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Quakers have always been a small minority, separated at one time by their speech and dress. Nowadays they are regarded with some suspicion as likely to be teetotallers, and pacifists, a race apart. It was not surprising that I felt some misgivings about starting to study at a college, which had a reputation for academic success among students from Eton and other well-known schools. On the other hand it also had a reputation for an interest in politics, mainly of a variety of socialism and under the famous Dr Jowett had built up an ethos of public service. Despite my shyness and doubts about my intellectual capacity, I began to enjoy the atmosphere and set out to make friends.
One of the first things we had to do was write a paper and read it to the Master; A.D. Lindsay was an important figure in the university and it now astonishes me that he had time for such a purpose. He was known to me for his work in adult education helping the unemployed miners of South Wales and his wife came to the Quaker Meeting in High St. Unfortunately I chose a topic about the danger of cars to pedestrians, which I knew was a subject dear to him. Thinking he would be amused with a challenge to his views I wrote on the theme that it would be better to spend time attempting to deal with war casualties than car accidents. To my surprise he winced and showed his disapproval.
The exhilarating air of intellectual enquiry, of the search for a meaning in life and for wisdom was a great delight but

not help my studies. I was living in college for the first two years, though only a mile from home, in order to make the most of the social life. My father and mother made it very clear that this was as important as anything. I suspect that my father had in mind that I would be able to make good friends who would work with me later on in business. This was the reason for choosing Oxford for me despite my parents and brothers having been at Cambridge. My father only once intervened in my student life by inviting me to the theatre to see a skit on youth. As it happened he had confused two plays and what we saw was a skit on bank directors. We laughed loud and long. From time to time I went home to borrow the car on Sundays to take fellow students who wished to go to outlying Quaker Meetings. At the time I was more at ease when communing with nature than listening to the ministry, but I was not good at knowing how to do either the one or the other. I was a slow learner.
In some ways Oxford was of little help in this respect. Life in North Oxford was succinctly described as eternal Sunday afternoon and lacked the challenges we felt we needed. Life in the University was strident as well as exhilarating, making it necessary to pick and choose. I did not want to drink with the son of an arms manufacturer who came back to college on his hands and knees, nor with those habitual drunks, making use of their new-found freedom who came back pretending to be cars by stopping at the traffic lights. Another went out for a drink with his father and returned with a garage sign saying ‘IN’, which he fixed up at the top of his stairs. The more troublesome ones invaded my room with some kind of battering ram and poured scorn on the soft drinks they found there. On my return they would not leave but needed a push. It seemed as though my reputation as the best scrum half in the college may have helped, I wondered how some of the frail members of the college would have fared. Freedom should have its limits at some point. J.S. Mill wrote that if you wish to produce men of genius, you must first cultivate the ground in which genius can flourish. One might add that if you want peace, you must first cultivate the culture of peace in which peace can flourish. Much later on our five-year-old daughter, Candia, provided the ideas and almost all the words for a poem, which was published by the BBC; it is worth quoting here, as it is a good comment on the experience of students who had been kept in a straightjacket at boarding school and then passed on to u

niversity. They tended to abuse their freedom.

On Liberty. ( I like you. You’re Different)

If I only read my book, if I eat but half my tea,
If I leave my clothes about, mummy soon gets cross with me.
‘Leave your book a minute, make a tidy plate
Why can’t you be like the others?’ That’s what I horribly hate.

If she wants us all the same,
She shouldn’t give me all the blame,
But have another baby now,
And make it twins, then she’d see how.

