John Neville Keynes (1852-1949)

Rita McWilliams Tullberg

Introduction

In 1925, John Neville Keynes, at the age of 73, resigned from the office of Registrary, the most senior administrative position at the University of Cambridge. He had held the post for 15 years. To mark his retirement, the Master and Fellows of Pembroke College and his many colleagues and friends subscribed to have two portraits painted of him, one to be kept by the University and hung in Pembroke and the other to adorn the walls of that iconic address, 6 Harvey Road. The finished portraits, painted by Sir Gerald Kelly, were handed over in a ceremony in Pembroke in 1927. In thanking his well-wishers, Neville Keynes spoke of a life spent working for the University: ‘I have always thought myself fortunate in being able to spend my life in University work. I cannot imagine any other surroundings that would have been so congenial to me, or where I should have had such consideration and kindness as have always fallen to my lot here’ (Neville Keynes quoted in Florence Ada Keynes 1950: 109). The pleasure was reciprocated. Many members of the University acknowledged their gratitude for the work Keynes had done on their behalf in maintaining the smooth running of the administrative body that was responsible for the expansion and modernisation of teaching and research in Cambridge. As the Cambridge Review wrote: ‘No University official has been more loved and respected in the memory of man

R.M. Tullberg (h)

Researcher in Economics, Sweden e-mail: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

R.A. Cord (ed.), The Palgrave Companion to Cambridge Economics,

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-41233-1_18

than Dr J. N. Keynes who retired from the office of Registrary at the end of 1925’ (‘News and Notes’, 11 March 1927).¹

However, the University Registrary was not simply a retreat post taken on by an ageing academic tired of teaching and examining. Neville Keynes had dedicated over 40 years to the administration of the University, first as the Assistant Secretary and later Secretary to the Local Examinations Syndicate (LES) from 1881 to 1910, and from 1892 as Member and unpaid Secretary of the Council of Senate,^{[1] [2]} in addition to membership and chairmanship of various faculty boards. Why then is there an entry for the University’s top ‘civil servant’ among this collection of Cambridge economists? Was Neville Keynes’s association with Cambridge economics anything more than that of the father of the University’s brightest economic star, John Maynard Keynes? A brief sortie into the world of academic reform is necessary to understand this conundrum.

By the mid-1800s, it had become obvious that Cambridge must change. It was no longer reasonable for the University to draw its students from a narrow band of male, public school-educated Anglicans who spent three years honing their skills in mathematical manipulation which they then followed with a career in the church or possibly the law.^[3] Students needed to be prepared for the challenges of scientific industrialism, foreign trade, the administration of a developed domestic market economy and of an expanding Empire. Younger universities and university colleges were being established that offered degree courses in applied sciences, languages, economics, and engineering—in short, those subjects that Cambridge ignored. Reforms were to transform mid-nineteenth century Cambridge from a collection of independent, medieval, monastic seminaries into a more homogeneous University with first-class teaching and research in the natural and social sciences. Economics as a subject of academic study in Cambridge would not be as we know it without reforms in the University’s religious affiliation and celibacy requirements, in the subjects offered for degrees, the expansion of the student base, and the organisation of teaching in what we now would call faculties. Neville Keynes’s education and career serves as a useful illustration of how these reforms impacted on a scholarly young man seeking an education that was relevant to the social and economic problems of his day. After graduation, during his long Cambridge career as lecturer and administrator, Keynes contributed significantly to a climate in which the Economics Tripos could be born and Cambridge economics could achieve a high status in research and teaching.

Neville Keynes was born in 1852 in Salisbury where his father, John Keynes, after inheriting the family brush-making business handed it over to his brother and turned to his life’s hobby, horticulture.^[4] The family were active Congregationalists, and Neville Keynes could expect to suffer socially and academically the disabilities still attached to Nonconformism by the largely Church of England establishment. In the balance was the support of a widespread circle of like-minded, Congregationalist friends and acquaintances reaching beyond Salisbury. John Keynes Senior was also a staunch and active Liberal and could count prominent Salisbury Liberals, such as William Fawcett and his son Henry, as good friends. Henry Fawcett was to play a major role in Neville Keynes’s career, not least by his early death in 1884 that left the Chair of Political Economy at Cambridge empty.

