An Unfinished Page

Cambridge provided an unlikely home for an aspiring revolutionary. Outspoken advocacy of socialism put Dobb on the fringes of a political scene dominated by a massive influx of veterans — four hundred officers from the Navy alone — who had deferred enrollment in the University’s colleges for enlistment in Britain’s armed forces during the Great War. It was a nasty piece of luck for Dobb that he arrived at Cambridge when the ranks of its student body swelled with older versions of the kind of people who had infuriated him at Charterhouse. He had multiple occasions to reflect on this unfortunate coincidence in his undergraduate career — for instance, when student-veterans tossed him, fully dressed, into the River Cam; when they disrupted a meeting of the Union of Democratic Control, a pacifist organization with a local Cambridge branch that Dobb had joined; when those same students, as the conflict following the UDC meeting escalated, almost destroyed his room; or during any of the other acts of casual intimidation, harassment, and violence Cambridge authorities let slip their attention when directed at the University’s socialists.1