To complete this list of those who saw Oxford differently and enjoyed tolerance of eccentricity, the student at the House, as Christchurch is known, may be added. To evade the rule against student’s cars being kept in Oxford itself, he kept his car at the required distance away and had a chauffeur to bring it to him. He is unlikely to have met the student who was discovered by researchers to have no growth in his fingernails at all. On further investigation he was found to be living on one meal each day, the compulsory dinner each evening. The researchers were looking for a convenient measure of malnutrition.
Tolerance of differences was no more common in the university than outside it, or so it seemed to me. We resented the song, which Trinity College students sang over the wall separating them from us. 'Balliol bring forth your white man,' they chanted, referring to the Balliol policy of including Indians and others. Colleges differed as much as individuals and Trinity had the custom of recruiting solely from well-known 'public schools.' When the rugby teams of the two colleges had a draw in the semi-finals, excitement ran high.
One of my first friends in the first term was an Indian. Chandra Mal was being trained for the Indian Civil Service. It was he who introduced me to Professor John Macmurray’s book Free

the Modern World , in which he describes what he means by 'real friends' and 'real people.' It echoed what my father had said to me before starting at college, but made it more precise and persuasive. Much is said about friendship, how it halves troubles and doubles happiness and how you can always judge a person by the friends he keeps, but Macmurray takes his readers further than this by implying that real people make friends more easily and more deeply. Real people are those who are on good terms with themselves, who know themselves and like what they know, without, of course, being selfish or egocentric. Yet, at the end of reading the book it is clear that it is necessary to forget oneself so as to be able to overcome self-consciousness.
Chandra or Chandi as we often called him, had been helping Gandhi as a secretary before he came to college. He was a devotee of the great man. Often conversation turned to one of his many facets, so once he began talking about what an Englishman could wear, comparable with Gandhi’s loincloth, to show that he took the side of the poor. Laughingly we decided that the brown corduroy trousers and red spotted handkerchief of the farm labourer were the nearest we could get. Now in my retirement this is what I use on the days when I go out to work in the market garden. It serves as a reminder that the poor are always with us, though not so much on the farms as among the unemployed, and in the Third World.
Unknown to most of the others, we had among us the son of a farm labourer. Somehow, despite the large number of his brothers and sisters, he had made his way to writing books including one on agriculture with Seebohm Rowntree, the authority on poverty at that time. I lived in awe of anyone who could write a book. Books were treated as something very special in our home and I reacted accordingly. Authors such as E.M. Forster and Malcolm Darling came to stay from time to time at ‘102' and added to this feeling of awe.
Then there were the Rhodes Scholars. Two from every one of the United States came to Oxford each year and Balliol seemed to have more than its fair share of these older gifted people, many of them trying to get their theses published. I was sorry when one of them earned great notoriety in the war in Vietnam later on. At the time he was developing his theory of a take-off stage in

se of a country’s development. I would have liked to have known Phillip Kaiser better. He became among other things the President of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I met him years later when he was presiding over a meeting for teachers.
Amiya Chakravarty had already served as a professor of Calcutta University and had come to Oxford to write a doctoral thesis on Hardy’s The Dynasts. He had been with Tagore at Shantiniketan (The abode of peace) where his followers developed their culture of peace with the help of Tagore the wise poet. Amiya was more than a good friend to me. The Italians were invading Ethiopia at the time and he taught me the depths to which compassion can reach in speaking about the suffering caused. On another occasion he invited me to meet his friend Paul Robeson, who had just returned from West Africa. He had been studying the similarities between the music he found there and the jazz introduced into the USA by the descendants of African slaves. He stood up and sang and sang. It seemed to me that the whole college and not just the room resounded with that great voice. He sang for peace and tenderness, but I do not know how many people see it this way. Robeson was unfortunately later dismissed as a communist by the establishment.
Afterwards Amiya moved to the USA and I did not keep up with him, but I read that once he had been honoured as the educationalist of the year. When I listen to such people or hear Paul Robeson or Joan Baez singing I feel that any hardened diplomat or businessman could be persuaded to change sides. I often found myself singing on my bicycle. Sometimes the songs were those of the wander-vogel who, despairing of civilisation, took to the roads and footpaths, to seek the good life in the open air. Sometimes they included love songs, which struck home.
Another student whom I worked with closely was Dr Ranyard West, or Roy, as he was known, a psychoanalyst. He believed that his speciality was an important contribution to make, to the understanding of dictators and their power as demagogues and to determine the emotions imposed by war propaganda. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the application of psychiatry to world order. In the longer term, he wrote a number of books such as Conscience and Society .

