History Is Multifaceted

I T was America which changed my life. But before I explain, let me set the scene. My father died when I was eight and my mother brought up three boys, of whom I was the eldest. I set my sights on a university education but knew that if I stayed at home my mother would get no financial help, so I decided to seek admission to the London School of Economics, which by October 1940 had been evacuated to Cambridge. To finance my education I obtained a City of Bristol scholarship of ?6o a year. In addition, I applied for a grant from the Alice Coles Charity, a local charity which was advertised on the cover of my state school exercise book. They awarded me a grant of ?5 a year, but in order that I should not indulge in profligate expenditure they decided to pay that sum in three termly installments of Li 13S. 4d. and indicated that, when I got a job, they hoped that I would refund the money. LSE accepted me but decided that ?65 was insufficient so they gave me another LI 5 for the year, which meant that I lived the first year in Cambridge on ?8o. On this amount, which clearly-even in I 940-was not lavish, I was able to live adequately. I bought books and a bicycle and don't remember feeling worse off than my contemporaries. The first-year course in social studies consisted of five subjects: theoretical and applied economics, economic history, geography, and the British constitution. I had gone up to LSE hoping to specialize in geography, but the lectures by Rodwell Jones, co-author of a standard geography textbook, consisted of interminable slides of the interminable American prairies. I have to confess that I lost interest in this undemanding intellectual activity. Then, as a result of the examinations at the end of the first year, I was offered the Lillian Knowles Scholarship in economic history, worth ?2 5, which I accepted. So America changed my life. Instead of becoming a geographer I became an economic historian. There were times in the 1950S when promotion was more rapid in geography when I questioned my decision, but in the end I do not regret my change of course. The additional ?25 took my annual income into three figures and with rather uncharacteristic rashness, this being Cambridge in the early 1940s, I bought a dinner jacket-a tuxedo-for the marginal ?5, a bargain even then and the more so as I was able to wear it into the mid-i97os. American history found little place at LSE early in the war, and when I returned in 1945 after winning the war, with a little help from Errol Flynn, I found things had not altered. The first-year economic history course, which dealt with the spread of industrialization largely in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, found room to mention developments in the

Economic, financial, and policy analysis · History