Founded in 1440, Eton is the Establishment school par excellence and one based on a cult of success. Former pupils, whilst Burgess was there, included the then Viceroy of India, the King of Siam, the Lord Chancellor, Speaker of the House of Commons, Chief Commissioner of Police, Lord Mayor of London, Director of the National Gallery, Governor of the Bank of England, Editor of The Times, Chairman of the BBC, plus over a hundred Members of Parliament.
The school that he entered in January 1924 had over a thousand boys, divided between twenty-six houses, and must have appeared daunting to a boy not yet thirteen. His own house of about forty boys, at 7 Jourdelay’s Place, was a large ivy-covered Queen Anne house and included several new boys from Lockers Park, including a young Irish boy, Dermot McGillycuddy of the Reeks, who was to become a close friend.
It was run by a mathematician, Frank Dobbs, a quiet, amusing, tall, red-faced man with a hooked nose and moustache, who was then in his late forties, and the author of a well-known arithmetic book for schools. Burgess had his own study bedroom, with a bed folded against the wall by day and pulled down by a maid just before evening prayers, a bureau, a wash stand and a Windsor chair. He rose at 6.45 a.m. and the school day began at 7.30 a.m., followed by breakfast at 8.20 a.m., and the last class was at 5 p.m., with three afternoons a week devoted to sport. As a junior boy, he was required to ‘fag’ for older boys, cleaning, cooking and running errands.
A picture of Eton only a few years earlier can be found in Cyril Connolly’s memoir of arrested development Enemies of Promise. Connolly was to write that all his contemporaries ‘were broken under the strain of beatings at night, and bullying by day; all we could hope for was to achieve peace with seniority and then become disciplinarians in our turn’.1 Burgess coped with the hierarchies of boarding-school life with a mixture of offhand bravado, charm, humour and apparent conformity, but the seeds of his rebellion against authority were already being sown.
The school was divided into classes, or divisions, through which one progressed on intellectual merit until one reached the heights of division one. Burgess began in division twenty-seven and quickly flourished academically, being awarded W.T. Webb’s edition of Lays of Ancient Rome for a first-class result in trials in April, and being runner-up for the Geoffrey Gunther Memorial Prize for art the same month. The following term he moved up to division twenty-six, where a highlight of the summer term was the visit of King George V and Queen Mary to the College Chapel. His Eton career had begun well, but then tragedy was to strike.
On the night of 15 September, he was later to recount, he was woken by anguished cries from his parents’ bedroom. When he went to investigate, he found his mother trapped by her husband, who had died of a heart attack in the course of making love, and the young boy had to separate the two bodies. Malcolm was just forty-three. It was an experience that Burgess later claimed had determined his homosexuality, but which he told to very few people; his brother Nigel had never heard such an account, nor did it figure in his KGB debriefings. In any case, Evelyn was a fit, young woman and her husband of average weight. Whatever the truth – and Burgess was a fantasist from an early age – the suddenness of Malcolm’s death, described as being caused by ‘atheroma of the aorta and valvular disease of the aortic valve’, was devastating for his family and not least for a boy of thirteen.
A week later Burgess returned to Eton, still in shock from his father’s death, but he was not to be there long. The plan had always been that he would start at Dartmouth as soon as he reached the minimum age of thirteen and a half, so just over three months after his father’s death, Burgess found himself leaving Eton, the friends he had made and a promising academic school career, to train as a naval officer.
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Dartmouth Naval College stands majestically above the charming Devon town of Dartmouth, with commanding views over the River Dart. When Burgess entered in January 1925, the buildings were only twenty years old, built to replace the training ship Britannia, on which his father had been trained. Dartmouth, with its six hundred cadets, was a public school almost as prestigious as Eton – but one with a difference, in that its sole purpose was to prepare boys for a naval career and it was run like a ship. Staff under the command of Captain Dunbar-Naismith, who had won a Victoria Cross as a submariner during the Dardanelles Campaign, were responsible for the naval side and discipline, and a civilian headmaster for teaching.
