Hedi Stadlen - Cambridge

Cambridge

Through contacts in Whitehall, Dr Simon sent his daughter to Newnham College, Cambridge University, where she continued her studies, but switched to Moral Sciences (philosophy) under Ludwig Wittgenstein.

She spent her weekends in London, working for the cause of Indian freedom in Krishna Menon's India League, with Indira Gandhi among others. She later explained that "the racial discrimination suffered by the Jews in Austria made me feel sympathetic to the victims of colonial rule and strengthened my determination to identify with the fight for the freedom and independence of colonial peoples."

The capitalist crisis, fascism and the Spanish Civil War attracted her to the Communist Party of Great Britain. The historian Eric Hobsbawm fell in love with Hedi Simon, but she, in turn fell in love with another Communist undergraduate, Pieter Keuneman who was President of the Cambridge Union and editor of the student magazine Granta. He was the son of a Dutch Burgher Supreme Court Justice in Sri Lanka.

Hedi Simon graduated with First Class Honours in 1939, but as a woman, was excluded under university rules from the award of her degree. She married Pieter Keuneman in Switzerland in September 1939. The next year they went to Sri Lanka.