CHNN 22, Spring 2008 - School of Social Sciences

with Cole there sort of presiding. I wasn’t in an academic relationship to Cole any more than I was
to Christopher Hill, who I knew well, and whose lectures I did sometimes attend; although they
were not the same courses as I was doing in PPE. I got immersed in studying on my own reading
and so on rather than the formal course.
The things that were being discussed at Cole’s rooms were things relating to the labour
government: economic problems, political problems, questions of education – a very broad terrain.
Then of course there was a great deal of discussion on the Korean War, a great deal of discussion
about the Soviet Union and the nature of these states. Old G D H Cole was a very undogmatic and
very unforceful character. He was there and encouraging everybody to have their say and
expressing his opinions, but usually in a relatively tentative way: a very mild man. Among the
communists, Christopher Hill was way above the others both in terms of his standing and the
amount of contact he had. He allowed his rooms in Balliol to be used for meetings of, I think we
called it the Marxist History Society; and various other events of that character. I used to see quite
a bit of Christopher Hill when I was up there. He sometimes did general things in regard to
marxism, then used to ask me my view on how they went over with the students.
I
was elected to the party’s national student committee in the September, before I’d even
started as a bloody student! I then got into Oxford the next month and was put under very
strong pressure, which I succumbed to, to become secretary of the party branch in November.
This was the Oxford University communist party which was basically undergraduates and which at
that time had about forty members. There was a separate senior branch and outside of the
university there were industrial branches at Cowley and so on, and also local branches. In general
the branches were pretty separate. There were some social events where we met together; and we
had a meeting with Dutt in Christopher Hill’s room at which there were people from both sides
there. But in general they were fairly separate, although there was the question of which
postgraduate student should go in. This was to become a big issue in ’68, where every effort was
made to break down these kind of barriers and just have one branch; but we’re talking now about
’49 to ’52 and this had not yet developed.
I was at Christchurch, where I got the scholarship. I don’t think I would have chosen it if I’d known,
it had too high an admixture of old Etonians and this sort of thing. Apart from having branch
meetings, like communist party branches generally did, we used to have at least one big public
meeting every term. I used to try and get Pollitt to come down, but he always used to say: ‘I’ll send
you Dutt: deep unto deep.’ In addition, there was the Socialist Club which was a wider thing,
communists took part in it with left Labour people and so on. Relations with Labour students were
mixed. The left-wing people were in the socialist club, with whom we had good relations. With the
Oxford University Labour Club relations were not too good politically. There was a communist
candidate in the 1950 general election and I used to speak on street corners in the election
campaign – which would not have been well looked upon by the proctors in non-election periods.
But in the period of a general election they couldn’t very well stop it. At the next national student
conference, 1950, I was actually elected as the chair of the national student committee.
I was also very much tied up in the Oxford University Peace Council, which was formed at the
height of the Korean War through a meeting of William Rees-Mogg, for the Conservative
Association; Shirley Catlin, now Shirley Williams, for the Labour Club; and one or two others, and
myself from the communist club. It was on our initiative that we called the thing together, and
managed to hammer out the basis for an organisation to exist and be properly registered in the
university. You had to have a senior member attached to your club and we had the Reverend Jesuit
father Tommy Corbishley as our senior member. It wasn’t like the British Peace Committee that
was campaigning on a straight line with a more limited appeal. We did get out some quite good
things in regard to the peace negotiations in Korea and this sort of thing.
We used to have counter-courses: marxist economics for the economics students, this sort of thing.
The ’68 thing challenged the university to have a different type of course, whereas we, realistically
– because we’re now talking about the height of the Cold War – didn’t think that we were going to
change the university course, but we at least wanted to prepare ourselves and the people we could
influence to be able to face up to bourgeois arguments and to get a marxist understanding. We
didn’t call them counter-courses, we called them probably marxist education or something of that
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