time: the refreshing river 



turn at oppressing everybody else." I remember saying I thought it a 

 very peculiar theory. I still smile at this, but it was something to be 

 discussing it at all; I believe most of the boys with whom I was at 

 school did not begin to think about it till many years afterwards, if ever. 



Later on, as an undergraduate, my interests were largely philo- 

 sophical and theological, and I was so unpolitical that I never joined 

 the Union Society, on account of a disinclination to be drawn into 

 political debates. But in so far as I was anything, I was vaguely pro- 

 gressive, and remember supporting with great enthusiasm (and owing 

 to my upbringing no small inside knowledge) the proposal for a 

 State Medical Service at a debate at the Junior Acton Club, an organi- 

 sation which united mostly Caius and Emmanuel men but now long 

 since defunct. An influence of considerable importance, after my 

 marriage, was that of our friend the biochemist L — . R — ., whose 

 eastern and central European outlook on political questions revolu- 

 tionised ours. We had got to know him during a period of work at 

 the Roscoff Marine Biological Station, and I remember discussions on 

 the roof, in 1925, while the sun sank over the He de Batz, and again 

 in our house in Cambridge later, which were very formative for us. 



The process of socialisation of my outlook, however, really began 

 with the General Strike in 1926 and was completed by the rise to 

 power of Hitlerite fascism in 1933. In the general strike I was on the 

 wrong side, and helped in the running of the railway as a volunteer, 

 explaining my action to socialist friends as a straightforward support 

 of constitutionally elected government, a government which I had 

 certainly voted against in the preceding elections. I so far acted up to 

 my beliefs in this way that at the conclusion of the strike, when the 

 railway company wanted us to remain at our posts in order that their 

 oflicials could conduct a victimisation process against the returning 

 railwaymen, I spoke against this at a meeting of the volunteers, 

 pointing out that we had no quarrel with the railwaymen, and so 

 helped to ensure that most of the volunteers left without delay. There 

 can be no doubt that these events supplied the most powerful stimulus 

 I had ever had towards reading along sociological and political lines. 

 I carried a little old torn copy of the Tale of Two Cities on the foot- 

 plate, but in the evenings and afterwards I read Shaw's Guide to 

 Capitalism and Socialism and went on from that to heavier material. 

 In this way I came to the belief I now hold, that, in a sense, in any 

 doubtful case, "the people are never wrong"; through all the ages of 

 oppression since the first beginnings of private property men have 



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