It is clear from this that he was already reading widely. Asked by a newspaper in 1995 to nominate his favourite Penguin, he chose Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow (first published in 1921):
In the summer of 1937 when I was driven by my parents around Devon and Cornwall they (although far from being anti-books) complained that there was little point in showing me the splendours of the coasts and moors of South-West England if I spent the whole time sitting in the back of the car engrossed in Huxley. His aura of sophistication was alluring for a sixteen-year-old.47
This was just after he left school. But asked on another occasion for a favourite poem, he picked ‘Prospice’ – a meditation on death by Robert Browning, which he said he had studied for his Higher Certificate and still found ‘powerful’ in his seventies.48 Outside the classroom Roy was ‘more enthusiastic than skilled’ at games, though he played in the scrum at rugby, was not a bad slow bowler and won prizes for swimming. He was popular enough to become a prefect, though the girls – it was a co-ed school – thought him ‘a bit uppish and detached’.49 Hugh Brace remembered him ‘going around with the girls a bit in the sixth form, one in particular’, who must have been his first girlfriend.50
By this time Arthur had become MP for Pontypool when the previous Member retired in 1935. From now on he normally stayed in London during the week when the House was sitting, lodging with other Labour Members in a hotel in Bloomsbury, and came home only at weekends. But that year the family moved to a much larger house reflecting his new status.fn5 This third Greenlands – rented from the GWR – was two miles further down the valley on the edge of Pontypool, near the railway station, a square white-stuccoed house standing in a substantial garden, with an open aspect to the south-east towards England. It was not a ‘big house’ in the full sense of the word, but in the context of Pontypool it was a substantial residence. Here Arthur and Hattie frequently entertained parliamentary colleagues for the weekend: the Attlees and Arthur Greenwood, Herbert Morrison and Hugh Dalton, among others. The teenaged Roy thus grew up knowing all these leading figures of the 1945 government as family friends – though the guest who most impressed him was his own future Cabinet colleague, Dick Crossman, then a thirty-year-old Oxford don who stood as Labour candidate at a Birmingham by-election in 1937. ‘His blend of verve and paradox I found very exciting at sixteen.’51, fn6
If Roy was not already hooked on politics, he certainly became so now:
As a schoolboy, I was an assiduous gallery-sitter in the House, whenever I could persuade my parents to take me up to London, which was not too infrequently . . . I remember on one occasion, during I think the long drawn-out debates on the 1936 Unemployment Assistance Bill, being very indignant when, at 4.00 a.m., my father insisted on sending me home to his hotel in a taxi and refused to allow me to see the night through from the Gallery.53
As well as politics, the young Roy was habituated very early to taxis, hotels and restaurants.
In February 1935 he wrote a detailed account of a trip to London with his mother and a friend, which included breakfast on the train. Food was something he already took very seriously:
This was very sound – the usual G.W.R. breakfast. Porridge, Corn Flakes or Grape Nuts with a peculiar kind of extremely rich and good cream. Some kind of fish, generally kipper, plaice or haddock (the former two of which I like, the latter one I eat), any variety of eggs, bacon, sausage, cold ham etc., and finally toast, some very good butter (frozen or half-frozen), and marmalade, all washed down with two, or even three large cups of good coffee. The coffee on the G.W.R. is always very good. There is never the least suspicion of skin about it. I dislike intensely coffee on which skin is prone to form.
They stayed at the Strand Palace Hotel which, he noted, was ‘in many ways, an amazing hotel. It is very large and, despite the fact that the charges are quite reasonable, extremely luxurious.’ They went up the dome of St Paul’s, met Arthur for lunch at the Strand Corner House and went to Selfridges, before going to see Love on the Dole – a very suitable choice for a Labour MP – at the Garrick Theatre. ‘It was a very good play,’ Roy wrote, ‘but was not particularly marked by its cheeriness.’ The next day they went to the Science Museum, the zoo and Madame Tussaud’s. (‘I had never been there before, and I cannot say that it impressed me very much’), before catching the 5.55 back from Paddington and having a good dinner on the train.54
A few months later he did it again, this time on his own. At Newport station, doubtless feeling very grown-up, he bought the Daily Mirror, the News Chronicle (a Liberal paper) and the Humorist magazine. Breakfast was up to standard, ‘the kipper being one of the best that I have ever tasted’. But lunch at the Strand Palace was disappointing. ‘The lunch is not nearly so good as the dinner is, although I have no doubt that they bear a very distinct relation to one another.’ The dinner he confidently judged ‘one of the most amazing in London’, comprising six or seven courses for three shillings and sixpence.55 But he was not interested only in food. After one of these London trips he compiled an exhaustive description, in nine chapters, of the unfolding view from the train window. ‘The journey from Newport to Paddington,’ it began, ‘must be, for its length, one of the most beautiful in the country.’ The scenery was ‘varied and interesting’, and he counted it a recommendation that ‘the line passes no areas that are disfigured by basic industries’.56 Artlessly these teenage journals foreshadow the man he would become.
