Universities for the Empire, 1900–45

Abstract

Jawaharlal Nehru’s memories of Edwardian Cambridge could have been written by any nostalgic graduate:

life was pleasant, both physically and intellectually, fresh horizons were ever coming into sight, there was so much to be done, so much to be seen, so many fresh avenues to explore. And we would sit by the fireside in the long winter evenings and discuss unhurriedly deep into the night till the dying fire drove us shivering to our beds … It was the pre-war world of the early twentieth century. Soon this world was to die, yielding place to another, full of death and destruction and anguish and heart-sickness for the world’s youth.¹