The Man Who Loved China by Simon Winchester Read Free Book Online

his other work he found time to address the International Folk Dance Congress in 1935: his topic was “The Geographical Distribution of English Morris and Sword Dancing.” Like so many of the fascinations in Joseph Needham’s life, what had started as an innocent weekend hobby ended up as a subject for academic discussion and high seriousness. “No knowledge,” his father had said, “is ever to be wasted, or ever to be despised.”
    Â 
    Britain’s nine-day general strike of 1926 finally confirmed Needham as a man of the far, far left—mainly because it did not lead to any obvious victory for the workers. In fact it allowed the Conservative government of the day to pass laws banning such sympathetic strikes, consolidating in Needham’s disappointed mind a notion that had been forming since he was a schoolboy: that his sympathies lay with the workers, totally.
    He was by no means a Bolshevik, as he had thought himself as a schoolboy; nor would he ever become a full-fledged member of the Communist Party. But around this time he would devour both Das Kapital and the German edition of Engel’s Dialectics of Nature , and he would throw his hat in with the far left wing of the British Labour Party now and for the rest of his life. But he was a stalwart who would also be firmly wedded to his creature comforts—such as his magnificent Armstrong-Siddeley car (though he did write to the company’s founder, Sir John Siddeley, asking that none of the firm’s money be used to finance military research, as it was once rumored to do).
    He became very much an activist—a militant, almost. He was forever writing letters to newspapers, pamphleteering, designing placards, campaigning, marching, taking up causes. He demanded, for instance, that Britain boycott the Olympic Games of 1936 in Berlin. He complained on behalf of the National Council for Civil Liberties about heavy-handed police actions at an airfield at Duxford, where pacifists had tried to hand out leaflets during an air show, and found themselves arrested. (They“should be shot,” Needham records one local as muttering to him when he went to the show to see for himself.)
    His colleagues on the National Council for Civil Liberties represent a roll call of the intellectual left of the day: E. M. Forster, Clement Attlee, Nye Bevan, Havelock Ellis, Dingle Foot, Victor Gollancz, A. P. Herbert, Julian Huxley, George Lansbury, Harold Laski, David Low, Kingsley Martin, A. A. Milne, J. B. Priestley, Hannen Swaffer (a former neighbor in south London), R. H. Tawney, H. G. Wells, Rebecca West, and Amabel Williams-Ellis. 5 All of them became firm friends. He addressed the University Socialist Society, finding himself lecturing to a comrade named Kim Philby, Trinity College representative, who would later become notorious as one of Britain’s most celebrated spies. Needham joined forces with the extraordinary social anthropologist Tom Harrisson, a founder of Mass Observation. 6 He was enormously influenced by the communist crystallographer J. D. Bernal, and joined Sir Solly Zuckerman’s famous scientific dining club, the Tots and Quots. He was, in other words and in all ways, a figure of the left-wing establishment, his credentials never in doubt, his subscriptions and his fealties always paid in full.
    All this frantic activity led to some predictable muttering in the college. A number of the older fellows of Caius said that Needham’s socialist leanings suggested a growing eccentricity, and the possibility that he was becoming unsound. Eccentricity was generally a backhanded compliment; but unsound was as pejorative as any word in the establishment’s lexicon. Needham was notably thin-skinned in his youth, highly sensitive to criticism of any kind: “I shall have nothing further to do with your journal,” he wrote to the editor of the Cambridge Review , after the publication ran an essay lambasting him