The golden age of the don

Twilight of the Dons: British Intellectuals from World War II to Thatcherism, Colin Kidd, Princeton University Press, £30

In Porterhouse Blue, Tom Sharpe’s sparkling satire of Oxbridge life, the priggish Master chastises a don for supporting the ancient tradition of eating swan at the annual college feast. ‘Don’t you find this a little indulgent? Particularly in the present economic circumstances,’ asks the Master. The objection is nonchalantly dismissed by his colleague who replies: ‘Oh, we never bother with present economic circumstances. We find they tend to go away after 50 years or so.’

The themes of this vignette – playful wit, esoteric customs, disdain for the real world – are central to Twilight of the Dons, Colin Kidd’s masterly account of academic life at Oxford and Cambridge between the Second World War and the Thatcherite 1980s. During this golden age, Oxbridge dons educated Britain’s elite and shaped public opinion, but, unlike foreign intelligentsias, their aim was not to undermine the Establishment; instead, as Kidd asserts, their comfortable insider status turned them into ‘an estate of the realm’.

The catalyst for this rise to pre-eminence was the war. Many dons – such as Edgar Williams, Montgomery’s intelligence supremo at El Alamein – enjoyed a ‘good war’ and emerged buoyantly confident that they could now play leading roles in public life. Growing access to the media turned some dons into national, even international stars. The most conspicuous ‘media don’ was A.J.P. Taylor, but others followed in his wake. Hugh Trevor-Roper shifted American public opinion, following Kennedy’s assassination, by daring to criticise the Warren Commission Report for its handling of the evidence relating to Lee Harvey Oswald. If it is difficult to imagine an Oxford don having a similar impact today, it must be even harder to believe that a Cambridge don was once crowned TV Personality of the Year. But that is precisely what happened in 1955, when the archaeologist Glyn Daniel, popular as a radio and television lecturer, took the top prize.

Kidd does not engage in hagiography, but paints a vivid and largely sympathetic portrait of the dons. Clever, clubbable and civilised, they relished witty repartee and enjoyed the epicurean pleasures of High Table. Learning was worn lightly, style mattered almost as much as substance, and a certain effortless amateurism was prized. The gravest offence was ‘shop talk’ about one’s own subject, and the worst thing to be was a pompous and prolix German or American academic. As the career of Isaiah Berlin – born in Riga to Russian Jewish parents – demonstrated, this secular clerisy was open to talent, but there was an unspoken expectation that dons should adhere to a quasi-aristocratic code of speech, dress and behaviour.

The downside to all this saw minds narrowed by snobbery, social competitiveness and obsessive conformism. According to Lawrence Stone, the ‘malice and hatred’ found in an Elizabethan village found their only ‘modern equivalent’ in ‘the Oxford Common Room’. Inevitably, some took things too far and became parodies of the imagined classic English gentleman. J.H. Plumb, who rose from suburban lower-middle-class obscurity to become Master of Christ’s College, Cambridge, wore velvet fedoras, drove a Rolls-Royce, collected Sèvres porcelain, memorised Debrett’s, and even befriended Princess Margaret. Invited to Sandringham, and unable to restrain himself, he used the crested notepaper to write a two-worded boast to a colleague: ‘Made it.’

On religious matters, these men – and they were largely men – were agreeably liberal in outlook. Some were believers; a perhaps surprisingly large number were unmoved by religion, but the majority preferred to adopt ‘an outwardly ironic distance’ from their ‘own inner commitments’. There were, of course, mischief-makers, too. A.J.P. Taylor (himself an unbeliever) enjoyed needling devout colleagues by suggesting that Magdalen’s chapel be converted into a swimming pool. Emotions sometimes boiled over. Francis Crick resigned his fellowship over a large donation for the college chapel, adding that a brothel would have been preferable to a chapel. But most dons tacitly agreed with E.M. Forster, who, despite his own scepticism, tolerated ‘most religions so long as they are weak’, finding in their rites ‘an acknowledgment of our smallness which is salutary’.

Beyond this vivid and comprehensive overview of the dons’ habits, mannerisms and preoccupations, Kidd is eager to uncover a less familiar side to Oxbridge. There were frequent and sometimes heated debates about the nature of an Oxbridge education. Some wanted to prioritise postgraduate research; others believed the universities existed to educate the country’s future leaders, while David Cecil, an English literature don, worried that Oxford was in ‘danger of choosing nothing but safe examinees’, who would merely ‘follow a useful and undistinguished career as teachers and minor civil servants’. Although the pace of change could be glacial, the university nevertheless moved with the times, and the curriculum underwent regular evolution. A case in point, despite some persistent hostility, was the eventual acceptance of sociology. Of course, there were limits, as the Said Business School was not founded until 1996: sociology was one thing; allowing Mammon through the gates was quite another. But the dons displayed their entrepreneurial flair by establishing a string of new universities. John Fulton from Balliol College, Oxford, for example, headed up the new University College of Sussex, which quickly became known as ‘Balliol-by-the-Sea’. The sense of energy was impressive and, as Kidd notes, many of the new ‘plate glass’ universities were direct ‘extensions of reformist ideas within Oxbridge itself’.

But golden ages do not last. Although the student protests of the late 1960s were significantly worse on the Continent, they nevertheless ‘did much to tarnish the reputation of the universities’, and ‘constituted the moment donnish confidence began to ebb’. The worst of the violence came in 1970, during the ‘Garden House’ riot, when a hotel was attacked, two policemen were injured, and a zoology don was struck by a brick. There were, however, also moments of levity. When the expected siege of All Souls never materialised, its Warden, John Sparrow, and his colleagues seized the banner of the Oxford Revolutionary Socialist Students and amended it to read as follows: ‘Oxford Revolutionary Socialist Stupids’.

The final blow came with the advent of Thatcherism. Although some dons cheered Thatcher’s arrival at Number 10, others were disdainful. One don sniffed that there was ‘something quite obscene’ about her bourgeois appearance, describing it as ‘not exactly vulgar, just low’. But Thatcherism’s impact on higher education prompted a rare outbreak of donnish consensus. Deep funding cuts, greater government control, and an emphasis on efficiency and accountability were seen as damaging and degrading. It was this culture clash – rather than the media fantasy of a cabal of left-wing dons – that lay behind Oxford’s vote in 1985 to deny Thatcher an honorary degree. As Stefan Collini noted:

‘The moment a licensed valuer is sent to make a survey according to ruling market prices, the charm is broken, gold turns to lead, diamond to glass. 

Even though some dons still support the main thrust of Thatcher’s reforms, Kidd argues that ‘growing professionalisation had its costs’. Greater scrutiny of their activities and mounting pressure to produce research deemed to be ‘valuable’ inevitably meant that dons had less time to devote to their undergraduates. As fewer dons lived in college, choosing instead to scurry off home to complete their work, communities that had once provided like-minded scholars with the time and space to cultivate their minds, increasingly became ordinary places of work subject to the incessant rhythms of targets and deadlines. When Jeremy Catto died in 2018, having devoted nearly 40 years of his life to his undergraduates, hundreds attended the memorial service of arguably the last of the great bachelor dons, but the spell had been broken.

On one level, Twilight of the Dons can be read as a fascinating history of modern philosophy, as it ranges impressively across the varied terrains of ordinary language philosophy and French postmodernism, as well as the wilder and more improbable shores of Tory Marxism. But the chief merit of this thought-provoking and brilliantly written book – which anyone who cares about the future of higher education should read – is to trace an important period of social change, and to offer an unsentimental yet tender lament for a world that has sadly vanished forever.