Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes. Richard Davenport-Hines

of Sir Oswald Mosley, and Geoffrey Keynes asked me if I thought that Skidelsky was a crypto-fascist, as he had been told. He asked, too, if Skidelsky resembled Michael Holroyd, which I did not understand until later was an enquiry whether Skidelsky would be as frank about Maynard Keynes’s sex life, and in identifying his lovers, as Holroyd had been in his two recent volumes on Lytton Strachey. I extolled Skidelsky, whose Politicians and the Slump had taught me as a schoolboy the excitement of modern archives. Skidelsky was too enlightened in his ideas to be a crypto-fascist, I said: his imaginative gift was to interpret people who were far different from him. Geoffrey Keynes seemed to listen with surprising care to my blurting. It seems doubtful if he remembered what I said for long, but I am glad to have championed Skidelsky’s cause against the mistrust and whispered impediments that confronted the early stages of his project.

      This interlude at Lammas House left an abiding sense of the Keynes frame of mind. The punctilio, brisk competence, logic and discreet humour of Geoffrey Keynes were attractive. The way that he welcomed me with questions, without either reducing or emphasizing his own great authority, was signal. But his wish to hear well of Skidelsky, and his evident desire to find reasons for generous cooperation, were Keynesian. When I investigated Geoffrey Keynes in reference books afterwards, I found that he had worked in horrific conditions as a surgeon in casualty clearing stations on the Western Front in the first war and had held the rank of air vice-marshal as an RAF consulting surgeon in the second war. As a result of his experiences of trench warfare, he devised the Keynes flask for blood transfusion, founded the London Blood Transfusion Service and in 1922 published the first textbook on the subject. In the 1930s he pioneered the radium treatment of breast cancer and was a humane opponent of drastic surgical responses to that affliction. All the time he was assembling one of the best private book collections in England of his century, astounding other collectors by his generosity in sharing its treasures, and compiling magisterial scholarly bibliographies based on his holdings. He also wrote a ballet, with music by Ralph Vaughan Williams. This passionate, enriching diversity of interests, disciplines and powers was characteristic of the Keynes brothers.

      In the University of Cambridge during the 1970s John Maynard Keynes was invoked as a man beyond emulation. Forty years later, my admiration for his self-control, authority and benevolence has intensified. He seems – more than ever – an inspiring example of an intellectual who was bold in his ideas and unselfish in the ways that he put them into action. If his life has one pre-eminent lesson, based not on wishy-washy hopes about human nature but on the probabilities for good outcomes, it is that if confronted by conflicting alternatives, when choosing the way forward in practical matters, the sound principle is to take the most generous course.

      ‘The golden mediocrity of a successful English middle-class family’ was John Maynard Keynes’s phrase to describe the ancestry of his fellow economist Malthus. The calm, assuaging prosperity of his own family began with a teenage boy’s stagecoach ride from Salisbury to Andover in the last years of the reign of King George III. His grandfather John Keynes (1805–78), who had been apprenticed at the age of eleven to his father’s brush factory at Salisbury, admired a purple carnation (called Butt’s Lord Rodney) in the buttonhole of a passenger sitting opposite him. He determined to cultivate carnations and pinks, and pawned his watch to buy his first plants. At the age of seventeen his pinks won his first prize in a garden-show: a pair of sugar-tongs. Within years his hobby was bringing him a respectable fortune. Thousands flocked to his dahlia exhibition at Stonehenge in 1841. Four years later he opened a nursery in Salisbury, where he produced dahlias, verbenas and carnations, and hybridized new roses. Copious hot-house beauty brought social opportunities that had been unimaginable to the apprentice in the brush factory. When the Prince Consort opened the Horticultural Society’s new gardens at South Kensington in 1861, Keynes was a member of the committee that welcomed him.1

      The success of John Keynes’s nursery depended on the increased purchasing-power of middle-class Victorians and the confident assertion of their tastes. His customers rejected the aristocratic model of landscape gardening practised by William Kent, Capability Brown and Humphry Repton, whereby lawns swept up to the house and flowers were confined to the borders in the kitchen-garden. Instead of austere, distant and picturesque views, they wanted banks of colourful, floriferous, fragrant plants to abound in the beds around their houses. A description of the conservatory at a flower-show in Kensington in 1861, at which John Keynes took several prizes, encapsulates a Victorian world in which comfort, safety, abundance and colour were valued. The building was bestrewn with dahlia blooms, hollyhocks, gladioli, phloxes, petunias, roses, lilies, geraniums, verbenas, ferns. Mediterranean tree frogs, disporting themselves on mosses, lichens and ferns inside a glass case, fascinated onlookers, especially children. Military bands performed a selection of marches, overtures, fantasies, waltzes and operatic airs throughout the day.2

      John Keynes, ‘the principal grower of dahlias in the kingdom’, was eminent in the cathedral city where he spent his life. He helped to build a school there, and was long-serving Sunday-school superintendent of Brown Street Baptist chapel. Education was seen as empowering, enriching, meritorious and fulfilling: it was not a chore, but a privilege. His household took The Times. For years before John Keynes’s election as mayor in 1876 he served as a Liberal member of the municipal council. Such was the esteem in which his neighbours held him that most shops in Salisbury closed during his funeral in 1878. The old man left assets exceeding £40,000. Probably his profits from the nursery had been amplified by judicious investments in railways. A network of branch-lines and junction railways, some more profitable than others, were built to radiate from Salisbury during the 1850s. John Keynes probably joined in this local railway boom, and surely participated in the Salisbury Railway & Market House Company, which built a warehouse district on the edge of town and opened a profitable freight-line in 1859.3

      The provincial prosperity of the old nurseryman seemed mellow to his descendants. ‘Like everything English,’ as Virginia Woolf wrote in 1937 of pre-war life, ‘the past seemed near, domestic, friendly.’ Maynard Keynes’s sense of the brightness of English and European life before the lights were extinguished by continent-wide war was fundamental to what he thought and did. ‘What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man that age was which came to an end in August 1914!’ Keynes wrote in The Economic Consequences of the Peace – doubtless mindful of his family’s burgeoning prosperity. Although most people were overworked, with few comforts, they were given hope by the pliancy of the class system. ‘Escape was possible,’ he felt convinced, ‘for any man of capacity or character at all exceeding the average, into the middle and upper classes, for whom life offered, at a low cost and with the least trouble, conveniences, comforts and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of other ages.’4

      Neville Keynes (1852–1949) was the child of the floriculturist’s second marriage to Anna Maynard Neville. She is often said to have been an Essex farmer’s daughter; but her father, although descended from millers and yeomen, was in business in London: her childhood was mainly spent in the countrified suburb of Camberwell. The fact that the Keynes family were staunch Baptists predicated Neville’s education. At the age of fifteen he was sent to a nonconformist boarding-school, where it was instilled in pupils that their hopes of salvation on Judgement Day lay in virtuous living and in passing the London University matriculation exam. Neville Keynes duly, in 1869, won a scholarship to University College, London, which, unlike the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge, accepted undergraduates from outside the Church of England. During his three years at University College, this young nonconformist, with his provincial background in trade, was shown longer horizons, which were to propel his children towards titles and academic honours, and to make their surname the basis for an adjective with world recognition, ‘Keynesian’.

      In 1871 Gladstone’s Liberal government enacted