For the short term we formed a Child Psychology Study Group in the college and linked ourselves to Margaret Lowenfeld's Institute of Child Psychology, London. Her methods of understanding children were novel; we could watch the new ways children revealed themselves as they played with carefully designed toys and learned to relax after demanding exercise. The children were tested by being observed as they used these toys that represented the 'world' as they saw it; the results were extraordinary and I believe that, if the war had not intervened, Nursery Schools would have been promoted more widely and sooner. To us it seemed to imply that a new sort of education should be given to children, especially those of Nursery school age. I truly believe that creative and constructive play is an antidote to fear and hatred.
The happiest student I can recall is Billy Hughes, his nickname derived from the name of a prominent trade union leader. He even laughed in his sleep when on a vacation reading party with me. I never learned the secret of his contentment or the significance of his laughter. He could not recall the dream of which the laughter seemed to be part, but it occurred more than once. Dreams and their significance were an important part of conversation when the interest in Freud and Jung's work was at its height. Afterwards he became Ellen Wilkinson’s Parliamentary Private Secretary in the Attlee Government and visited me anonymously in the depths of my despair at Saltley Teacher Training College. Then he became Principal of Ruskin College. His happiness was infectious and the College was fortunate in having him.
In the first months in my acquaintance with him, I had such an extraordinary dream that I wrote it down in the morning. About three years previously I had been travelling through Tunis and Algeria with a French businessman, who was buying produce for his Paris shop. The day before we arrived in the town of Constantine there had been a riot among the Arabs there on account of a rumour that a Jew had desecrated an Arab Mosque. The Arabs broke into many Jewish shops, killed the owners, and hung their brightly coloured rolls of cloth on the bridges, which crossed the deep gorge half surrounding the town, and on lamp posts. The French authorities restored order with the help of their colonial troops from Senegal, who were posted at street corners at the time of our arrival.

The dream began in the middle of Broad Street Oxford, showing the place in the road where Hugh Latimer the martyr, was burned at the stake in Queen Mary's reign. In a state of great anxiety I was walking towards the house of the Master of Balliol College with an urgent message. Miraculously there was no wall between the pavement and the drawing room of A. D. Lindsay, the Master and his wife. They were holding some kind of party in honour of General Smuts, who was accompanied by my parents. Mrs Lindsay, knowing Oom Jannie's fondness for babies and there being none in her family at that time, had borrowed one from an Oxford orphanage. In fact Oom Jannie used this as an escape from the small talk of social occasions.
The three of them agreed to come but not with the sense of urgency I possessed. As we looked into the street, we saw from windows upstairs in Exeter College furniture and books being hurled down and thrown onto a huge bonfire. There seemed to be Arabs everywhere running and shouting, with no one else in sight. It looked as though we had left our departure too long. To my surprise no one took much notice of us until we reached the crossroads beyond Blackwells famous bookshop. There an Arab in his white robes stopped us wanting to know who we were and where we were going. At that moment I felt a table-fork in my hand, which stuck out backwards so to say. With a big swipe I struck it into his chest and he folded up and collapsed.
We hurried on down Holywell Street and turned left into Mansfield Road to enter Balliol's former rugby ground. As we did so, Arabs entered the usual way from Jowett Walk and hurried to intervene. Suddenly there appeared a fence and very high gate in front of us, my heart sank and I assumed we would be captured. However, just then an aristocratic couple riding very high horses appeared from nowhere, the gates swung open for them and we were close on their heels. The gates

