Today, 25 March, is the feast of the annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. May I reassure regular readers that my normal stance of militant atheism has not given way to religious mania, still less to Mariolatry? I continue to strive for the day when all priests, rabbis, mullahs, lamas, shamen and other functionaries of superstition only exist in museums, memory and history.
However, on this day every year my school choir would sing evensong in the chapel of Gonville and Caius College. We would perform the canticles in a setting by the music master, Graham Sudbury, the carol the Angel Gabriel from heaven came, whose refrain, most highly favoured lady has been rendered by choirboys as most highly flavoured gravy for generations, and the hymn Blessed city, heavenly Salem, which, it is fitting to remember in his 350th anniversary year, is to a tune taken from Henry Purcell's anthem, O God, thou art y God.
Afterwards we would be entertained to tea in the Master's parlour. The tenors and basses were separated from the trebles and altos and were rumoured to be given beer, though when my voice broke and, after a brief unsuccessful attempt, influenced by he counter-tenor revival then in train, to sing the alto parts, I found myself among the basses, I found this to be untrue.
Joseph Needham, the scientist and sinologist, was master then, a benevolent presence at the post-evensong feast. I was reminded of this when reading Simon Winchester's life of Needham. He would read one of the lessons, while the other was read by the then headmaster of the school, Anthony Melville, the two of them seated at the rear of the chapel, on either side of the door in curtained pews with many cushions. Melville's thorough-going reactionary stance must have been at odds with Needham's progressive outlook. Indeed it was also at odds with the school's traditions. Two of its most famous old boys were Rajani Palme Dutt, eminence grise of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and Humphrey Jennings, the radical documentary film maker.
Needham was also a keen swimmer, and my father had pointed him and his second wife Lu Gwei-Djen out to me him at the University bathing sheds on the way to Grantchester, and at a bathing place near Horningsea. It seemed to me that Winchester in his book has mistaken the location of the latter. Known as the pit, it was a popular swimming place, an old gravel pit surrounded by hawthorn on land owned by Hugh and Betty Gingell, who kindly let people use it. Needham's remarks on swimming in Cambridge are well worth reading, part of an essay Cambridge Summer in History is on our Side
Later I was to come across Needham through the part he played in the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding. At this period, just after the Cultural Revolution, the Cambridge branch was divided more or less equally between those who thought Chinese paper cuts were awfully pretty, and those of us who were interested in what we political lessons we could draw from the Chinese experience.
Needham, Joseph
History is on our side: a contribution to political religion and scientific faith
London: George Allen & Unwin, 1946