Enoch Powell - Pre-War Career

Pre-War Career

After graduating from Cambridge, Powell stayed on at Trinity College as a Fellow, spending much of his time studying ancient manuscripts in Latin and producing academic works in Greek and Welsh. In 1937, he was appointed Professor of Greek at the University of Sydney aged 25 (failing in his aim of beating Friedrich Nietzsche's record of becoming a professor at 24). Among his pupils was future Prime Minister of Australia Gough Whitlam. He revised Stuart-Jones's edition of Thucydides' Historiae for the Oxford University Press in 1938, and his most lasting contribution to classical scholarship was his Lexicon to Herodotus, published the same year.

Soon after arrival in Australia, he was appointed Curator of the Nicholson Museum at the University of Sydney. He stunned the vice-chancellor by informing him that war would soon begin in Europe and that when it did, he would be heading home to enlist in the army. By the time Powell had left King Edward's School in 1930, he had confirmed his instinctive belief that the Armistice was merely temporary and that Britain would be at war with Germany again. During his time in Australia as a professor, he grew increasingly angry at the appeasement of Nazi Germany and what he saw as a betrayal of British national interests. After Neville Chamberlain's first visit to Adolf Hitler at Berchtesgaden, Powell wrote in a letter to his parents of 18 September 1938:

I do here in the most solemn and bitter manner curse the Prime Minister of England for having cumulated all his other betrayals of the national interest and honour, by his last terrible exhibition of dishonour, weakness and gullibility. The depths of infamy to which our accurst "love of peace" can lower us are unfathomable.

In another letter to his parents in June 1939, before the beginning of war, Powell wrote: "It is the English, not their Government; for if they were not blind cowards, they would lynch Chamberlain and Halifax and all the other smarmy traitors". At the outbreak of war, Powell immediately returned to Britain, but not before buying a Russian dictionary, since he thought "Russia would hold the key to our survival and victory, as it had in 1812 and 1916".