Neville Keynes suffered a further disadvantage, for although he was the son of a nationally recognised dahlia expert, he was, nonetheless, the son of a tradesman. This accounts for both the emphasis given to and anxiety involved in the choice of education as the route for clever children of successful tradesmen to move into the ranks of the professional classes, and for the unfamiliar academic road taken by Neville Keynes to a Cambridge degree. Unlike his own children, Neville Keynes did not attend any of England’s better-known public schools. He was sent at the age of eleven to Amersham Hall, ‘a small, exclusive Dissenting Academy of about a hundred boys’ (Skidelsky 1983: 7). There he showed promise in both classics and mathematics, but was of a ‘nervous disposition’ and inclined to lose marks in examinations because of anxiety. As an adult, this nervousness seems to have been accommodated by a ‘belt and braces’ approach to his career and a pessimistic outlook on the outcome of events over which he had no control.

Neville Keynes’s first public academic achievement was to win a Gilchrist Scholarship in 1869 to University College, London. The College had been founded in 1826 as a secular alternative to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, offering broader and more practical courses of study in the arts and sciences than was the case at the ancient universities. It was particularly attractive to Nonconformists, who had been excluded by the Religious Test Acts from degrees at Oxford and Cambridge.^[5] Keynes entered University Hall, a non-denominational Hall of Residence attended not only by some of his Amersham school friends, but also by like-minded sons of Nonconformist tradesmen climbing the social ladder in a hostile academic and professional world.^[6]

In July 1870, after a year in London, Keynes passed Part I of the London B.A. with First Class Honours, which gained him a further scholarship. The following year he was placed equal first in Part II, where he took Logic and Moral Philosophy Honours. The possibility of an academic career is said to have been mooted with his parents by Henry Fawcett, now Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge, and the path to a Cambridge college Fellowship was mapped out. After two false starts, the first the result of an ice-skating accident and then severe toothache, Keynes was awarded a scholarship to Pembroke College in June 1872 to read for the prestigious and competitive Mathematical Tripos (i.e. the Honours Degree examination) at Cambridge.

In October 1872, Neville Keynes became one of 24 freshmen at Pembroke College that year. His sights were set on a college Fellowship that would be awarded for a successful Tripos result.^[7] Within days, the narrow regime of the Mathematical Tripos for which he was being coached filled Keynes with despair. He began to discuss leaving Cambridge or dropping mathematics for ‘morals’ (the Moral Sciences Tripos). His friends advised him against it, as did Professor Fawcett. When Keynes’s Tutor at Pembroke heard about his plans, he strongly advised Keynes to continue with mathematics, suggesting that he would surely come in the top twenty students and ‘thought’ that this would secure a Fellowship. Keynes wrote ‘this would not satisfy me’ (Diary:

18 January 1873).^[8] Keynes agreed to stick with mathematics until the end of the summer term but was determined to switch to moral sciences from his second year. His Tutor, feeling this would be intellectually too undemanding, suggested that he combined moral sciences with law. Keynes however hit on another method of proving his intellectual capacity. Simultaneously with his Cambridge degree course, he would enter for other, broader degrees and prizes at London University.^[9]

The reasons for Keynes’s dislike for drilling in the set problems, set books, and set answers which candidates for top results in the Mathematical Tripos had to submit themselves are not spelt out but are easy to comprehend. An 18-year-old undergraduate was unlikely to challenge the received wisdom that the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos was the best possible intellectual training in logic and mental gymnastics available at the best university in the country. But Neville Keynes was twenty and had already a B.A. degree from London where he had been required to read classical literature and history, some natural science, philosophy, English literature and history, and so on, as well as mathematics. He also understood that he would have to achieve First Class Honours (known as a ‘Wrangler’; c.f. Alfred Marshall’s placing as Second Wrangler in 1865) in the Mathematical Tripos to be sure of a college Fellowship. The attraction of the moral sciences is also understandable. Coming as he did from a Congregational and Liberal home, school and Hall of Residence, Keynes had already been confronted with many of the social and moral problems of the age and was active in debate and in seeking solutions. During the Michaelmas (autumn) term at Pembroke, he spoke twice in college debates, once in favour of the government buying up the railways and on another occasion in favour of women’s suffrage. The following year Keynes joined the University’s Moral Sciences Club and became a regular contributor to their meetings.

