ABSTRACT
While it is commonplace that nothing was ever the same after the First World War, Cambridge University was in many ways unchanged by the conflict. No Zeppelins bombed the city so that the architectural beauty of the colleges was unsullied. Unbroken too was the intellectual lineage of the dons, many of whom had been diverted into tasks related to military needs, but were now free to take up their life’s work again. The duration of the war exceeded the usual three years of an undergraduate degree and the lost generation of young men were merely ghosts in the quadrangles and along the Backs. About one in five of those who had joined up straight from public school or who had interrupted their undergraduate degrees were killed in action, with larger numbers blinded, maimed, gassed or psychologically damaged so that they could no longer study. Those who did come up in 1919 were either intact exservicemen or younger brothers of the lost generation. The most conspicuous of the former were the 400 in naval uniform scattered among the various colleges; the Admiralty intended them to complete their educations with six months of general studies. They accounted for a quarter of all new undergraduates matriculating in the first six months of 1919, and their arrival was even celebrated by Kipling in one of his less memorable poems, ‘The Scholars’:
Oh, show me how a rose can shut and be a bud again!/Nay, watch my Lords of the Admiralty, for they have the work in train./They have taken the men that were careless lads at Dartmouth in’ Fourteen/And entered them at the landward schools as though no war had been./They have piped the children off all the seas from the Falklands to the Bight,/And quartered them on the Colleges to learn to read and write!
