for fifty-seven years and President of the General Medical Council for twenty-seven years; the physicist Sir Richard Glazebrook, senior bursar of Trinity; the mathematician William Besant, a Fellow of St John’s; and Anchitel Boughey, vicar of Great St Mary’s church, a lecturer in classics and theology, and a Fellow of Trinity. Harvey Road – a tree-lined residential street that was not a short-cut to anywhere except Fenner’s cricket ground – stood about midway between Pembroke College and Cambridge railway station (the latter within pleasant walking-distance). At the foot of the road a bulky Roman Catholic church was built in the early 1890s: it was said by E. M. Forster to have been funded by someone who made a fortune supplying movable eyes for dolls, but was in fact financed by a ballet-dancer who took to Christian repentance after marrying a banker.
Cambridge in the 1880s, and for another century, resembled a country town rather than a university city. It was nearer to John Keynes’s native Salisbury than to Oxford. The atmosphere and values at 6 Harvey Road might have been those of a medical household in a provincial town if it had not been for the emphasis on educational striving, tripos results, the rating of young men as having ‘first-class minds’ or being ‘unsound’. Maynard Keynes was always proud to identify himself as a member of the educated middle class: he saw education as enlarging and redemptive.
The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge Act of 1877 meanwhile facilitated reforms of college and university statutes, which came into force about the time of Neville Keynes’s marriage in 1882. Life fellowships (unless held with a major college office) were abolished; a progressive levy on colleges redistributed income throughout the university; and the ban on the marriage of college fellows was lifted. As a practical idealist, keen to raise academic quality, Neville Keynes diverted his energies towards the administration of the reformed university, became assistant secretary of the Examinations Board at Cambridge and vacated his fellowship. Two years later, in 1884, he was included among the first Cambridge University lecturers ever appointed. He was thus a pioneer in Cambridge of a new type of university employee whose chief commitment was to teaching and administration for faculty boards rather than for colleges. As secretary of the Examination and Lectures Syndicate in 1892–1910, Neville Keynes was instrumental in starting the economics tripos in 1902–3. His link with Pembroke dwindled to dining-rights and combination-room privileges, until he was elected to an honorary fellowship at Pembroke after retiring as university lecturer in moral sciences in 1911.
Neville Keynes had a low estimate of himself. He needed calm and regular routines to fend off attacks of nerves. He preferred to stay in a level, straight rut than to take any path on which he might be surprised or jolted; was prone to migraines or hypochondria when faced with tricky personal decisions; took pride in never tampering with a fact; preferred steady, unimaginative, impartial but somehow restful desk-work to tasks that excited tension or doubts. Consequently, he did not seek the vacant chair in economics at University College, London for which Alfred Marshall recommended him. In 1887 he similarly declined requests from Marshall to become the first editor of the Economic Journal because he knew the responsibility would make him ill with worry. This timidity disappointed his wife, who sought substitute consolations in the later successes of her children. Maynard, significantly, became editor of the Economic Journal some twenty-one years after his father had shirked the task – and retained the editorship until February 1945.
Macmillan, the London publishers with Cambridge roots, published Neville Keynes’s Studies and Exercises in Formal Logic in 1884, and The Scope and Method of Political Economy in 1891. Both books were painstaking but sterile; he revised each of them, but published little else. Instead, year after year, he churned out lucid, impersonal minutes and unfeeling, characterless memoranda for university committees. Repetitious, dutiful work made him feel better. He was described in 1904 by Arthur Benson of Magdalene as ‘a nice little chippy, precise, solemn man – a good Secretary, I should think – not exciting’.6
Life for Neville Keynes was seated on well-cushioned comfort. It was protected by the broad, solid mass of unchallenged English prosperity. In one respect he was a model parent: he encouraged his children, wished them to succeed, and cherished their ambitions; he never wanted them to be smaller than him or dependent on him, never sought to overshadow them, or retard their progress. At work and at home he shrank from exaggeration or severity. Long after Queen Victoria had died at Windsor, Neville Keynes remained a mid-Victorian in his belief in preserving orderliness, exhibiting social deference, fulfilling personal obligations and public duties, and in Christian decency.
In 1882, after the celibacy restrictions on the tenure of fellowships had been lifted, there was a spurt of marriages among Fellows: it was said that all but one of the resident Fellows of Jesus married within a year. ‘In that first age of married society in Cambridge, when the narrow circle of the spouses-regnant of the Heads of Colleges and of a few wives of Professors was first extended, several of the most notable dons, particularly in the School of Moral Science, married students of Newnham,’ Maynard Keynes recalled in the 1920s of his parents and their circle. ‘The double link between husbands and between wives bound together a small cultured society of great simplicity and distinction. This circle was at its full strength in my boyhood, and, when I was first old enough to be asked out to luncheon or to dinner, it was to these houses that I went.’7
In 1942 Maynard Keynes spoke at a family luncheon at King’s to mark his father’s ninetieth birthday and his parents’ diamond wedding. He imagined his father sixty years earlier as an ‘elegant, mid-Victorian high-brow, reading Swinburne, Meredith, Ibsen, buying William Morris wall-paper, whiskered, modest, and industrious, but rather rich, rather pleasure-loving, rather extravagant within carefully set limits, most generous; very sociable; loved entertaining, wine, games, novels, theatre, travel; but the shadow of work gradually growing, as migraine headaches set a readiness to look on the more gloomy or depressing side of any prospect.’ Maynard Keynes praised his father, too, as a university administrator: ‘He helped to create a framework within which learning and science and education could live and flourish without feeling … a hampering hand.’8
Neville Keynes is easy to judge because he kept a moderately informative diary from 1864 until 1917. For his wife one must rely on public records and a memoir written in her old age. Florence Keynes bore three children (Maynard, Margaret and Geoffrey) between June 1883 and March 1887. She was an attentive, stimulating mother. When her eldest son Maynard was aged four and a half, she began teaching him the alphabet in hourly lessons each morning. ‘Mother is such a clever person,’ the child told his father, before adding, ‘Mother is so kind. You are kind, too, but not so kind as Mother.’9
Once alphabets had been taught and her children launched into school life, Florence Keynes began to fulfil the ideals of service inculcated by her Baptist upbringing and Newnham training. She did not talk about the poor as if they were characters in a book; she had not a shred of the soft, subservient femininity of Victorian women; she was neither meddlesome nor domineering. Around 1895, deploring waste, confusion, insecurity and distress, she became founding secretary of the Cambridge branch of the Charity Organization Society, and began using her bracing virtuous intelligence to advance the education and health of girls and mothers. She entered local government in 1907 with her election to Cambridge’s Board of Guardians (which oversaw the Poor Law workhouses), and served as chairman of the Board from 1922 until the modernization of social service provisions under the Local Government Act of 1929.
Although women had been entitled since 1894 to serve on urban and rural district councils, they were excluded from borough and county councils until the Liberal government enacted the Qualification of Women Act of 1907. Even then the qualification for candidates was to be a householder; and as in the eye of the law, only husbands could be householders, not married women, this meant that only spinsters and widows could stand for election. Florence Keynes brought this anomaly to the attention of a Liberal Cabinet minister, and the law was altered in the summer