His Congregational and Liberal turn of mind was reinforced at Cambridge by the warm welcome that he received in the home of William Bond at Brookside, just a short walk away from Pembroke. Bond was a successful Cambridge grocer and a central figure in Congregational life in Cambridge, and the Keynes and Bond families knew each other well.^[10] At the Bonds, Keynes met the bright young people of both the University and the town, including a future colleague, James Ward, who was reading moral sciences.

In the Tripos finals of December 1874, Ward was placed first and crowned Senior Moralist.¹¹ Informally sitting the same papers were two students from a group of women living in Cambridge who were receiving tuition from some reform-minded Cambridge men. The first of these was Amy Bulley, a Congregationalist whom Keynes had met at the Bonds. The second, Mary Paley, he would come to know well. Placed in the Tripos degree examination between the First and Second Class, she would later marry Alfred Marshall. It was also at the Bonds that Keynes met the most important person in his life, his future wife Florence Ada Brown.^{[11] [12]}

The Moral Sciences Tripos covered Logic, Moral and Political Philosophy, Mental Philosophy, and Political Economy. Founded in 1848, the Tripos had attracted neither good teachers nor ambitious candidates. But the mood of questioning the absolute truths of both received religion and Euclid, as well as the irrelevance of studies in the language and literature of Ancient Greece and Rome to the problems of an industrial and increasingly democratic society, turned the attention of a number of important Cambridge thinkers to the moral sciences giving the subjects both prestige and sound academic credentials. Keynes had already proved himself in two of the Tripos subjects, and he began to enjoy the extensive reading the course required. Yet uncertainty about his career prospects as a graduate in moral sciences led him to take Parts I and II of the London BSc, gaining a First in geology and chemistry in October 1874. Even this was not thought to be sufficient and he prepared himself for the London M.A., aiming at the Gold Medal awarded to the candidate placed First. In December 1875, he passed his Cambridge Tripos as Senior Moralist and in the following June claimed the Gold Medal in the London M.A. All this was the result of a strict regime of hard reading, carefully noted in his Diary as the number of hours spent at work morning, afternoon, and evening, a habit he continued throughout his life.

Keynes did consistently well in all the subjects of the Tripos, but his best subject was logic. He was elected a non-teaching Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 1876 and of University College London, in the same year. Alfred Marshall and the philosopher John Venn were particularly enthusiastic about Keynes’s work and Marshall began plotting Keynes’s career, a habit which was to recur. There was, however, no shortage of lecturers in economics when the student numbers were small and could be covered by Henry Sidgwick, Herbert Foxwell, and Marshall, with Mary Paley taking over Marshall’s lectures to women at Newnham College. Keynes agreed to give lectures in logic twice weekly for men reading for the Moral Sciences Tripos and a similar course of logic lectures for women. He also coached several Girton women students in Political Economy. A popular and conscientious teacher, Keynes’s students did well in their Tripos examinations while Keynes was drawn even further into the circle of reform-minded men who were working to establish modern subjects and a system of intercollegiate lecturing at the University. He was also involved in the daring experiment of offering tertiary education to women of which Sidgwick and Marshall were leading lights in the early 1870s. By the time Keynes graduated as Senior Moralist in 1875, there were over 100 women in Cambridge preparing for the Cambridge Higher Local Examinations and Tripos examinations, following courses and taking examinations given and marked by senior male members of the University sympathetic to their ambitions.^[13]

Although the subject does not appear to have interested Keynes, Marshall wanted him to specialise in Economic History in order to attract the attention of the Board of History to economic science.^[14] Marshall also encouraged him to enter for the University’s newly established Cobden Essay Prize,^[15] writing an extended essay on ‘The effects of machinery on wages’, and Keynes even signed a contract to write an elementary book on economics. However, he did not win the Prize^[16] and a book project to which he had rashly agreed was dropped since Mary Paley had already agreed to write an elementary textbook in economics. The Marshalls left Cambridge for Bristol in 1877 and Keynes handed over his economics teaching to Foxwell and concentrated on logic.

Among the early students of Newnham Hall (later Newnham College) was Florence Ada Brown who came from the important Bedford Congregationalist family. She was the eldest daughter of Dr John Brown, minister of the Bunyan Meeting, often considered the centre of Congregationalism in England.

(1995, 1998).

