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

employee whose chief commitment was to teaching and administration for faculty boards rather than for colleges. As secretary of the Examination and Lectures Syndicate in 1892–1910, Neville Keynes was instrumental in starting the economics tripos in 1902–3. His link with Pembroke dwindled to dining-rights and combination-room privileges, until he was elected to an honorary fellowship at Pembroke after retiring as university lecturer in moral sciences in 1911.

      Neville Keynes had a low estimate of himself. He needed calm and regular routines to fend off attacks of nerves. He preferred to stay in a level, straight rut than to take any path on which he might be surprised or jolted; was prone to migraines or hypochondria when faced with tricky personal decisions; took pride in never tampering with a fact; preferred steady, unimaginative, impartial but somehow restful desk-work to tasks that excited tension or doubts. Consequently, he did not seek the vacant chair in economics at University College, London for which Alfred Marshall recommended him. In 1887 he similarly declined requests from Marshall to become the first editor of the Economic Journal because he knew the responsibility would make him ill with worry. This timidity disappointed his wife, who sought substitute consolations in the later successes of her children. Maynard, significantly, became editor of the Economic Journal some twenty-one years after his father had shirked the task – and retained the editorship until February 1945.

      Macmillan, the London publishers with Cambridge roots, published Neville Keynes’s Studies and Exercises in Formal Logic in 1884, and The Scope and Method of Political Economy in 1891. Both books were painstaking but sterile; he revised each of them, but published little else. Instead, year after year, he churned out lucid, impersonal minutes and unfeeling, characterless memoranda for university committees. Repetitious, dutiful work made him feel better. He was described in 1904 by Arthur Benson of Magdalene as ‘a nice little chippy, precise, solemn man – a good Secretary, I should think – not exciting’.6

      Life for Neville Keynes was seated on well-cushioned comfort. It was protected by the broad, solid mass of unchallenged English prosperity. In one respect he was a model parent: he encouraged his children, wished them to succeed, and cherished their ambitions; he never wanted them to be smaller than him or dependent on him, never sought to overshadow them, or retard their progress. At work and at home he shrank from exaggeration or severity. Long after Queen Victoria had died at Windsor, Neville Keynes remained a mid-Victorian in his belief in preserving orderliness, exhibiting social deference, fulfilling personal obligations and public duties, and in Christian decency.

      In 1882, after the celibacy restrictions on the tenure of fellowships had been lifted, there was a spurt of marriages among Fellows: it was said that all but one of the resident Fellows of Jesus married within a year. ‘In that first age of married society in Cambridge, when the narrow circle of the spouses-regnant of the Heads of Colleges and of a few wives of Professors was first extended, several of the most notable dons, particularly in the School of Moral Science, married students of Newnham,’ Maynard Keynes recalled in the 1920s of his parents and their circle. ‘The double link between husbands and between wives bound together a small cultured society of great simplicity and distinction. This circle was at its full strength in my boyhood, and, when I was first old enough to be asked out to luncheon or to dinner, it was to these houses that I went.’7

      In 1942 Maynard Keynes spoke at a family luncheon at King’s to mark his father’s ninetieth birthday and his parents’ diamond wedding. He imagined his father sixty years earlier as an ‘elegant, mid-Victorian high-brow, reading Swinburne, Meredith, Ibsen, buying William Morris wall-paper, whiskered, modest, and industrious, but rather rich, rather pleasure-loving, rather extravagant within carefully set limits, most generous; very sociable; loved entertaining, wine, games, novels, theatre, travel; but the shadow of work gradually growing, as migraine headaches set a readiness to look on the more gloomy or depressing side of any prospect.’ Maynard Keynes praised his father, too, as a university administrator: ‘He helped to create a framework within which learning and science and education could live and flourish without feeling … a hampering hand.’8

      Neville Keynes is easy to judge because he kept a moderately informative diary from 1864 until 1917. For his wife one must rely on public records and a memoir written in her old age. Florence Keynes bore three children (Maynard, Margaret and Geoffrey) between June 1883 and March 1887. She was an attentive, stimulating mother. When her eldest son Maynard was aged four and a half, she began teaching him the alphabet in hourly lessons each morning. ‘Mother is such a clever person,’ the child told his father, before adding, ‘Mother is so kind. You are kind, too, but not so kind as Mother.’9

      Once alphabets had been taught and her children launched into school life, Florence Keynes began to fulfil the ideals of service inculcated by her Baptist upbringing and Newnham training. She did not talk about the poor as if they were characters in a book; she had not a shred of the soft, subservient femininity of Victorian women; she was neither meddlesome nor domineering. Around 1895, deploring waste, confusion, insecurity and distress, she became founding secretary of the Cambridge branch of the Charity Organization Society, and began using her bracing virtuous intelligence to advance the education and health of girls and mothers. She entered local government in 1907 with her election to Cambridge’s Board of Guardians (which oversaw the Poor Law workhouses), and served as chairman of the Board from 1922 until the modernization of social service provisions under the Local Government Act of 1929.

      Although women had been entitled since 1894 to serve on urban and rural district councils, they were excluded from borough and county councils until the Liberal government enacted the Qualification of Women Act of 1907. Even then the qualification for candidates was to be a householder; and as in the eye of the law, only husbands could be householders, not married women, this meant that only spinsters and widows could stand for election. Florence Keynes brought this anomaly to the attention of a Liberal Cabinet minister, and the law was altered in the summer of 1914. In an uncontested election in October, Florence Keynes became the first woman member of Cambridge borough council – and probably the first married woman to serve on a town council. She was described in 1916 as the busiest woman in Cambridge. After the passage of the Sex Disqualification Removal Act of 1919, she was among the earliest women to become magistrates. She served as alderman of Cambridge from 1930 and as mayor in 1932.

      It is notable that Maynard Keynes drew closer to his mother, consulted and respected her, as she became prominent in Cambridge civic life: his letters to her became informative, while his contacts with his father receded in importance. Public works lightened her domestic character. ‘Florence is becoming quite frivolous – playing auction bridge, and solving crossword puzzles,’ Neville Keynes noted in 1914. His devoted dependence on her increased with time. ‘If possible I love my dear wife more than I ever did. I am always thinking about her.’10

      As a Cambridge councillor Florence Keynes took up modernizing initiatives in both health and the law. During the Great War she was one of the doughty wives of Cambridge dons who helped Sir Pendrill Varrier-Jones to start the Papworth tuberculosis sanatorium outside the town. The Fulbourn mental asylum was another local cause that she adopted. She campaigned for the establishment of juvenile courts and for the appointment of women police; and urged women to serve as jurors. Sometimes by private lobbying, sometimes through voluntary organizations or in her official roles, Florence Keynes helped to start an open-air school for sick children and the first English juvenile labour exchanges. The provision of free spectacles and dentistry for needy Cambridge schoolchildren, and the supply of gadgets or false limbs to help the disabled, were among her other good causes. She sat on a Whitehall committee on the recruitment and training of nurses. Many of her accomplishments were achieved through the National Council of Women, of which she became national president in 1930–2.

      But all this came when her children were adults. A quarter-century of maternity had supervened. Florence Keynes became pregnant about a month into her marriage. The family doctor, who oversaw the pregnancy and delivery, was typical of the Harvey Road set. George Wherry, surgeon at Addenbrooke’s hospital, Fellow of