On graduation from Oxford in 1948 he became a lecturer in English Literature at University College Swansea where he taught for a dozen years. He was drafted into the army and received a commission in the Royal Corps of Signals in 1943, going on to university after the end of the war. He did well at the City of London School and got into St John’s College, Oxford, where he declared himself to be a communist. The 1944 Education Act allowed bright youngsters from lower-middle and working class backgrounds to attend university and it was intended as a piece of social engineering to break down the old barriers of class and privilege and issue in a New Britain of fairness and equality after the most devastating war in history.Īmis was the son of an office clerk. A Labour government was elected in 1945 after Victory in Europe but its members had been largely in control of domestic policy during the previous years. It was a world of rationing and earnest social policies that made George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) seem possible and not far away.
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