body’, consisting as it did of ‘one or two school teachers, a waiter, and several men who worked at the Gloucester aircraft factory … as an “intellectual” I was given the job of political education. Never can there have been a more signal instance of the blind leading the shortsighted. I mugged up Das Kapital, The Communist Manifesto, the writings of Lenin, and endeavoured to teach dialectical materialism and economic theories I only half understood to people who lived their lives right up against the fact of economic necessity.’
Although Auden issued a clarion call to his generation to stop ‘lecturing on navigation while the ship is going down’, he did not join the CPGB. Nor did MacNeice, another ‘Marxist of the Heart’ for whom ‘comrade became a more tender term than lover’. Despite this, MacNeice could see communism’s attraction after the ‘jogtrot’ left of the Labour Party, which was ‘notoriously lacking in glamour’, and he could appreciate why ‘these young poets had turned to the tomb of Lenin … The strongest appeal of the Communist Party was that it demanded sacrifice; you had to sink your ego.’ Though he was ‘repelled by the idolisation of the state’, MacNeice was able to console himself with Marx and Engels’ dictum that it would soon ‘wither away’. Spender did actually sign up, but his membership was short-lived.
Other Cambridge Communist sympathisers who would later gain notoriety for their espionage activities on behalf of the USSR included Donald MacLean, H.A.R. (Kim) Philby and Anthony Blunt, who was always ‘thought of as a fellow-traveller, never as a Party member [and who made] extremely cynical remarks about Communism that went beyond the call of duty in suppressing the fact that he was one’.
But there were those who were prepared to make the commitment. In December 1931 the October Club (named after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917) was started in Oxford by an American Rhodes scholar, Frank Meyer, who subsequently translated to the London School of Economics, where he remained active in student politics until he was deported by the government. By January 1933 it could boast three hundred members, though not all of these were card-carrying Communists. However, by 1934 Communists had effectively succeeded in taking over the Oxford Labour Club, hanging a huge portrait of Lenin on the wall of the club’s meeting house to signal their entryism. Not everyone advertised their affiliation, but Philip Toynbee, the son of the Oxford historian Arnold Toynbee and grandson of the classicist Gilbert Murray, who had joined the CPGB at the end of his first term at Oxford and ‘retired deeper and deeper into this secretive hive … was not a clandestine member, but sat on a little iceberg peak above the submarine majority, revealing, as we used to say, “the Face of the Party”’. Toynbee exemplified the song ‘we would ruefully sing at our evening socials [the Bromley branch members would, no doubt, have joined in] :
Dan, Dan, Dan!
The Communist Party man Working underground all day. In and out of meetings, Bringing fraternal greetings, Never sees the light of day.
His undergraduate life consisted largely of sitting through interminable committee meetings, sometimes lasting ‘from lunchtime until eight or nine in the evening’, leafleting, demonstrating in support of strikes in Oxford factories, taking part in ‘slogan-shouting marches through London’, attending international Communist Party conferences, going to work alongside the miners in the Rhondda Valley, soaking up ‘the whole lively atmosphere of purpose and intrigue’. In 1938 he was elected the first Communist President of the Oxford Union (to be succeeded by Edward Heath two terms later).
While there were probably around two hundred card-carrying Oxford undergraduates, in Cambridge several dons were members of the CPGB, including Dobb, the biochemist ‘Doggy’ Woolf and the literary scholar Roy Pascal. By 1935 the Cambridge Socialist Society of around five hundred members was dominated by Communists, of whom again some two hundred were Party members. The Cambridge cell, centred on Trinity and King’s colleges, was active in the town organising anti-war demonstrations, supporting CP candidates at elections and welcoming the Hunger Marchers in February 1934 (Margot Heinemann owed her conversion to an encounter while at Newnham with the wan and down-at-heel marchers, and remained a Party member all her life), as well as within the colleges agitating for better pay and conditions for college servants, distributing leaflets and selling copies of the Daily Worker.
But despite this varied and gifted glitterati, ‘traitors to their class’ until the Party line changed, the ‘entry of the intellectuals’ remained something of a trickle, and for every student, scientist or poet who declared for communism there were hundreds of workers. Though the membership of the CPGB rose to a pre-war peak of 18,000 in December 1938, the vast majority of members were working-class. Moreover, distrust of the eggheads did not fade easily: in 1938 one veteran at the fifteenth Party Congress railed against ‘these unscrupulous semi-intellectuals who pose as left revolutionaries, who put their “r”s in barricades, instead of putting their arse on the barricades’.
I regard Nature as perhaps the most important weekly printed in English, far more important than any political weekly.
Arnold Bennett, November 1930
Mr [H.G.] Wells at one time appeared to think that the scientists might save us. Then more recently it was going to be international financiers. But so many committed suicide. So now it is going to be aviators. Perhaps soon we will be told to pin our hopes on a dictatorship of midwives.
Professor F.S. Blackett, ‘The Frustration of Science’ (1935)
In October 1933 the writer H.G. Wells gave a dinner party. Since he had invited too many guests to fit round the table in his flat in Chiltern Court, off Baker Street, the party dined first at the Quo Vadis restaurant in Dean Street, Soho — a building in which Karl Marx had once rented rooms — and then repaired to the flat, where it was promised that Moura Budberg (a Russian aristocrat and probably the common-law wife of the writer Maxim Gorky, who had to come to London as Wells’ mistress, but continued to maintain distinctly shady links with the Soviet Union) would entertain the assembled company by playing the harp. It was a glamorous evening, with the socialite Lady Emerald Cunard ‘in ermine, almost invisible under pearls and diamonds, scenting out the lions’, the novelist Enid Bagnold, now married to the head of Reuter’s, Sir Roderick Jones, ‘brazening out’ a nettle rash by covering her face with an orange veil, Harold Nicolson, Max Beerbohm, and ‘H.G. at the centre, rosily smiling, all the guests talking at once’.
Unfortunately a number of the guests, including Moura Budberg, were taken ill with food poisoning, so there was no music that night, but there was endless discussion, as there always was at Wells’ soirées, including one the month before, assembled ‘to discuss a magnificent idea he has, to unite science to save the world against all its growing dangers: Fascism, Communism, Japanism, Americanism and Journalism … H.G. “chaired” the meeting in his squeaky voice, which becomes quite a handicap in such circumstances. Nothing was decided, naturally, except the need for something, and H.G. will go on giving dinner parties to discuss saving the world.’
‘Saving the world’ from the list of spectres Wells evoked, as well as those of the economic slump and intractable unemployment at home, was something discussed at a lot of top people’s dinner tables in the 1930s. And scientists were at the forefront of such debate, as many were convinced that scientific methods would come up with solutions that inexpert, ill-informed, blundering politicians seemed utterly unable to locate.
Although he was primarily interested at the time in ‘the reproductive physiology of monkeys and apes, and the bearing of any evidence on the evolutionary interrelationship of monkeys, apes and man’, which he was well placed to research as Prosecutor, or research fellow, at the Zoological Society in Regent’s Park (a post he had achieved at the young age of twenty-four), Solly Zuckerman also had a wider range of interests. The atmosphere of the time encouraged him to discuss with some friends, including the young political economist (and great joiner of discussion groups) Hugh Gaitskell and G.P. ‘Gip’ Wells, the zoologist son of H.G., the idea of forming a small dining club. In the autumn of 1931 ‘Tots and Quots’, an abbreviation