In front of the main building, a long three-storeyed building with a clock tower in the middle, was a parade ground with a figurehead of Britannia, and behind it a flagstaff on which the White Ensign was raised at sunrise and lowered at sundown to the mournful sounds of a bugle. The big hall, where parades were held, was called the quarterdeck and the officers’ rooms were cabins, whilst the officers lived in wardrooms and the cadets in gunrooms. Instead of tailcoat, top hat and white bow tie, Burgess now wore a blue naval uniform or white flannel trousers, reefer, collar and tie and lanyard, plus cap in summer. ‘The cap was vital, since every time one passed an Officer or Master one had to salute,’ remembered one contemporary, William O’Brien.2
Burgess was one of just over fifty cadets joining in the St Vincent Term, and was assigned an Admiralty number 205. Each term or class, further sub-divided into Port or Starboard – Burgess was both, which is unusual – was named after an Admiral, and the cadet would remain within their class, i.e. St Vincent, throughout their eleven terms at the college.3
Each term was under the command of a naval lieutenant, assisted by two cadet captains drawn from the senior terms. The cadets spent the day in the gunroom – a big room with lockers, tables and benches – and slept in dormitories of about twenty-five, where the hard-sprung iron beds were arranged in two parallel rows also named after admirals (Burgess was in Keppel), with windows on the north and south sides. Each evening the windows had to be opened uniformly according to the weather, so with cold north-westerlies and showers in the offing, the order might be, ‘Half-open south, quarter-open north, close all fanlights.’4
A wooden sea chest at the end of his bed held the cadet’s clothes. ‘Undressing was not the simple matter of throwing off clothes and rumpling them into a drawer,’ recollected O’Brien. ‘All garments had to be folded to a regulation size and arranged to a standard pattern on the drop-flap of the chest. The cap on top, dead centre, badge exactly in the middle of the peak, shoes in line, bed squared off with the blue rug precisely folded at its foot, its owner’s embroidered initials centre.’5
Cadets were punished for the most modest of dress imperfections, constantly shouted at and forced to do everything at the double. They were trained to obey orders so eventually, once in the navy, they could give them. ‘We could find no kindness or affection: only constant chivvy, nag and menace,’ later wrote one contemporary, Charles Owen. ‘We longed for the end of every day, for the privacy of bed, for a brief escape through sleep from the shouts and threats and orders which right into our dormitories, right up to lights out, still pursued us.’6
Ambrose Lampen remembered that:
Everything was ‘regulation’, all was uniformity; every movement was carried out in strict time with everyone else, and usually ‘at the double’. We got up in the morning to the order, ‘Turn out at the double!’ and we went to bed at night to the order, ‘Say your prayers!’ We were not allowed to walk about. We ran from classroom to classroom. We ran when passing rooms allocated to our seniors. We ran to or from the mess-hall, or the playing fields. However sick we felt, we ran to the Sick Bay.7
Discipline was enforced by caning, was arbitrary, frequent, and entirely at the whim of the Term Officer or his underlings. Caning was restricted to six strokes and applied just before bedtime to pyjamas. ‘The cane caused weals which persisted for as long as six weeks,’ recollected Arthur Hazlett:
Sometimes when two strokes landed in the same place they were likely to draw blood. What was worse was that the beatings were given for very minor offences such as talking after lights out or being late for Divisions or some other function. There was also a ‘tick’ system, in which a ‘tick’ was awarded for some small oversight such as an untidy sea-chest or leaving books about. When four ‘ticks’ had been amassed, the offender was beaten. Although the usual punishment was only three or four strokes, they were given extremely hard and a beating was a very painful experience.8
