Tutoring a Maharajah

Austin remained a Fellow of Corpus Christi for over three years, from March 1923 to the summer of 1926, the one unmarried Fellow living in College. In 1926 he married one of his pupils, Joan Maurice, who had graduated in economics the previous year and was to become in time the most celebrated woman economist the world has known, with the possible exception of Rosa Luxembourg. The Maurices were a formidable and numerous clan: Austin once confessed to Joan that he found them ‘a trifle frightening’. Joan’s greatgrandfather was F. D. Maurice, the Christian Socialist who refused to subscribe to the doctrine of eternal damnation and was evicted from his chair in Theology at King’s College. Her grandfather and father were both generals. General Sir Frederick Maurice, her grandfather, delighted in giving encouragement to revolutionary spirits and is said — no doubt allegorically — to have brought together on one occasion for Sunday tea at his home in Hampstead, Masaryk, Gandhi and Lenin. Her father, another General Sir Frederick, was the author of a famous letter to The Times in the spring of 1918, giving the lie to statements by Lloyd George about the strength of the armed forces under British command on the Western front. He, like his grandfather, suffered for his outspokenness but entered a new career as head of the Working Men’s College, later Queen Mary College, part of the University of London (it was in fact at the College that the reception took place when Austin and Joan were married).