swung together and we were safe for the time being.
Then we made our way by a devious route on the far side of the river Cherwell the sequence of the dream broke, Oom Jannie disappeared and my parents and I were at 102 Banbury Road expecting some kind of attack. I was still in great fear and I took on the job of checking that all the windows and doors were closed and locked. I covered upstairs as well as downstairs but was still very afraid of what might be going to happen throughout the town and thought I had been meticulous when suddenly, as I was standing at the far end of the hall, I heard the front door open, it had rollers fitted so that it was obvious when it was used, I was horrified that I had forgotten to lock it and amazed when a little dark face of an Arab boy, who might have been six or seven years old, peeped round the edge of the door. When he saw me, using both hands, he flicked the contents of a frying pan towards me but it was badly aimed and it hit the edge of the inner doorway. He quickly slammed the door and ran. In horror I went to pick the object up. It was a large piece of fried human flesh so I opened the door and threw it away as far as I could.
The dream might have ended there and still provided enough for my friends to try to analyse, but the most extraordinary part was yet to come. Moving back across the hall I remembered that in my haste I had forgotten the front half of the drawing room which looked onto the Banbury Road.
When I opened the door I was astonished and my feelings ran amok. My father who was not a pacifist, indeed had volunteered, but unsuccessfully, in the First World War, had opened all the four windows as wide as could be. Then he had sat down in an armchair, seeming to be quite relaxed, reading his friend Laurence Housman's The Little Plays of St Francis. They are plays, which I knew well which teach such strange lessons; as the best place for stolen gold is underground, where it can rest unremembered, the wise insights of illiterate people, non-violence and the value of retiring from positions of power. As an otherwise conventional banker he savoured such teachings and relished them.
My reaction was strong and immediate. I was more than aghast at my father doing what I should have been doing, if only I had not abandoned my principles when my first trial came. With a very strong feeling of nausea I woke up, it took some time for the nausea to disappear, and the dream stayed with me as a reminder of the importance of my pacifist principles. I had let my fears betray my convictions in my dream life, and this was something I was determined to avoid in waking life.

With this dream to strengthen a belief in the importance of the unconscious mind it is no wonder that I turned to psychoanalysis to deal with one of the main roots of war. Contrary to Billy Hughes' Marxist claim that Capitalism is the main cause of wars, and also the more vague belief that it is a religious change of heart that is crucial; on closer examination human motives, represented by psychoanalysis, offers a chance to produce a culture of peace in place of a culture of aggression, militarism and hatred, perhaps by some process of group hypnosis.
At this time there was little going on to dispel the fears of war. There was a group promoting Federal Union, there was the much discussed motion in the Oxford Union where the debate concluded with a majority voting that 'This House will not fight for King and Country' leaving open the possibility that some might fight for other causes. After the failure of the League of Nations to ensure collective security in what is now Ethiopia, came a similar failure in Spain. The Spanish Civil War was the result of a democratically elected government that was eventually overthrown by a military dictator, General Franco. As a response, a number of Oxford people I knew, went to fight there in the International Brigade and several never came home. One young woman had been my teacher when I started Latin, the daughter of the Professor of Moral Philosophy, another was the son of a member of our Quaker Meeting. Life seemed to be a deplorable muddle and my reaction was to offer such help as I could give to the local League of Nations Union.
It also gave the Soviets the chance to show that they would support a democratic government according to the principles of the League of Nations collective security, while British and French governments remained neutral because they feared the socialist sympathies of Spain. No doubt the two governments were formed by short-sighted politicians who preferred to look at questionable 'national interests' rather than a long-term plan for establishing effective law courts in order to have an alternative to war. Sixty years later the lesson has not been learned that crises can be avoided by early preventive action, but not very easily if war propaganda is allowed to flourish until the time for making peace has passed. Most languages have a version of a stitch in time saves nine, and they are surely appropriate when applied to pollution and its avoidance. Prophets are