For more serious offences, there was a modern version of the cat-o’-nine-tails, with the culprit’s Term drawn up on three sides of a square, and the victim being strapped to a frame in the middle and then beaten. According to Burgess, ‘he rebelled against the barbarous ceremonial of corporal punishment known as “official cuts”: he and three of his friends turned ostentatiously away in order to avoid seeing this performance, which the cadets were paraded to witness’.9
The rules were rigid. Cadets did not speak unless spoken to, ‘did not mix with another term, except for college games, and were not allowed (by custom) to speak to a senior cadet and did not speak to a junior’, another contemporary, Michael Creagh-Osborne, remembered. The cadets would rise at 6.30 a.m. and take cold plunge baths before prayers in the dormitory. After dressing there would be a fifteen-minute talk in the gunroom on seamanship and an hour of lessons, before falling in outside the gunroom and marching into breakfast in rows of four for 8 a.m. This was followed at 9 a.m. with a general parade called ‘Divisions’ followed by drill, before marching off to morning lessons.10
Every afternoon there would be games and then another parade called ‘Quarters’, tea, and prep in the gunroom before retiring to bed at 9.20 p.m. Sundays involved ‘a succession of meticulous inspections by progressively higher ranking officers’ with a march past straight into Chapel and a further service in the evening.11
Alongside normal school lessons with an emphasis on maths, physics, science and naval history, the cadets were taught seamanship, navigation, astronomy, engineering, and the spirit, customs and traditions of the Royal Navy. Long hours were spent learning ‘bends and hitches’, splicing heavy wire ropes, learning and hoisting flag signals, using Morse code with flashing lights, and memorising the complex system of navigation lights used internationally. Cadets were taken out on a minesweeper HMS Forres, owned by the college, for a week’s cruising, and there were also sailing races – either at Dittisham Reach up the River Dart, or on the open sea.12
Teaching tended to be unimaginative and learning by rote, the emphasis on how and what, rather than why, and the only school subject that was of real importance was mathematics. For naval officers on the staff it was just another posting – generally two years – and the job was regarded as a penance before returning to sea, more excitement and promotion. The impact on a sensitive and independently minded young boy, who was far from home, had just lost his father and was restricted to one visit per term from his mother, must have been considerable. Burgess learnt to conceal his feelings, to adapt and try to belong to the prevailing orthodoxy, but the discipline was also good for him, giving him structure and imbuing qualities that he would carry through his whole life, such as punctuality, leadership and an ability to work with others.
He was immediately marked out as a high-flyer, his reports describing him as ‘excellent officer material’ and ‘a zealous all-rounder’.13 From the second term he was either second, or more often first in his class, and in the summer of 1926 he won prizes for science, history and geography, which included the three volumes of Sir Julian Corbett’s Naval Operations: History of the Great War. He was an accomplished draughtsman and map-drawer and known as a skilled artist, contributing a drawing of West Meon to The Britannia Magazine shortly after he arrived. He played for his term in both junior rugby and football, eventually gaining a place at right half in the second football XI. A contemporary, Bernard Ward, remembered how ‘he excelled at any activity or lesson’.14
A particular interest was history, and inspiration was Alfred Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890), and its sequel dealing with the French Revolution and Napoleonic Empire, in which Mahan argued that commercial prosperity and security depended on naval dominance. It was an early introduction to the sort of determinist and materialist interpretation of history that Burgess was to find so attractive in later life. One element of Mahan’s argument – the growth of American power at the expense of the Royal Navy – was to resonate particularly with the schoolboy and be influential in shaping his views of the United States. In his mind, American policy had led directly to the cuts in government spending in the early 1920s, cuts which fell especially hard on the navy, and had curtailed his father’s naval career.