She entered Newnham in 1878 on a scholarship where she studied for the Cambridge Higher Local Examinations with a view to school teaching. Being only 17, her father had particularly requested that her social engagements outside the College be limited. But, as she wrote herself, she returned home in 1880 secretly engaged to the young don, John Neville Keynes, whom she had met at the Bonds.

Neville Keynes’s father died in 1878 leaving him with a considerable legacy from which he had a comfortable income of about ?800 annually, assuming his investments were sound. But a man about to marry and prepare for a family needed an additional source of income if he wanted to live without the anxiety of managing an investment portfolio. Unlike his son, who was to love the excitement of stocks, shares, and futures, Neville Keynes’s anxious disposition, together with an inherited work ethic and sense of duty, did not permit him to live without a paid occupation. Under existing Pembroke Statutes, he would have to relinquish his Fellowship on marriage. This celibacy requirement was a serious hindrance to many aspiring Cambridge academics and a further obstacle to the modernisation of teaching at the University.^[17]

Alfred Marshall, when he and Mary Paley married, lost his Fellowship at St. John’s College and reluctantly took the post as Principal and Professor of Political Economy at the newly established University College in Bristol.^[18] Faced with the same problem three years later,^[19] Keynes had to choose between remaining a Fellow and single, leaving Cambridge to find a teaching post in London^[20] or in one of the university colleges which were springing up in provincial centres, getting himself appointed to a university or college teaching post in Cambridge, or turning to administration. The first two options involved leaving Cambridge and were unthinkable, so he chose a combination of the latter two. The unreformed statutes which prevented Keynes from holding a Fellowship as a married man were Pembroke College’s loss but most certainly the University’s gain. No longer a college fellow, Keynes was able as a skilled administrator to contribute enormously to the financial and educational well-being of the University in the following decades.

In March 1881, Keynes was appointed Assistant Secretary to the Local Examinations Syndicate (LES).^[21] The post was no sinecure. Local Examinations and lectures were important projects in the armoury of Cambridge reformers. The academic reputation of Cambridge—and of individual colleges—rested in part on the quality of applicants choosing to study there.^[22] Secondary education in mid-nineteenth-century England was still an ad hoc affair and the teaching that boys received was not subject to any standardised assessment. Here the interests of the schools and Cambridge coincided: schools wanted to establish a reputation for good academic results and the University wanted to admit students of known merit and ability to its halls of higher education.^[23] The organisation of Junior Local Examinations (under 16 years) and Senior Locals (under 18 years) for secondary-school children expanded rapidly, from 370 boys at seven centres in England in 1858 to almost 16,000 boys and girls in England and overseas, sitting examinations set and marked by Cambridge in 1898. Both the examination and the lecture schemes created jobs for a growing band of academics wishing to pursue careers in secondary and higher education or who needed to augment their incomes as fellows and lecturers at Cambridge colleges.^[24]

With his income and occupation settled, Keynes and his future wife bought a large semi-detached house which was to be built in Harvey Road, at that time on the outskirts of Cambridge although still within easy walking distance of the town centre, colleges, and administrative buildings. His marriage in 1882 and birth of his first son, Maynard, in June 1883 seem to have energised Neville Keynes and increased his interest in academic work. In 1884 he published Studies and Exercises in Formal Logic, based on the lessons and lectures which he had given his students since his own graduation. By all accounts, the book was an excellent pedagogical textbook in formal Aristotelian logic, valued for Keynes’s ability to devise and formulate: ‘[S]imple, elegant and powerful methods of treatment, which involve no technical mathematics and depart to the least possible extent from the traditional logic of “simple” propositions’ (Broad and Pigou 1950: 404-405), and for the large number of interesting and ingenious problems in formal logic provided for the student to work on. Contemporary critics noted that the book did not include any of the modern symbolic logic which was growing in importance but was nevertheless in general well received.^[25] Encouraged by this success, Keynes began to think of developing his academic career further by writing a new book, focusing on inductive logic. However, as with his earlier plans for an elementary textbook on economics, news that someone else, in this case Venn, was planning such a book led him to drop his own idea.