In the summer of 1937 he left school, but his Higher Certificate results were ‘indifferent’ and he was not yet ready to try for Oxford. So he went for a year to University College, Cardiff – an interlude he omitted from his entry in Who’s Who. Hugh Brace thought it was ‘a kind of crammer . . . because he was so young’.57 It was really more like a sixth-form college, intended to bring him up to the level needed to achieve his father’s ambition. Soon after he had started there, Arthur – away in London as usual – wrote him a characteristic letter on his seventeenth birthday:
My dear Roy,
This is your 17th birthday and I am writing this note to wish you many happy returns.
You are now starting on your university career. In school you have done splendidly. With good health and perseverance you will no doubt be equally successful in the next five or six years. I wish you well.
A good rule in life is never to do to anyone what you would not like done to you. I once heard Sir Harry Lauder say he had never said or done anything in his profession he would be ashamed for his mother to hear or know. That, I thought, was a proud record. May you be able to achieve that high standard!
Pony and I are very proud of you. I know you will do everything possible to preserve that pleasure for us.
I enclose a small token of our love.
Yours affectionately,
Jumbo58
Looking back in a piece written for the college centenary in 1982, Roy claimed to have enjoyed his seven months at Cardiff. He lived at home and travelled in each day by bus, an hour and a quarter each way, so he did not experience much of university life, partly because he was so young, but also because his focus was so firmly fixed on Oxford. But he remembered that the food was ‘rather good, better certainly than that which I subsequently had to accustom myself to at Balliol’, and claimed to have made two lasting friends with whom he made frequent expeditions to the Kardomah Café to drink Russian tea ‘in glasses with straw holders, which we thought a rather daring drink’.59 He was supposed to be brushing up his history and French and starting some economics. He was presumably taught by Hilary Marquand, soon to be a minister in the 1945 government but at this time Professor of Industrial Relations at Cardiff, since he named Marquand, along with his headmaster, as a referee in his application to Oxford; but he mainly remembered writing nineteenth-century history essays for Dorothy Marshall, later a distinguished historian of the eighteenth century, whom he credited with teaching him to write in the approved Oxford style.fn7 At any rate, this year at Cardiff did the trick. In Marc
h 1938 he sat the history scholarship for a group of six colleges, including Balliol – then the only Oxford college operating admission solely by competitive examination. Sending his application to the Balliol admissions tutor, he wrote naively that he had ‘obtained past papers from an Oxford publishing firm, but they gave no indication of the scope of the work required’, and asked for some advice.61, fn8 The tutor replied reassuringly that the extent of his reading was less important than the power of using the material he possessed: the point was whether he had the sort of mind that would enable him to gain a First, not whether he had the knowledge now that would be expected at the end of three years.62 He failed to win a scholarship; but the college evidently did detect first-class potential and he was offered a place to read PPE (philosophy, politics and economics, otherwise known as Modern Greats), already the course of choice for aspiring politicians.
That goal achieved, Arthur took him again to Paris where Roy stayed on for a month on his own, staying in a pension near Montparnasse and exploring the city on foot and by metro. This was when he acquired ‘almost a taxi-driver’s knowledge of Paris’ – but not yet a taste for wine. ‘It was rather nasty wine they served us,’ he recalled years later, ‘a vin ordinaire which most people diluted with water. But I didn’t like it, diluted or undiluted.’63 As the war clouds gathered over Czechoslovakia, however, he hurried back to England ten days before Munich bought a temporary reprieve, then went up to Oxford at the beginning of October 1938, still a month short of his eighteenth birthday.