seldom popular figures and their words fall too often on deaf ears.
The debates in Parliament and the Oxford Union lacked gravity and sincerity even in the days before the war started. I spoke once in the Union but found the debates promoted insincerity. What was said was often clever or humorous as when debating the merits of the Union's officers having to wear white bow ties and coats with tails, Lyall Wilks stated 'God made the conservatives and gave them tails, but the socialists he left to come to their own conclusions.' With this command of language, in the course of time he became a judge.
Though not wanting to speak in the Union I did want to learn how best to speak in public. There was an office of the League of Nations Union in Oxford and they seemed glad to accept my offer of help, so I often went out to some of the villages in Oxfordshire to speak to one of the Women's Institutes.
One of my acquaintances was Moss, a Canadian student; he was a gentle serious young man who enjoyed walking in the countryside. In North Oxford there was a private housing estate for middle class people and when a Council Housing Estate was built behind them a barrier wall was built on their private road to prevent the working class tenants of the council houses taking a short cut to the city. This expression of contempt for another social class upset him deeply and, supported by another student, he took tools and knocked off the top foot of bricks in an attempt to remove this high barrier wall. At this point the police intervened and he was arrested, after this his sadness deepened. He went walking another day and his body was found on a half-burnt haystack. He left no explanation. Tragedies like this added to the gloom created by Hitler's Germany and the betrayal of the League of Nations to make this a very sad period, similar to what we now see at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

‘When I am Hungry’
When I am hungry, may I find some people to feed,
When I am thirsty, may I offer water for their thirst,
When I am sad, someone to lift from sorrow,

When burdens weigh on me, lay on my shoulders the burden of my fellows
When I stand in need of tenderness, may I find someone who yearns for love,
May loving kindness be my bread, and gentleness my strength
May a culture of peace be my resting place.
Adapted from the French 'Prieres de Foi'

One of the difficulties of peace is that the word suggests that it is something passive that undermines the willingness to face the challenges of a harsh, competitive, and aggressive society, rather than something active. In this respect I was glad to be able to play rugby to reassure myself. The first season I captained Balliol's second XV and the following year was chosen as scrum-half for the first XV. I was ashamed to hear that previously University College, our main rivals had suffered so many injuries when playing against Balliol that half their team could not play in their next match. Vengeance was expected. Our best player was put out of action very early in the game and I had the questionable honour of having my leg and knee twisted by the captain of the Oxford team. The result of the match was decided by a free-kick the captain took as a drop-kick on the five yards line, and more than twenty-five yards from the scoring line where the goal posts stand, in other words as far as could possibly be attempted. The ball soared into the air and struck the cross bar so that, by some miracle, it struck the bar again coming down. It fell the wrong side for us and we lost the cup.
People argue about football matches. Do they enhance or sublimate aggressiveness. My personal guess on this matter is that it depends on how it is played and how the coaching is given. Unfortunately for me when rules are broken and the game gets rough the scrum-half is apt to suffer most and I was injured both at Oxford and later at Carnegie College in Leeds where my partner was the exceptional international player Bill Davis. I had only to get the ball into his hands and then he often scored tries without being touched.
When not playing rugby I obtained my exercise by walking the footpaths of Oxfordshire, sometimes by following the towing paths of the river or canal, often on the hills and often in the footsteps of

Mathew Arnold and his Scholar Gypsy. In this poem by Arnold, an Oxford student left his companions and his books and wondered through the countryside 'waiting for the spark from heaven to fall' and learning from the gypsies. The appeal of learning from more practical people and attaching less importance to academic studies has often haunted students at Oxford, even in the new century. It was more than exercise I received. Like the scholar gypsy I often felt stabs of loneliness, and found myself also 'Waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.'
Often, I envied the gypsies their way of life. I had visited a gypsy caravan near Bagley Wood once where a gypsy’s wife unfolded her treasured tablecloth. An heirloom that had been passed down to her through the generations, but she explained that she could no longer read what was embroidered on it in the ancient Gypsy script, but suggested that it was some parable for life.
One evening at Puckham I was leaning over a gate and enjoying the view when a stranger approached. Later on he admitted that, when I responded to his greeting, he concluded that I must be the Scholar Gipsy from the poem. I was pleased to have my own search associated in some way with that of the Scholar gipsy.
At times I had friends with whom I could share walks and thoughts, both boys and girls, one said to me 'living is like painting a beautiful picture, and we should use all the richest colours we can find.' He stopped as we walked, as if to emphasise his point, but I failed him on that occasion, by not giving him enough encouragement, and years later I failed him again, due to my shyness when we met by accident on one of the Aldermaston Marches against nuclear weapons.
What is it that constitutes a colour? How can richness be measured? What sort of picture should it be? I was troubled about the purpose of life, without a purpose there seemed to be no hope. Without hope we might follow Moss.
At this time I needed all my strength to survive what was for me a very sad love affair. My feelings were strong but got no response. I talked about serious matters such as work-camps, unemployment, and wars, she was interested in music and climbing. To my astonishment she turned up likewise at one of the Aldermaston Marches.