In 1884, as part of the reforms shaping the modern University, the General Board of Studies appointed for the first time 23 Lecturers and three Readers across the disciplines as part of Cambridge’s plan to move the centres of teaching from the colleges to the University. In the light of his success and experience as teacher, examiner, and author and supported by Sidgwick, Neville Keynes was elected in April 1884 to hold the one Lectureship made available to the moral sciences, a position he held until 1911. Sidgwick wanted him to consider his Lectureship as being in Logic rather than Political Economy. Keynes wrote in his Diary that he was prepared, on behalf of the Moral Sciences Board ‘to do the work which is most needed’ (Diary: 29 January 1885).

A further opportunity arose for Keynes to pursue a strictly academic career path in January 1885. On the unexpected death of Henry Fawcett, Marshall was appointed to the Cambridge Chair as Professor of Political Economy in December 1884. Marshall returned to Cambridge from a post at Balliol College, Oxford, where he had been lecturing to Indian civil service candidates. Admiring the man and his work as well as that of his wife, Mary Paley, Keynes welcomed Marshall’s return to Cambridge and the boost that this would give to the modern study of economics. He was perhaps less prepared for the commotion that the new professor would cause in the moral sciences dovecotes. Marshall took the opportunity to set out his platform for the new Cambridge-style analytical economics which he would defend against both internal and external attack. His tactic was to strengthen the subject ‘institutionally’ by organising economists into a professional body with a respected house journal^[26]

and by placing his disciples in academic posts throughout the country’s expanding tertiary education sector. Although London University and the provincial university colleges were gaining in reputation during this period, it was still the case that Oxford and Cambridge were in a separate league. It must therefore have been tempting to have a sound and reliable colleague in the Drummond Chair of Political Economy at Oxford smoothing the path from methodological controversy to consensus. Already in December 1884, Marshall set about persuading Neville Keynes to take over Marshall’s Balliol lecture post which he felt would surely lead to Keynes’s election to the Oxford economics Chair as soon as it became vacant.^[27] He bombarded Keynes with letters and telegrams filled with flattery and appeals to his sense of duty and would not accept Keynes’s refusal of the job.^[28]

Keynes, however, had a number of good personal reasons for not wanting to exchange Cambridge for Oxford. As far as his career was concerned, his prospects in Cambridge were tangible and more promising than the occupation of the Oxford Chair at some point in the future. He held the first Lectureship under the Moral Sciences Board, where he was well regarded as a logician as well as an economist and given the opportunity to lecture in both subjects. He had indeed published a valued textbook on classical deductive logic. His peers throughout the University had him in their sights as a skilled and hard-working future administrator. He felt himself that he had a strong claim to become the Secretary of the LES when the current Secretary retired.^[29] He positively enjoyed administrative work and was good at it. Domestically, he had finally succeeded in solving one of his greatest worries—the welfare of his widowed mother—by settling her in a house in Cambridge close to, but not in, Harvey Road.^[30] Neville Keynes was not a man who sought fresh fields and new experiences and preferred to minimise stress by dealing, with increasing competence and tact, with familiar people and familiar problems.