* * *
fn1 It may not be unimportant that Roy was born on the second anniversary of the Armistice, which meant that throughout his childhood his birthday was marked by solemn ceremonies, brass bands and processions. 11 November was a very special date in the calendar in the 1920s.
fn2 Looking at the map today, this seems surprising. But until Dr Beeching slashed the railway network in the 1960s, trains from the South-West went through the Severn tunnel to Newport before proceeding north via Pontypool, Shrewsbury and Carlisle to Glasgow.
fn3 Ivor Bulmer-Thomas had a remarkable career. Born plain Ivor Thomas in 1905, the son of a brickyard worker, he progressed from West Monmouth – where Arthur first took an interest in him – to a brilliant academic career at Oxford and then, via journalism, into Labour politics, before crossing the floor to join the Tories in 1949, marrying into the Bulmer cider family and devoting the rest of his life to saving ‘friendless’ churches. He remained a friend of Roy’s up to his death in 1993.
fn4 Near the end of his life Jenkins recalled it more candidly in an unguarded interview in the Spectator. ‘I got into Balliol 62 years ago from a most awful school – no, I mustn’t say that, but . . . it was a very, very minor school, with very little good teaching.’45
fn5 MPs’ pay was raised in 1937 to £600 p.a. This was a solid professional salary, but it was supplemented by no additional expenses beyond the train fare to their constituencies, hence the need for cheap accommodation in London during the week.
fn6 Arthur took Roy with him when he went to speak for Crossman at this by-election – Roy’s first visit to the city he was to represent for twenty-seven years. His principal memory was of Birmingham’s impenetrable one-way traffic system.52
fn7 More than half a century later Jenkins was able to invite Dorothy Marshall, now aged ninety-two, to lunch at East Hendred. She greatly appreciated his reference to her in his memoirs and was ‘as excited as a schoolgirl’ at seeing him again.60
fn8 He signed this letter ‘R. Harris Jenkins’. It is not clear whether he then saw Harris as his preferred Christian name or as part of a double-barrelled surname. At any rate he dropped it very quickly as soon as he got to Oxford.
2
David and Jonathan
OXFORD HAS BEEN the nursery of aspiring politicians ever since the young William Gladstone was President of the Union in 1830. Whatever the competing academic claims of Cambridge, it is overwhelmingly from Oxford that the governing elite has reproduced itself, generation after generation. The rise of the Labour Party interrupted the tradition only briefly. The pioneers naturally did not go to university at all. But by the time Labour came to maturity as a governing party after 1945 – under the Oxford-educated Attlee – its younger leaders were overwhelmingly Oxford graduates and very often dons, like Hugh Gaitskell, Douglas Jay, Patrick Gordon Walker, Dick Crossman and Harold Wilson. Almost half of the twenty-three members of Wilson’s first Cabinet in 1964 had been to Oxford, and five of the six contenders for the succession in 1976 – though on this occasion it was the exception, Jim Callaghan, who took the prize. On the Conservative side the picture has been similar: in the thirty-five years between Churchill’s retirement and the accession of John Major (roughly the span of Roy Jenkins’ political career) all five Tory leaders had been to Oxford. More recently Tony Blair, David Cameron, George Osborne, William Hague and the Miliband brothers have maintained the pattern.fn1
But if the dominance of Oxford has been remarkable, the pre-eminence of a single college is almost equally so. Balliol is one of the oldest of the Oxford foundations but architecturally one of the least distinguished and academically has never been outstanding. ‘I am not sure,’ Jenkins wrote in 1988, ‘that Balliol has been responsible for any major foray beyond the established perimeter of knowledge since Adam Smith’; while in his own time ‘I do not think it had a single don of towering intellectual stature’.1 It boasted a remarkable tally of eminent literary alumni, from Matthew Arnold and Algernon Swinburne in the nineteenth century to Aldous Huxley and Graham Greene in the twentieth. But Balliol’s distinctive ethos, combining an unusually meritocratic admissions policy with a commitment to public service, was first established under the mastership of Benjamin Jowett in the 1870s. The archetypal Balliol man of Jowett’s time was H.H. Asquith, the brilliant son of a Yorkshire wool merchant who coined and in himself epitomised the phrase ‘effortless superiority’, becoming a young Home Secretary in 1892 before rising with smooth inevitability to the premiership in 1908. From 1924 the Jowett tradition was carried on by another outstanding Master, A.D. (‘Sandy’) Lindsay – a Labour-voting Scot and champion of adult education who was briefly Professor of Philosophy at Glasgow before going back to Balliol at the age of forty-five. Amid the upper-class frivolity that still largely characterised Oxford between the wars, Lindsay’s Balliol was a serious college which mixed scholarship boys from state schools with the best of the public schools and a substantial element from overseas and self-consciously trained them up to be the next generation of Cabinet ministers, ambassadors, Permanent Secretaries and bishops.