Studying at Oxford in those pre-war years was, to a large extent, a matter of choice. When asked whether I was reading for a first class degree, I answered with an emphatic 'No.' I was clearly informed that one would be no advantage if I entered Barclays Bank, whereas I was offered an extra year by my father if there was any chance of me playing for the Oxford University Team. To this I pointed out that the Oxford scrum-half was staying on an extra year in order to play for England.
My first impressions of the teaching at Oxford startled me. It was a dark October evening when I knocked on the door of my tutor. Philosophy, Politics, and Economics were such diverse subjects that I had many tutors, each one lasting for a short period, but on this occasion I was visiting my personal academic tutor, who would be helping me choose which lectures I should attend. Humphrey Sumner was an extremely able academic who afterwards won the most envied post in the University, the Wardenship of All Souls, the college with no students. It specialises in research. Being accustomed to the quirks of Quakers I was all the more appreciative of what I saw when I opened the door, the only light in the long room was a table light at the far end and bent over a table was a handsome head of long hair and the silhouette of a very large goose quill at work.
I have seldom told this anecdote for fear of Oxford being mocked for its quaint outmoded ways. I have found feathers a very difficult implement to use for writing. A first tutorial is too imposing an occasion for a discussion on the origin of pens, so we talked at random. Although he was an historian specialising in Russian History I never found conversations with him easy. He was kind enough to say after my degree was announced, that I had spent my time very well. I doubt if he knew that I had been attending lectures on psychoanalysis, and on unemployment by Professor Meade and G.D.H. Cole on life in cooperative communities.
'All works of love are works for peace' was a saying in accord with one lecture about the value to society of groups of people who follow their consciences. Sometimes the lectures on ethics called into question the doctrines related to economic man who was supposed to benefit everyone by following his own self-interest; however, nothing satisfactory was erected in its place. Human

motivation might be part of a psychology course but it could have received better treatment in moral philosophy.
These were outside my course but life seemed short: ominously in 1934 I had been offered free training as a pilot, and, though pressed hard by an influential tutor of the college, I rejected the offer. I was more attracted by the chance to do something useful immediately. Finding the political and economic causes of war, solving the problem of unemployment, living in a community, and promoting international understanding seemed more worthwhile, so it was to these lectures I went in so far as I could find them.
This proved more difficult than might be expected. In political theory much was said and written about the relationship between the individual citizen and the state, and the various views about the nature of the state, including, for example, federal states. However, it did appear as though a topic did not deserve attention unless Plato, Rousseau, or Hobbes had written sage words on the subject. Unemployment was taken as a purely economic phenomenon; the political impact on countries such as Germany was not mentioned, presumably because it was so new that its significance had barely been detected. A future Professor of Philosophy suggested that I was taking Moral Philosophy much too seriously and that it should be ranked as a pastime such as chess. If philosophers ignored their vested interests and reached final conclusions they might have to join the unemployed, he confessed
Researchers into cancer are said to suffer from this same inhibition. For the most part I failed to cope with the course I had chosen and ended up with a third class degree. It was little comfort that a fourth class existed and I was bitterly disappointed. The news came at a bad time, a very bad time, capping the failure in my main friendship. Working for peace is hard enough to arrange without a bad start. I could not expect to find a job writing as a peace correspondent, nor find ways of slipping in messages related to peace as an ordinary journalist.