• [1] Another speaker at the presentation referred to the great work that Dr Keynes had done for the Universityand said that he had changed a regime of autocracy at the Registrary to a kindly welcome which some ofthem in the early days had hardly hoped to see.
• [2] The Council was the elected ‘Cabinet’ of the Senate, the University’s governing body. Keynes was immediately put on eight sub-Syndicates and in 1893 became Secretary to the Council, a task that was lateramalgamated with that of Registrary.
• [3] Most students at this time did not attempt a Tripos but satisfied themselves with a general studies coursethat led to the Ordinary Degree, also known as the Pass or Poll Degree: 48% of male students took theOrdinary Degree in 1887, this figure dropping to 43% in 1912. After the Second World War it became apractice that all students would read for Honours degrees. See McWilliams Tullberg (1998: Appendix B)for a fuller discussion of the Ordinary Degree.
• [4] In Kellys Directory for Salisbury 1875, Keynes & Knight, brush makers & turners can be found onWinchester Street and Keynes John, nurseryman & florist on Castle Street. John Keynes served his town as Mayor 1876—1877.
• [5] The Test Acts, requiring graduates to pledge allegiance to the 39 Articles of Faith of the Church ofEngland, were lifted in the case of Cambridge in 1856, but other disabilities, such as proceeding to theM.A. or the holding of Fellowships and University offices, remained until 1871.
• [6] University Hall was founded in 1849 by Nonconformists to extend the principle of religious freedom tothe sphere of education and to encourage dissenting families to allow their young men to spend time inLondon gaining a university education. It was non-confessional, and although daily prayers and lecturesin theology were offered, they were not obligatory.
• [7] This was a paid post without specific teaching duties which allowed its holders to write, research, teach,coach, shoulder college office—or do nothing, as they wished. In the second half of the nineteenthcentury, a small college like Pembroke was only likely to vote into the fellowship men who were ofoutstanding academic merit and willing to teach, research, and hold a college office.
• [8] Neville Keynes’s Diaries, which he kept from 1864 to 1917, are archived at Cambridge UniversityLibrary, Reference GB 12 MSS.Add.7827-7869.
• [9] Phyllis Deane describes this, no doubt correctly, as a ‘brave decision’ (Deane 2001: 46).
• [10] Bond is described by Binfield (1968: 251) as ‘the leading chapel personality, a forceful enlightened manto whom (Emmanuel) church owed much’.
• [11] Another school and University College friend, Alfred West, had read moral sciences and had graduatedas Senior (i.e. top) Moralist in 1869.
• [12] Ward too married a Congregationalist student from Newnham who passed informally the MoralSciences Tripos with a First in 1879.
• [13] The tertiary education of women at Cambridge was highly controversial and opposition to theirpresence in Cambridge grew as women began to demonstrate their academic prowess. The two women’scolleges, Newnham (first residential students 1871) and Girton (founded 1869 and moved to Cambridge1873), approached the issue differently and opinions varied on the ‘correct’ route to academic excellenceamongst the women and their male supporters. For the story of this controversy, see McWilliams Tullberg
• [14] These Boards or Special Boards organised the syllabus and teaching in Tripos subjects. The more familiar term today would be Faculty.
• [15] An essay prize of ?20 and a silver medal was offered every third year by the Cobden Club to recentgraduates of Cambridge. The Club had been founded in the year after the death of Richard Cobden topromote his ideas of free trade, peace, and international co-operation.
• [16] Marshall remarked on Keynes’s essay that it had been weakened by the changes that he (Marshall) hadadvised him to make so as not to offend the external examiner Prof. T.E. Cliffe Leslie (Marshall toFoxwell, 3 July 1878, quoted in Whitaker 1996: volume 1, 101—102 and fn. 8).
• [17] Generally speaking, only professors, heads of colleges, and holders of certain college and Universityoffices could marry and many promising academics were lost to the University when they married andleft Cambridge.
• [18] Mary Paley had to resign her post as Lecturer in Economics at Newnham. She too lectured in economics at Bristol. See McWilliams Tullberg (1995).
• [19] With his solid independent income, Neville Keynes was however in a much stronger position economically than was Marshall.
• [20] Keynes briefly considered applying for the Chair in Economics at University College, London, thatJevons resigned in 1880. Keynes was aware that Foxwell was the more merited candidate and withdrewfrom the race.
• [21] The word ‘Local’ in the title meant just that. The University took its learning ‘extra-mural’—outside itswalls to people and places wanting higher education where they lived, were examined, and attested onwhat they had learnt.
• [22] In the matter of setting standards for schoolchildren, the University and colleges were for once in agreement. Similar reform movements were afoot in Oxford at this time.
• [23] There was a certain conflict. The University was interested in assessing the ability of individual studentsby determining the syllabus and standards for subjects studied at secondary-school level. Many schools,however, preferred to have the quality of teaching to all students assessed, emphasising the role of a schoolin moulding the whole pupil and not just academic achievements.
• [24] On the significance of the Syndicate’s financial reserves for use by the wider University, see Raban(2008: 25-26).
• [25] The book went through four editions and many reprints, the last being in 1906.
• [26] The Royal Economic Society was founded as the British Economic Association in 1890 and volume 1of the Economic Journal appeared in 1891.
• [27] Details of this episode are given in Deane (2001: 123 passim).
• [28] This brought on Keynes’s chest pains.
• [29] G.F. Browne did not pull his weight at the Syndicate. He retired in 1892 after being appointed Canonof St. Paul’s and Keynes to his delight became ‘master of the Syndicate Building’ (Deane 2001: 196).
• [30] He was also under stress in the early months of 1885 because Florence had given birth prematurely totheir second child, Margaret. Keynes asked himself what might have happened had he been in Oxford atthe time.