Three moments in my afternoon with Geoffrey Keynes I remember well. His wife Margaret (Charles Darwin’s granddaughter) had died two years earlier. ‘It was a good thing,’ he said to me in a matter-of-fact way. ‘She was quite off her head at the end.’ This was my induction to the unusual and sometimes discomfiting truthfulness of the Keynes family.
The second moment came when we were ushered into a dining-room where a good old-fashioned tea was arrayed. Keynes took me aside, tugged from under the table an old deed-box and asked me what I thought of the contents. These were sheaves of pale-blue paper covered with firm handwriting in fading black ink, on which children’s crayon drawings of animals and ships were superimposed. It was, he said, the manuscript of a book by Charles Darwin (either On the Origin of Species or The Descent of Man), which the frugal Victorian, receiving back from the printers, had handed to his small children as scrap-paper. While I handled these fragments, properly speechless, Konrad Kahl was reaching for some fruit-cake and dilating on the naturalness of men swimming naked together in Alpine lakes.
The third incident matters a trifle to this book of mine. Geoffrey Keynes – learning that I was training as a historian of the interwar period – asked what I thought of Robert Skidelsky. Skidelsky had recently proposed to write an enlarged, modernized and comprehensive biography of Maynard Keynes, which was intended to replace the standard life written a quarter of a century earlier by Sir Roy Harrod. Geoffrey Keynes told me that a few interested parties (some at King’s, but also, he implied, Harrod) had been deterring him from cooperating with Skidelsky. They had mentioned Skidelsky’s previous interest in the economic schemes of Sir Oswald Mosley, and Geoffrey Keynes asked me if I thought that Skidelsky was a crypto-fascist, as he had been told. He asked, too, if Skidelsky resembled Michael Holroyd, which I did not understand until later was an enquiry whether Skidelsky would be as frank about Maynard Keynes’s sex life, and in identifying his lovers, as Holroyd had been in his two recent volumes on Lytton Strachey. I extolled Skidelsky, whose Politicians and the Slump had taught me as a schoolboy the excitement of modern archives. Skidelsky was too enlightened in his ideas to be a crypto-fascist, I said: his imaginative gift was to interpret people who were far different from him. Geoffrey Keynes seemed to listen with surprising care to my blurting. It seems doubtful if he remembered what I said for long, but I am glad to have championed Skidelsky’s cause against the mistrust and whispered impediments that confronted the early stages of his project.
This interlude at Lammas House left an abiding sense of the Keynes frame of mind. The punctilio, brisk competence, logic and discreet humour of Geoffrey Keynes were attractive. The way that he welcomed me with questions, without either reducing or emphasizing his own great authority, was signal. But his wish to hear well of Skidelsky, and his evident desire to find reasons for generous cooperation, were Keynesian. When I investigated Geoffrey Keynes in reference books afterwards, I found that he had worked in horrific conditions as a surgeon in casualty clearing stations on the Western Front in the first war and had held the rank of air vice-marshal as an RAF consulting surgeon in the second war. As a result of his experiences of trench warfare, he devised the Keynes flask for blood transfusion, founded the London Blood Transfusion Service and in 1922 published the first textbook on the subject. In the 1930s he pioneered the radium treatment of breast cancer and was a humane opponent of drastic surgical responses to that affliction. All the time he was assembling one of the best private book collections in England of his century, astounding other collectors by his generosity in sharing its treasures, and compiling magisterial scholarly bibliographies based on his holdings. He also wrote a ballet, with music by Ralph Vaughan Williams. This passionate, enriching diversity of interests, disciplines and powers was characteristic of the Keynes brothers.
In the University of Cambridge during the 1970s John Maynard Keynes was invoked as a man beyond emulation. Forty years later, my admiration for his self-control, authority and benevolence has intensified. He seems – more than ever – an inspiring example of an intellectual who was bold in his ideas and unselfish in the ways that he put them into action. If his life has one pre-eminent lesson, based not on wishy-washy hopes about human nature but on the probabilities for good outcomes, it is that if confronted by conflicting alternatives, when choosing the way forward in practical matters, the sound principle is to take the most generous course.
‘The golden mediocrity of a successful English middle-class family’ was John Maynard Keynes’s phrase to describe the ancestry of his fellow economist Malthus. The calm, assuaging prosperity of his own family began with a teenage boy’s stagecoach ride from Salisbury to Andover in the last years of the reign of King George III. His grandfather John Keynes (1805–78), who had been apprenticed at the age of eleven to his father’s brush factory at Salisbury, admired a purple carnation (called Butt’s Lord Rodney) in the buttonhole of a passenger sitting opposite him. He determined to cultivate carnations and pinks, and pawned his watch to buy his first plants. At the age of seventeen his pinks won his first prize in a garden-show: a pair of sugar-tongs. Within years his hobby was bringing him a respectable fortune. Thousands flocked to his dahlia exhibition at Stonehenge in 1841. Four years later he opened a nursery in Salisbury, where he produced dahlias, verbenas and carnations, and hybridized new roses. Copious hot-house beauty brought social opportunities that had been unimaginable to the apprentice in the brush factory. When the Prince Consort opened the Horticultural Society’s new gardens at South Kensington in 1861, Keynes was a member of the committee that welcomed him.1
The success of John Keynes’s nursery depended on the increased purchasing-power of middle-class Victorians and the confident assertion of their tastes. His customers rejected the aristocratic model of landscape gardening practised by William Kent, Capability Brown and Humphry Repton, whereby lawns swept up to the house and flowers were confined to the borders in the kitchen-garden. Instead of austere, distant and picturesque views, they wanted banks of colourful, floriferous, fragrant plants to abound in the beds around their houses. A description of the conservatory at a flower-show in Kensington in 1861, at which John Keynes took several prizes, encapsulates a Victorian world in which comfort, safety, abundance and colour were valued. The building was bestrewn with dahlia blooms, hollyhocks, gladioli, phloxes, petunias, roses, lilies, geraniums, verbenas, ferns. Mediterranean tree frogs, disporting themselves on mosses, lichens and ferns inside a glass case, fascinated onlookers, especially children. Military bands performed a selection of marches, overtures, fantasies, waltzes and operatic airs throughout the day.2
John Keynes, ‘the principal grower of dahlias in the kingdom’, was eminent in the cathedral city where he spent his life. He helped to build a school there, and was long-serving Sunday-school superintendent of Brown Street Baptist chapel. Education was seen as empowering, enriching, meritorious and fulfilling: it was not a chore, but a privilege. His household took The Times. For years before John Keynes’s election as mayor in 1876 he served as a Liberal member of the municipal council. Such was the esteem in which his neighbours held him that most shops in Salisbury closed during his funeral in 1878. The old man left assets exceeding £40,000. Probably his profits from the nursery had been amplified by judicious investments in railways. A network of branch-lines and junction railways, some more profitable than others, were built to radiate from Salisbury during the 1850s. John Keynes probably joined in this local railway boom, and surely participated in the Salisbury Railway & Market House Company, which built a warehouse district on the edge of town and opened a profitable freight-line in 1859.3
The provincial prosperity of the old nurseryman seemed mellow to his descendants. ‘Like everything English,’ as Virginia Woolf wrote in 1937 of pre-war life, ‘the past seemed near, domestic, friendly.’ Maynard Keynes’s sense of the brightness of English and European life