Nigel Tangye, the cadet captain for the St Vincent term, remembered Burgess as being ‘cast in a different mould to his fellow cadets in that his manner was sophisticated in the same sense that an intelligent fifteen-year-old with the upbringing of an aristocrat is alarmingly at ease in any social situation. He was tall for his age, bright eyed but with a cool, lazy manner and this trait was reflected in his uniform which was faintly sloppy, nothing one could put one’s hand on, but not smart’.15
Tangye sat beside him at meals and recollected:
I was very glad to have him as one of my meal companions, for his intelligence ensured that although it made him appear more my age group than his own, in the sense of outlook and commentary, his sense of diplomacy ensured his always managing to restrain any familiarity with me, and he had charm. By the end of the term, having had two hundred and fifty-two meals with him sitting next to me, I knew him no better than the first time I met him. He remained an individual in a community from whom he kept an unobtrusive distance, never causing offence by actually being conceited but failing to conceal the fact that intellectually he was their superior’.16
The only blemish on Burgess’s record was his ‘slowness’ in navigation, a sensitive subject given his father’s experience in 1904. Examination by the principal medical officer, and then a specialist, showed the problem was Burgess’s eyesight. Executive officers required perfect eyesight and though Burgess could have continued in the engineering branch, it effectively meant the end of what could have been a promising naval career.
As with much in Burgess’s life, the truth is not always clear and confusion surrounds his departure. Poor eyesight was often a euphemism for dishonesty or homosexuality. There were rumours of theft – traces of the Winslow Boy, subsequently rigorously denied and certainly not in character – and homosexuality being the real reasons. According to a classmate, Robin Tonks, ‘I have heard, but merely hearsay and from a source which I do not regard as entirely reliable, that Burgess was found wanting in some respects as a potential officer and that his withdrawal on the grounds of defective vision was perhaps more diplomatic than medical.’15
His contemporaries, perhaps influenced by his subsequent life, all give slightly different accounts. John Gower thought ‘Burgess was a misfit and his eyes an excuse to return to a life with less pressure’,16 whilst Michael Creagh-Osborne remembered, ‘that in his last term he was in some sort of trouble and looked very sullen and disgruntled. I think he got beaten for it – or the sullenness was because of it. I know I was not surprised to learn he had left.’17
David Tibbits thought he had stolen a fountain pen. In any case, ‘We all looked at him as very tiresome. He was not popular and had no close friends. He was left-wing.’18 Meanwhile Captain St John felt he was ‘different as ex-Eton … he was mostly a LONER. I suspect Guy left Dartmouth as a HOMOSEXUAL … My impression was that Guy was not popular, nor was he any good at games. I have no evidence about his being beaten, but add that I am sure that every member of the term had been beaten more than once. It was a method regular and much used.’19
According to John Carmalt-Jones, ‘Burgess was known to be sexually attractive with boys and that’s possibly why he left. He was not particularly good at games but clever, very artistic and a good cadet. He conformed.’20 Tibbitts agreed: ‘He was a very strange chap. He did not have the same sort of views as us. He was an amusing chap. He wasn’t ordinary at all …’21
It seems strange that the problem of poor eyesight was not discovered at his medical examination, but there is certainly evidence in later life that it was not good. The likelihood is that Burgess was not happy and did not fit in and it was generally felt his academic talents might better be served by a return to Eton. If Burgess wanted to go to Cambridge, he would have needed Latin, which was not taught at Dartmouth.22
Burgess’s departure in July 1927 appears, therefore, to be entirely honourable – not least as Eton was happy to have him back. His Russian controller Yuri Modin later wrote, ‘Personally I never noticed the slightest defect in his vision … he loathed Dartmouth and despite his extreme youth was sufficiently independent and tough-minded to tell his parents that it would be too great an honour for the Royal Navy to receive Guy Burgess into its rank.’23
Dartmouth was simply the wrong school for him. He was cleverer than his contemporaries – his final term had him fourth in order of merit, with further prizes for history and scripture – but unpopular with many of them, and not really cut out for a naval career. Lonely and a loner, he must have been relieved to be returning to Eton.
If Burgess had stayed at Dartmouth, his life would have been very different. He would have become a naval officer rather than go to Cambridge and, if he had survived the Second World War, might well have made the flag rank – the term produced twice as many admirals as normal, even though eight were to be killed in the Second World War – which had eluded his father.