Communism began to be important in Oxford in 1931, when some undergraduates set up the October Club, a Communist-front body whose secret aim was to control as much of Oxford left-wing politics as possible. Within a year, the Club had a membership of 300, which included many people who were also in the Labour Club. When Harold went up in 1934, the October Club was at the peak of its recruiting zeal: one of Harold’s first decisions on taking up residence was to reject the overtures of an Octobrist who wanted him to join, explaining politely but firmly (as Harold related in a letter to Marjorie), ‘I didn’t want to.’27 Many others, however, became members of both the October and the Labour Clubs, either gullibly or sympathizing with the Communist point of view.
When Harold went to his first meeting of the Labour Club, the ‘Marxist public school products’ were about to stage a Communist takeover. Anthony Blunt, the KGB spy, later described how Marxism ‘hit Cambridge’ (by which he meant smart, sophisticated Cambridge) early in 1934.28 It hit Oxford a few months later. An important development for Marxists in both universities, as for Communists generally, was an alteration in Moscow’s international tactics, occasioned by Soviet concern about a resurgent Germany. The switch was not sudden: rather, there was a gradual change of approach away from the former ‘Class against Class’ line to the ‘Popular Front’, officially adopted by the Comintern at its Seventh Congress in 1935. The new line meant that democratic socialists were no longer to be denounced as social fascists; instead they were to be coaxed into alliance in a ‘popular front’, or coalition of left-wing forces. This was the theory: in practice, it meant that Communists were supposed to use every wile to subvert Labour Party citadels. In Oxford it gave zealous Octobrists a motive for a fifth-column assault on the Labour Club, in the name of a ‘popular front’.
The merger between the two Clubs was brought about by secret Communists early in Harold’s undergraduate career. Christopher (now Lord) Mayhew, Harold’s exact Oxford contemporary and a Labour activist in the University, remembers that some two hundred Communist undergraduates ‘dominated the fifteen hundred members of the Labour Club, using techniques that are familiar enough today but frequently caught us off our guard then’. It emerged that, for some time, Labour Club elections had been rigged by the simple expedient of conducting a ballot and then falsifying the results.29 Philip Toynbee – who made his name as a public school runaway before going up to Oxford and becoming Communist President of the Union – later boasted that every member of the Labour Club executive was a secret member of the Communist Party, except Mayhew who ‘never seemed to have grasped that all the others were’.30 Mayhew’s own claim is that, though duped for a time, he eventually saw through the ploy.31 Later, Mayhew led a breakaway Democratic Socialist Group – anticipating the Social Democrat split in the national Labour Party half a century later, in which some of the same people were involved, taking the same sides. Mayhew himself was the first Labour MP to cross over to the Liberals, while the leader of the 1981 Gang of Four, Roy Jenkins, had also been an Oxford Democratic Socialist. Denis Healey, on the other hand, stayed with Labour in 1981 as he had done in the late 1930s when, although a Communist, he had been elected Chairman of the Labour Club.
