1902–1904

For the next five years from Michaelmas term 1902, Dent's Fellowship gave him a base and official status. His Fellow's perks included college rooms and dining rights at High Table; the money he saved went on books, music, entertaining and travel, while the vast quantities of new and unusual music he had collected, manuscripts or original Scarlatti pieces like Volo Pater he had copied himself, were brought to life again, sung at Nixon's or donated to the CUMC library or the Pendlebury. His rooms in Gibbs G3 were still unfinished when he returned, his instruments – the harpsichord and square piano beside most of his books and music – still being stored with Lawrence. Even so, with so much in his daily life taken care of he could spend the day working on music at the British Museum, lunching with Ted, and catch the train back in time to take formal dinner in Hall, with excellent food and wine and the ponderous High Table humour about the Proctor's ‘fine chases across Parker's Piece’.

College provided routine stimulation of his intellectual life as well; Goldie wanted Dent at his weekly discussion club, where many were also Apostles, like Forster and G.E. Moore, who read a paper on hedonism. ‘Most of us … thought we were hedonists: Moore however insisted that I was not. He was very metaphysical and algebraical & I felt that he got a long way away from practical ethics.’ With Meredith and Barger and other likeminded younger Fellows, Dent dabbled in college politics, proposing a ‘secular scheme’ for the college, setting themselves up in opposition to what Dent called the ‘clerics’: advocating greater freedom from official religious activity, abolishing compulsory chapel for a start. King's was divided on the subject, and its religious nature, the ‘anti-clerics’ felt, masked deeper debates on freedom in education.

For several years Dent continued to construct his own circles around younger university men like Mollison, Meredith, Greenwood, Barger, and those who envied his comfortable Cambridge life, like Haward and Forster, still floundering in the outside world, unable to find solid employment or occupation.