Lionel Elvin

[3] After a two-year Commonwealth Fund Fellowship at Yale, Elvin returned to Trinity Hall in 1930 as the college's first Fellow with responsibility for teaching English (he was tutor to both Marshall McLuhan and Raymond Williams while he was there).

He became the Senior Treasurer of the then newly formed Cambridge University Labour Club in Easter Term 1934.

Elvin was a man of the left, a radical and a "non-Christian"; his adherence to his principles led him to refuse numerous honours, although he did accept the honorary fellowships awarded to him by Trinity Hall and the Institute of Education.

In his autobiography, Encounters with Education (1987), Elvin, who had stood unsuccessfully as the Labour parliamentary candidate for Cambridge University in the election of 1935, recorded, "I do not think any five years in my career were more enjoyable than those I spent in Ruskin".

Elvin visited the United States on several occasions, but his final years were spent at his home in Bulstrode Gardens, Cambridge.