It was fun to be a Communist at Oxford in the 1930s, if you had the money and the leisure to sustain the lifestyle. Toynbee claimed that when membership of the Party reached its peak in 1937 of 200 or so (eighty per cent of whom were undercover members, passing for ordinary supporters of other parties) it was far from being a public school preserve: at least half its membership came from grammar schools.32 This was not, however, the more vociferous half, and there was some justice in the comment of a critic in Isis, the undergraduate magazine, who wrote after a notable Union debate that if the Communists wanted to take power, ‘they really should insist that everyone is sent to a public school’. Oxford socialism had become an exclusive society with its own code and rituals. Labour Club members called each other ‘comrade’, not just in meetings, but also in private conversation. Isis noted that any serious office-hunter at the Union had to denounce capitalism. A socialist who wore the customary evening dress for debates needed to ensure that his bowtie was a ready-made one, ‘to show his contempt for bourgeois prejudices’.33
Philip Toynbee, who viewed bourgeois prejudices with a mixture of aristocratic and Marxist disdain, was the symbolic leader of this kind of gay and abandoned politics, which was designed to outrage headmasters, dons, old-fashioned fathers and Times leader writers and, incidentally, to spice up the social whirl. Toynbee’s nostalgic boast in later years was that ‘you bought silk pyjamas from your tailor in the High Street, danced the night away, and then shot off to CP headquarters for your secret instructions.’34 There was also an aphrodisiac quality: ideas about socialism and free love often mingled. Jessica Mitford (a left-wing Toynbee cousin) has given the best account of how, for the naughty children of the upper classes, sex, intellectual snobbery and demi-monde politics could come deliciously together.35 Toynbee’s own diary entries for the 1930s reveal ‘a dizzying mélange of Communist Party activities interspersed with deb dances, drunken episodes, and night-long discussions with fellow Oxford intellectuals – Isaiah Berlin, Frank Pakenham, Maurice Bowra, Roy Harrod’.36
At Cambridge, where Communism was similarly chic, not all its adherents were so frivolous: some, indeed, took it with a deadly seriousness. At Oxford the form the political fashion took depended critically on which year you happened to go up. Denis Healey, who entered Balliol in 1936, was recruited to the Communist Party the following summer by the poet Peter Hewitt, a friend of Toynbee’s. Though by now the doctrine was sweeping through political Oxford like an epidemic, its character was already changing. According to Healey, there was a key dividing line between undergraduates of his year, and those who started in 1935. ‘Peter and Philip … belonged to a different generation of Communists from me,’ he observes. ‘They had joined the “October Club” a year or two earlier, when Communists were very sectarian, got drunk, wore beards, and did not worry about their examinations.’ Following the 1935 change of Comintern line, however, a new earnestness took over: ‘Communists started shaving, tried to avoid being drunk in public, worked for first class degrees, and played down their Marxism–Leninism.’37
If there were aspects of the post-1935 approach which Harold might have found congenial, had he gone up in 1936, there was nothing in the pre-1935 style to appeal to him. Communists and fellow-travellers were to be found in the posh, arrogant colleges, like Balliol and Christ Church, not in modest establishments like Jesus: Steel recalls only one leading member of the October Club among his college contemporaries. There was nothing in common between the Toynbee circle and the Wilson circle, if it could be called a circle. ‘We were very naïve and innocent,’ says a Wilson friend. ‘For example, I don’t think I had ever heard of homosexuals when I was an undergraduate, and Harold may not have either. I had no idea that spies were recruited at Oxford.’ Instead of sex and popular fronts, Harold talked about Gladys, the Wirral, and his work.38 Others who came from a similar, grammar school or minor public school background, experienced Oxford political and intellectual friendships as a social elevator: chameleon-like, they adapted. Harold – and it was a disadvantage later on, as well as a strength – seemed to resist such influences. Unlike Healey and Jenkins, he never learned to sound like an Oxford man, and did not try. He did not mix with people from a different milieu. He stuck to his own. It was not that he disliked the Pakenhams, Crossmans and Gordon Walkers, young dons who helped to set the social tone as well as the socialist one, or even the Bowras, Berlins and Harrods. It was just that he never encountered them, except when he attended their lectures.
Harold did not shut himself off from politics altogether. He remained Labour-inclined for his first few months, toying with the idea of taking a more active part after the exam in December was over. At the end of the Michaelmas Term he had not yet despaired of the Labour Club: indeed, he must have participated to a certain extent because somebody nominated him as college secretary. He thought about it. One factor to be weighed in the balance was that Cole was President of the Club, ‘and all the coll. sees meet him a lot’. After the Christmas vacation, however, he decided not to accept the post, and to give up attending Labour Club meetings. The reasons, he told his parents cryptically, were ‘(a) LI. George (b) the Labour Party (c) am much more interested in foreign