THE OXFORD GROUP

In the early thirties, Oxford was the place where the largest number of young people were prepared to take training for the task to which Buchman had set his hand. They and the Communists, who founded their October Club in 1932 and recruited three hundred members in the first year, were probably the most controversial bodies in the university. This was not because either group was sensationally numerous. Their significance resided in their radical commitment.

The first sign that many of the brighter spirits in Oxford were turning to Communism was the recruitment of poets like W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day Lewis in the late twenties. Others followed them in the early thirties, mainly because of despair at the state of society. Three million Britons were unemployed, and living on a means-tested pittance not far from the starvation line. Successive governments, Conservative and Labour, seemed unwilling or unable to do anything about it. On the Continent Mussolini's dictatorial colours were now apparent, and in January 1933 Hitler came to power.

'No one who did not go through this political experience during the thirties', writes Day Lewis in his autobiography, 'can quite realise how much hope there was in the air then, how radiant for some of us was the illusion that man could, under Communism, put the world to rights.'1

There was generosity as well as naivety in this illusion, for Day Lewis and his friends seemed ready to dismantle their own pleasant way of life if they could thereby lessen the injustices of society and the world. Bearing in mind the pressures at home and abroad, the complacency of the establishment, and the almost total ignorance of how Communism was actually working in the Soviet Union, their attitude was understandable and worthy of respect. 'It would have been a disgrace not to have been a member of the Party' in the mid-thirties,' claimed one adherent, who states that he left it in 1938.2

The extent of the migration among British intellectuals-particularly in Cambridge where it included such then unpublicized figures as Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and Donald Maclean - was significant. George Orwell believed that 'for about three or four years the central stream of English literature was more or less under Communist control',3 while Neal Wood writes of 'the dazzling array of intellectual virtuosi', many of whom achieved distinction in literature, the universities, the civil service and the sciences, who took the same road.4

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