married woman to serve on a town council. She was described in 1916 as the busiest woman in Cambridge. After the passage of the Sex Disqualification Removal Act of 1919, she was among the earliest women to become magistrates. She served as alderman of Cambridge from 1930 and as mayor in 1932.
It is notable that Maynard Keynes drew closer to his mother, consulted and respected her, as she became prominent in Cambridge civic life: his letters to her became informative, while his contacts with his father receded in importance. Public works lightened her domestic character. ‘Florence is becoming quite frivolous – playing auction bridge, and solving crossword puzzles,’ Neville Keynes noted in 1914. His devoted dependence on her increased with time. ‘If possible I love my dear wife more than I ever did. I am always thinking about her.’10
As a Cambridge councillor Florence Keynes took up modernizing initiatives in both health and the law. During the Great War she was one of the doughty wives of Cambridge dons who helped Sir Pendrill Varrier-Jones to start the Papworth tuberculosis sanatorium outside the town. The Fulbourn mental asylum was another local cause that she adopted. She campaigned for the establishment of juvenile courts and for the appointment of women police; and urged women to serve as jurors. Sometimes by private lobbying, sometimes through voluntary organizations or in her official roles, Florence Keynes helped to start an open-air school for sick children and the first English juvenile labour exchanges. The provision of free spectacles and dentistry for needy Cambridge schoolchildren, and the supply of gadgets or false limbs to help the disabled, were among her other good causes. She sat on a Whitehall committee on the recruitment and training of nurses. Many of her accomplishments were achieved through the National Council of Women, of which she became national president in 1930–2.
But all this came when her children were adults. A quarter-century of maternity had supervened. Florence Keynes became pregnant about a month into her marriage. The family doctor, who oversaw the pregnancy and delivery, was typical of the Harvey Road set. George Wherry, surgeon at Addenbrooke’s hospital, Fellow of Downing College and University Lecturer on Surgery, was a lanky long-distance runner, who (like Neville Keynes) adored Switzerland and (unlike Neville Keynes) was a bold mountaineer. The author of Alpine Notes and the Climbing Foot (1896) and Notes from a Knapsack (1900), he savoured the inarticulate camaraderie of men who climbed steep mountains roped together. He had gone to Cambridge by an arbitrary route that was characteristic of its period. At the age of twenty-one, having qualified in medicine at a London teaching hospital, he was invited to a whist party by the house surgeon. There, when someone cited Tennyson’s ‘Northern Farmer’, he capped the quotation with one from Virgil’s Aeneid. Perhaps this seemed bumptious, for the surgeon retorted that Wherry was too immature to practise medicine, and sent him with a letter of recommendation for further studies at Cambridge. A young physician who quoted Virgil, climbed Alps, analysed old bones in the Fitzwilliam Museum and wrote a monograph on Charles Lamb was the only man present at the birth of Maynard Keynes.
Neville Keynes listened at the bedroom door (Tuesday 5 June 1883) as his mother-in-law Ada Brown and Dr Wherry handled the delivery. ‘I saw her at intervals till about nine, but after that they wd not let me go into the room,’ he recorded in his diary.
At 9.30 I went to listen outside the door … Florence was giving a slight groan every now & then (they say she was very brave) and at 9.45 I heard such a hullaballoo, & Mrs Brown just came to the door, & said it was a boy … Everything went well, except for a little tear, wh Wherry sewed up. Just before eleven I was allowed in to see her, & I thought her looking bonny. They say that the boy is the image of me. It’s ugly enough.
Next day Neville added in his diary: ‘I am already getting very fond of him notwithstanding his ugliness … I could sit & look at him for hours. I love the contortions of his little face and his little hands.’ This harping on the baby’s ugliness may have persisted: as a boy, Maynard Keynes was convinced of his ugliness, and in manhood he continued to feel that his appearance was repulsive.11
The forenames ‘John Maynard’ were chosen, but ‘the little man’ was never known to his family, friends and contemporaries by any forename except Maynard. The formulation ‘John Maynard Keynes’ is used on the title-page of his books, in library catalogues and by people who never knew him. He disliked this wording, and in letters to intimate friends always signed himself ‘JMK’: ‘John’ was used only by his mother at rare moments of stress.
The baby delighted his parents, who watched him with love and pride. ‘With my own eyes I really did see him smile this morning,’ Neville Keynes noted after a month. ‘He is beginning to look about him a good deal, & he is particularly fond of colour. We think him the sweetest baby that ever was. Florence is getting so fond of him as almost to surprise herself.’ And when the infant was approaching two months old: ‘We don’t think it possible that we could love any other baby as we do our little Maynard. He looks so sweet and so pathetic when he begins to cry. I would [that] I could photograph his looks upon my memory. I fear to forget them. His intelligence is increasing, & this enables him to be more patient when his Mother is getting ready to nurse him. He at least half understands what is going on.’ A fortnight later, in mid-August 1883, the doting father noted (with a characteristic touch of unease behind his pleasure): ‘the little man has again been making a distinct advance. He laughs a good deal and looks so pretty … He sometimes tries to sit up by himself, & he likes to feel his feet; but they say that is not good for him.’12
Neville Keynes loved the watchfulness, the receptivity, the thoughts and the growing articulacy of his children. He valued the childlike, and his children’s pride of accomplishment. ‘It is our dear little boy’s third birthday,’ Neville noted on 5 June 1886. ‘He is quite a little man now; & we can send him to any part of the house by himself on errands. There is nothing he likes better than being entrusted with an errand … I wish he weighed more the little shrimp.’ On summer holiday at Hunstanton in 1887, he grabbed his four-year-old for boisterous play: ‘O Father,’ Maynard remonstrated, ‘you are so frisky!’ When his aunt Fanny Purchase, who was married to a Weybridge grocer, remarked that she had a bad memory, Maynard chirped out, ‘O, I have a very good one.’ His aunt asked if he wouldn’t give her a little bit of his memory. ‘He thought for a moment and then he said, “But I don’t know how to get it out of myself.”’ Just before Christmas of 1887 (aged four and a half) he impressed his father with his latest philosophic enquiry: ‘How do things get their names?’13
When that same autumn Neville admitted ‘that I shall be so sorry when he grows big so that I can no longer carry him about and hug him’, Maynard promised to remain small and not grow up. Neville Keynes wanted his boy to remain a sprightly, skinny little darling full of bright quips and treasured confidences: half dreaded him turning into an independent, long-legged stripling striding away to an unpredictable future in which misfortunes could pounce on him.14
During the spring of 1888 Neville Keynes began reading aloud to his elder son for ten minutes every evening at bedtime, which increased their mutual trust, intimacy and pleasure. One night, when Neville was reading Grimm’s tales, he spoke the sentence: ‘A certain father had two sons, the elder of whom was sharp & sensible.’ A little voice piped up, quite seriously, ‘Why that is like me!’ A few weeks later, Grimm was put aside, and Alice in Wonderland started. ‘He is a delightful little man to read to. His attention never wanders for an instant, & he hardly misses a single point.’ At the age of six he told his mother that he was interested in his own brain. ‘Just now, it’s wondering how it thinks. It ought to know.’ Both parents read aloud to their children: on a holiday in 1894, for example, Florence read Anthony Hope’s Prisoner of Zenda; Neville, Kipling’s Jungle Book.15
For