This mix of egalitarianism with high-minded ambition suited the young Jenkins admirably – as it did the serious young organ scholar, three years ahead of him, ‘Teddy’ Heath, the son of a Broadstairs builder, and the brilliant, bullish yet solitary son of a Bradford technical college head, Denis Healey, two years ahead. ‘Life,’ it was once said, ‘is one Balliol man after another’; and in the post-war decades the famous joke was scarcely an exaggeration. Within his own college Jenkins was able to get to know several of those who would be his colleagues and rivals in the House of Commons over the next half-century: not only fellow grammar-school products like Heath and Healey, but also well-connected scions of political families like Julian Amery, Maurice Macmillan, Hugh Fraser and Mark Bonham Carter (Asquith’s grandson). Though very different, all these men perceptibly carried the Balliol impress: that air of innate self-confidence and an inability to suffer fools. From the moment he arrived in Oxford Jenkins slipped smoothly into the same mould.
He was always shy. Yet Balliol, with its unusual mix of privileged Etonians and clever scholarship boys, Scots, Jews, American Rhodes Scholars and princely Indians, was ‘an intrinsically friendly place’2 and his provincial background was no serious bar to fitting in. Two lifelong friends he made within the college were Madron Seligman (also a close and faithful friend of Ted Heath, much later a Member of the European Parliament);
and Ronald McIntosh (later an industrialist who headed the National Economic Development Council (NEDC) in the 1970s). A third was Neil Bruce, who became a BBC foreign correspondent but died relatively young. Their memories of Jenkins differed slightly. Seligman remembered him as quiet, diffident and bookish, whereas McIntosh recalled him as ‘good company, with a well-developed sense of fun and a lively, though not scholarly, mind . . . A naturally gregarious character, he was always at ease with himself socially and had no hang-ups about being a Welsh miner’s son.’3 Jenkins himself admitted that he might not have felt so comfortable in most other colleges at the time; he remembered feeling ‘fairly uneasy’ when invited by Gavin Faringdon to his family seat at Buscot Park towards the end of his first year.4 But when David Ginsburg – another grammar-school boy who came up to Balliol the next year – first heard him speak in the Union, he took him for a peer’s son.5 If he did not already have it when he went up – and he always maintained that his father spoke little differently from himself – he very quickly acquired the distinctive drawl, with no trace of a Welsh accent, that was to be the delight of impressionists in years to come. It was doubtless his inability to pronounce his ‘R’s that led someone to describe him as ‘one of Nature’s Old Etonians’. It was unlucky that his own name began with ‘R’; but perhaps for this reason he never shied away from words beginning with the difficult letter.
Somehow Arthur contrived that Roy was not short of money. He lived in college in his first year – Staircase 15, Room 17 – and thirty years later his ‘scout’ (college servant) remembered him as ‘one of the best tippers’ he ever knew. Scouts reckoned anything over £5 as generous. ‘Mr Jenkins always gave me between £5 and £10 and when he left college to go into digs he gave me the tea service he had been using.’6 He had always liked his food, but now he quickly discovered a taste for wine. His school friend Derek Powell, who had preceded him to Oxford, recalled that Roy used sometimes to dine with him at Merton. ‘We had a little clique of bon viveurs – and our college food was better than Balliol’s . . . Our wines were better too, and Roy appreciated them. He loved a good claret then as he does now and his taste for living became Balkan Sobranie all the way once he got to Oxford.’7 Ginsburg too, who also became a lifelong friend – a Labour and then an SDP MP – remembered Jenkins, as an undergraduate, introducing him to Château Margaux.8
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