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Challenging the Old Gang

As a beneficiary of the Welfare State and the Permissive Society – to name just two of their life-enhancing achievements – I owe an enormous debt to the liberal intelligentsia who, in the teeth of opposition from the Old Gang, brought them to pass. But who were these irreverent shock troops and what motivated them? The answer is given by one of their standard bearers, Noel Annan (1916‒2000), in his dazzling group portrait Our Age (1990), which is not only a joy to read but also a wonderful crib for anyone studying the social history of Britain from the 1920s to the 1960s.

Lord Annan was that rare phenomenon, a public figure who could write, the greatest prose stylist of his generation in the opinion of some. During the war, from which he emerged in the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel, with an OBE and a head full of secrets, he was posted to the Joint Intelligence Staff, preparing the daily briefings for the chiefs of staff and the prime minister. This highly pressurized assignment involved swiftly interpreting masses of information and then expressing it succinctly and cogently, a skill on display in this book, the scope of which left reviewers gasping. ‘How could one man’, asked Frank Kermode, ‘know so much about so much?’ In addition to his mastery of detail Annan displays a wicked gift for observation. His appraisal of F. R. Leavis is exemplary: ‘he cultivated to perfection the sneer which he used like an oyster knife, inserting it into the shell of his victim, exposing him with a quick turn of the wrist, and finally flipping him over and inviting his audience to discard him as tainted and inedible’. He was also, as another reviewer noted, a master of the erudite aside, ‘uttered sotto voce, as it were, as the port goes round’. Thus Guy Burgess ‘had the look of a man who had just stepped off the Golden Arrow after a night in the Rue de Lappe’. But because he wrote most often for the New York Review of B

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As a beneficiary of the Welfare State and the Permissive Society – to name just two of their life-enhancing achievements – I owe an enormous debt to the liberal intelligentsia who, in the teeth of opposition from the Old Gang, brought them to pass. But who were these irreverent shock troops and what motivated them? The answer is given by one of their standard bearers, Noel Annan (1916‒2000), in his dazzling group portrait Our Age (1990), which is not only a joy to read but also a wonderful crib for anyone studying the social history of Britain from the 1920s to the 1960s.

