that such women as the fourteenth-century Countess of Pembroke had been valuable as ‘pious Foundresses’ of segregated all-male colleges, but denied that there could be benefits in treating twentieth-century women as equal members of the university: ‘The most serious indictment of the women students, apart from the fearsomeness of the women which those students nearly always become unless they marry quickly and forget it all, is the complete pointlessness of their being there.’ Women were not admitted to full membership of the university until 1948.13

  Despite the brilliant reputations of Keynes and his colleagues at King’s, of the mathematicians, philosophers and scientists of Trinity and of Lord Rutherford’s team at the Cavendish Laboratory, insular complacence provided the keynote at many Cambridge colleges. The Senior Proctor of the university, an economist named Claude Guillebaud, wrote in 1934 with Anglocentric condescension of middle-class dictatorships in Italy and Germany, ‘and the picturesque personalities of Mussolini and Hitler’. This sort of sour put-down passed for clever wit in senior common rooms. John Bull smugness was unshaken by the arrival in the 1930s of such émigrés as the Budapest-born economist Péter Bauer, the Berlin-born biochemist Ernst Chain, the Freiburg-born scholar of Roman law and rabbinical studies David Daube, the Viennese-born molecular biologist Max Perutz, the Kiev-educated historian Michael (‘Munia’) Postan and the Austrian jurist and medieval historian Walter Ullmann. ‘The bulk of the dons I have met are dull and provincial,’ Postan reported to an anthropologist friend in 1935. ‘They read little, know less and are smug and conservative in the worst Edwardian manner. They sneer at “fellows with ideas” or tell funny stories about Americans … It is all very painful and explains why so many of the young scientists here turn communist.’14

  Lord David Cecil, the Oxford literary critic, whose family had lived in Hatfield House for 350 years, said after visiting dons in Cambridge colleges, ‘One feels that they have accidentally inherited the place and haven’t yet learnt how to live in it.’ Hugh Trevor-Roper mused about ‘the curiously unsympathetic, strained, correct, unintellectual atmosphere of the university there, compared with the Oxford atmosphere which, though often boring and even coarse, is at least alive’. Maurice Cranston who visited Cambridge to give a lecture which he had spent three weeks preparing was shocked by his reception: ‘Cambridge isn’t Oxford; I was treated with a mixture of crude lifemanship [competitiveness] and plain rudeness,’ he wrote in 1954. ‘Trinity high table turned out to be a workhouse board, and the dinner was gastronomically lower than Lyons’ [Corner House], but there was plenty of wine, and I just gulped it down. For two hours before I had been sitting with my host, he offering no sherry, no conversation and no response to my increasingly nervous efforts to make it.’15

  Young Marxists of the 1930s were intolerant of constrictive policing in the British Isles but acquiesced in the murderous political policing of the Soviet Union. Party members in Cambridge were indignant at the authorities’ treatment of the aged trade union leader Tom Mann, who spent two months in Brixton prison for refusing in 1932 to be bound over to keep the peace after calling for a day of action against unemployment. Two years later, their ire was renewed when Mann and Harry Pollitt of the CPGB were prevented from addressing a mass demonstration against unemployment in Hyde Park, by being arrested under Lord Sidmouth’s Seditious Meetings Act of 1817 for speeches they had made in Wales. Notes of Mann’s speech, taken by two constables named Onions and Fudge, had him denouncing ‘the rotten ruling class’ responsible for this ‘tyrannical age’: ‘now is time for … class action. We must take control of the points of government – railways, dockyards, shipyards, telephones, wireless stations and use them for our cause. The workers are our weapons.’ Mann and Pollitt certainly thought in these terms; but the constables had taken notes only on passages in the speech that they considered ‘strong’, and had not recorded all that was said. Denis Pritt, representing Mann, played court-room tricks to discredit their abilities as note-takers. His humiliation of the police witnesses ensured Mann’s acquittal to the delight of CPGB members in Cambridge, who were indignant about Onions and Fudge, but indifferent to the enormities of the Gulag.16

  Cambridge undergraduate communists were similarly riled by Lord Trenchard, the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, proposing in 1933 that Scotland Yard should undergo technological modernization, with patrol cars linked by radio to a central communications room. Trenchard recommended forming an officer corps of university-educated men, who would be excluded from membership of the Police Federation to ensure that they did not share the outlook of the rank and file or be at risk of imbibing the Federation’s milk-and-water trade unionism. Constables were to be given police housing and recreational facilities that would distance them from their working-class neighbours. The left found these plans sinister and oppressive – indeed fascistic. George Lansbury, the Labour party leader, speaking in a Commons debate, called Trenchard’s proposals ‘a downright piece of class legislation’. The sequel, he predicted, would be that Trenchard, who was a marshal of the Royal Air Force, would organize police aerial bombing raids on working-class protesters: ‘Yes, a couple of aeroplanes did fly over a body of men at Coventry and we were threatened with what would happen.’ Echoing the complaints of Jack Hayes against General Macready in 1919, Lansbury warned that the Metropolitan Police was being turned into a ‘semi-military’ force. ‘Trenchard’s proposals’, David Guest concluded in an agitprop magazine called The Student’s Vanguard, ‘illustrate almost every point in the Marxist theory of the capitalist state.’17

  Guest, like Dobb, was a member of Trinity College, as were Blunt, Philby, Burgess and Cairncross. Some of the greatest minds of early twentieth-century England were Fellows of Trinity: the mathematician G. H. Hardy, the philosophers Moore, Russell, Whitehead and Wittgenstein; the classicist A. E. Housman; the historian George Macaulay Trevelyan. The Master until his death in 1940 was the Nobel physics laureate J. J. Thomson, ‘who, by virtue of his knowledge of the smallest particles, attained the Mastership of the greatest college in either university’, as A. S. F. (‘Granny’) Gow (a Fellow of Trinity) wrote in his Latin epitaph. ‘Loud-mouthed, toot
hless and unkempt, he married an unpleasant wife, thanks to whose money he was able to leave eighty thousand pounds sterling to his heirs, a house filthier than a pig-sty to the college, and to posterity an unforgettable model of avarice.’ College life fostered spiteful resentments among those Fellows who were not working hard enough.18

  The first of the Cambridge spies to reach Trinity was Anthony Blunt, who entered the college in 1926 and originally studied mathematics. In his first year, he was shy, disheartened, relatively poor and ill-dressed. In 1927 he changed his course from mathematics to modern languages: he already had perfect French and excellent Italian, but now turned to master German, which was the primary language of art scholarship. His first real love affair was with Peter Montgomery, the scion of Ulster military gentry. Sexual exchanges relaxed him, he dropped his defensive pose of sardonic misanthropy and evinced a dry sense of humour. In 1929 he became the lover of Virginia Woolf’s nephew Julian Bell, a rumpled, rumbustious and sturdy youth, who pursued Blunt for a quick inquisitive trial of a new sensation: his sexual energies were otherwise always directed at women. Blunt’s other undergraduate squeezes included Claud Phillimore, subsequently an architect who specialized in reducing extraneous wings of over-sized country houses during the cash-strapped 1950s. Phillimore’s father Lord Phillimore campaigned against Stalinist slave-labour tactics, and in 1931 sponsored legislation attempting to ban imports of timber and other commodities from penal colonies in the Gulag. He later commended Marshal Pétain for making a truce with Hitler in 1940 and decamped to South Africa in disgust at socialist post-war England.