Lord Annan was that rare phenomenon, a public figure who could write, the greatest prose stylist of his generation in the opinion of some. During the war, from which he emerged in the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel, with an OBE and a head full of secrets, he was posted to the Joint Intelligence Staff, preparing the daily briefings for the chiefs of staff and the prime minister. This highly pressurized assignment involved swiftly interpreting masses of information and then expressing it succinctly and cogently, a skill on display in this book, the scope of which left reviewers gasping. ‘How could one man’, asked Frank Kermode, ‘know so much about so much?’ In addition to his mastery of detail Annan displays a wicked gift for observation. His appraisal of F. R. Leavis is exemplary: ‘he cultivated to perfection the sneer which he used like an oyster knife, inserting it into the shell of his victim, exposing him with a quick turn of the wrist, and finally flipping him over and inviting his audience to discard him as tainted and inedible’. He was also, as another reviewer noted, a master of the erudite aside, ‘uttered sotto voce, as it were, as the port goes round’. Thus Guy Burgess ‘had the look of a man who had just stepped off the Golden Arrow after a night in the Rue de Lappe’. But because he wrote most often for the New York Review of Books, Annan was beyond the reach of many British readers. Our Age, much of it derived from his journalism, makes good this lacuna. The title of Annan’s book invokes one of his mentors, the witty, charismatic Oxford don and self-styled leader of the Immoral Front, Sir Maurice Bowra, who used it to describe the two or three generations, almost all of them male, from which sprang the liberal insurgents referred to above. Secular, pluralist, cosmopolitan and sexually flexible, valuing brains above birth or money, they rejected the ‘insufferable ideal’ of the English gentleman and its concomitant, the ‘good form’ inculcated at the public schools that most of them had attended. Bowra’s loathing for this code began in ‘the mud, shit and decomposing corpses’ of the Western Front, which he experienced as a young gunnery officer. ‘Whatever you hear about the war,’ he told Cyril Connolly, ‘remember it was far worse: inconceivably bloody – nobody who wasn’t there can imagine what it was like.’ Convinced that the Old Gang’s ironclad complacency had compounded the slaughter in Flanders, Bowra, says Annan, ‘embodied the spirit of those who wanted to be done with the war and good form’. An unrepentant pagan, he thought a lot of what you fancy did you good. ‘Pleasure, vitality and spontaneity were his delight; caginess, philistinism, pretentiousness and pomposity his prey.’ Introduced to Bowra by another of his mentors, the Cambridge don Dadie Rylands, Annan swiftly fell under his spell. Like Rylands, Bowra was homosexual, and I think it’s fair to assume that this was also true of Annan as an undergraduate, not least because consenting adults at King’s, his Cambridge college, could do pretty much as they pleased, always provided they did not offend the porters or bedmakers. By then, the late Thirties, an enormous gap had opened between intelligent young people like Annan and the fogeys set in authority over them. Homosexuality, to which Annan devotes two chapters, ‘became a way of jolting respectable opinion and mocking the Establishment’. It was also, for the ‘buttoned-up’ alumni of boys’ boarding schools, an uncomplicated arrangement. Unused to chatting up girls, who were equally gauche and understandably reluctant to ‘go all the way’, these chaps regarded heterosexual sex, said Annan, ‘as a choice between bores and whores’. Eventually they would reform the law on homosexuality, just as they would those on divorce, abortion and obscenity. But against these humane initiatives must be set the baleful legacy of the Cambridge spies. Their discovery, says Annan, ‘turned into a long-running inquest upon the culture, morality and patriotism of intellectuals of Our Age that the coroner kept on adjourning as spy after spy fell out of the cupboard’ (or should it be closet?). Annan does not attempt to exonerate the spies, two of whom, Blunt and Burgess, he knew. But he rejects the notion, peddled by hacks like Chapman Pincher, that Cambridge was to blame, pointing out that Bletchley Park, the most successful intelligence source of any nation during the war, was inviolate, despite its nucleus being recruited from the same slightly suspect university circles as the spies. Well, yes. But I can’t resist repeating an anecdote told me by the writer Simon Raven, who enjoyed a rackety four years at King’s just after the war. Distressed by his follies, dons like Rylands and Annan (then Assistant Tutor) urged Raven to be ‘“more like Ant Blunt. He had a lot of fun like you, but he worked hard, he behaved nicely, and unlike you he was a good socialist. Be more like Blunt,” they said. So when Blunt was exposed I sent them all postcards saying, “Thank God I wasn’t more like Blunt.” Wasn’t answered by many of them, I can tell you!’ For non-doctrinaire liberals like Annan the late Thirties were a profoundly depressing time. The Left had got its knickers in a twist, arguing against rearmament lest they be ‘tricked into another war’, yet urging the government to intervene in Spain against Franco. Meanwhile it was clear that Chamberlain, and the upper classes who supported him, were willing to do a deal with Hitler on the grounds that my enemy’s enemy is my friend. In the event, ‘Our Age’ did very well out of the war, the social consequences of which, in particular the expansion of universities, worked to their advantage. Brains were given their due. It was no longer such a defect to be ‘too clever by half’. Writing in 1963, by which time he had been elected Provost of King’s, Annan insisted that ‘intellect’ was what universities existed for. Everything else was secondary. ‘A university is dead if the dons cannot in some way communicate to the students the struggle to produce out of the chaos of human experience some grain of order won by the intellect.’ So, for a season, the liberal intelligentsia enjoyed a place in the sun. The governing class, whatever their politics, accepted the need for change. British society became less deferential and more freewheeling, a transformation that accelerated in the Sixties, when ‘sexual intercourse began’ and to be young was very heaven. But if sexual relations flourished, industrial relations did not, with dire consequences for the economy. Here was one aspect of modern life against which the intelligentsia had set its face. Whatever their differences – and Annan is at pains to emphasize how irreconcilable were, say, F. R. Leavis and Bloomsbury – they were united in their contempt for industry and business. E. M. Forster, whom Annan describes as his guru, had exposed the contradictions of this ethos fifty years before in Howards End. The arty, intelligent and compassionate Schlegels might be nicer and worthier than the money-grubbing Wilcoxes, but as rentiers they live indirectly on the wealth produced by the Wilcoxes. And when the money runs out? Annan, who in 1966 left King’s to become Provost of University College, London, a much more challenging role, saw the writing on the wall. The Good Life was unsustainable without a sound economic base. Cue Margaret Thatcher, the ruthless champion of entrepreneurial Conservatism who made a bonfire of subsidies and established the market as the sole judge of what was valuable in life. Though he must have winced at her apparent indifference to the arts, Annan, unlike many of his coevals, saw the point of Thatcher. The closed shop and other restrictive practices had to be abolished if the country was to pay its way. And, sadly, universities could no longer expect a blank cheque. Annan accepts that ‘every generation turns on its fathers’, but he is unwilling to turn the other cheek. To the charge brought by Roger Scruton that ‘Our Age’ lacked ‘experience of the sacred and the erotic, of mourning and of holy dread’, he responds, ‘Our Age thought they had done rather well by the erotic but were prepared to admit they were a bit short on holy dread.’ ‘Holy dread’ was certainly no concern of Annan’s great friend Sir Isaiah Berlin, who said he was ‘tone-deaf to God’. Berlin was preoccupied with the human condition, and according to Annan he wrote ‘the truest and the most moving of all interpretations of life that my own generation made’. Some of what he said was disconcerting, like his assertion that good ends conflict: you cannot exercise mercy without cheating justice, to take one example. He was a champion of ‘negative liberty’ – the right to be left alone – and rejected ideology as irrevocably as religion. In the address he gave at Sir Isaiah’s memorial service in January 1998 Annan, quoting from one of his obituaries, said ‘the respectful silence that met his death . . . shows that intellectuals can still be prized as civilizing influences in Britain’. I very much doubt if that is still the case, but it might serve as an epitaph for ‘Our Age’.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 63 © Michael Barber 2019


About the contributor

Michael Barber interviewed Lord Annan forty years ago for The Roads to Munich, a radio series he wrote and presented about Appeasement.

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