After a month visiting relations in Canada with his mother and Nigel, Burgess went up to Trinity College, Cambridge at the beginning of October 1930, and was given rooms in I4 New Court, just off Great Court. Trinity, founded by Henry VIII in 1546, was the grandest – it was said God was a Trinity man – richest and largest of the Cambridge colleges. Burgess was one of only thirteen scholars in his year across all subjects, and at nineteen and a half, he was slightly older than most of his contemporaries. He certainly appeared more sophisticated and glamorous. Cambridge was perfect for him. It allowed him to reinvent himself in certain circles, he relished the intellectual stimulus and the sexual freedom, and with a generous allowance from his mother, he was also richer than many of his contemporaries.
He immediately joined the socially exclusive Pitt Club, a haven for aristocrats and public school men, in Jesus Lane, lunching there each day on a bottle of Liebfraumilch ’21.1 He had come up with a number of Etonians, but according to Michael Vesey, a contemporary at both school and Cambridge, although he ‘tried to get in with the Old Etonians … they weren’t interested … My lot generally regarded him as a conceited unreliable shit.’2 By contrast, Michael Grant, who was reading Classics, described Burgess as ‘popular, especially with those who had been at school with him (as I was not), chiefly because he was good company and amusing’.3
Trinity had several history dons: J.R.M. Butler, who had just published his History of England 1815-1918 and would later become Regius Professor of History, another nineteenth-century specialist, George Kitson Clark, as well as Outram Evennett, an expert on the Counter-Reformation. Finally, there was the Reverend Frederick Simpson, elected a Fellow of Trinity in 1911 and destined to remain one until his death aged ninety in 1974; Simpson was the acclaimed author of two volumes of a proposed four-volume life of Napoleon and was to become particularly close to Burgess.
A tall, dark, stooped, craggy-faced man, he was often to be seen in a cloth cap and a dangling grey scarf. In his younger days he had flown the Channel in his own Gypsy Moth, whilst in later days, as Dean of Chapel, he questioned the divinity of Jesus. Unmarried, he was a frequent observer at the university bathing pool, where undergraduates swam naked.
Steven Runciman, who also taught Burgess, found his pupil, ‘A very clever boy. An interesting mind but rather undisciplined. He was a type that Eton sometimes produces. The Young Revolutionary … In those days he was always good company but a bit grubby. I often had to send him back to clean his fingernails.’4
Burgess’s interests remained historical and literary. At the end of his first term he was elected to the Trinity Historical Society, which was limited to the most promising twenty-five undergraduate and postgraduate members. Burgess would become a regular attendee at the club. Among the other members was Kim Philby, who had come up the year before to read History from Westminster School, where he had been a scholar. Membership of the club would increasingly shape Burgess’s political views.
Elected alongside him was Jim Lees, an ex-miner from Nottingham, who had won a trade union scholarship to Trinity, and who would become a life-long friend and strong radicalising influence. Lees had left school at fourteen and was one of a small group of former coal miners at Cambridge supported by the Miners’ Welfare Fund. Baldish and spectacled, he was a member of the Independent Labour Party. Burgess later admitted that Lees ‘taught him a lot and troubled his conscience’. Lees would tell Burgess despairingly that he would ‘get a First because your energies are not exhausted by life, because of the class-prejudice of the examiners, and because you got here easily and aren’t frightened by it. I shall do ten times as much work as you – and get a good Second.’
Burgess accepted that though Lees knew far more history than he did, that was the likely scenario. ‘He was interested in truth, I in brilliance. I made epigrams: he got the right answers.’5 Lees proved right. Whilst he managed a Second, Burgess in his first-year college exams was awarded a First – the only one of the thirteen Trinity historians in his year to do so.
Gervase Markham, reading English in the year above and secretary of the Trinity Shakespeare Reading Society, which met fortnightly in each other’s rooms to read through a Shakespeare play, later wrote about Burgess:
He was fat, coarse and untidy. The adjectives that come to my mind are ‘epicene’ and ‘apolaustic’: and I have just looked them up in my Shorter Oxford and find that their dictionary meaning fits him aptly.6 I think he rather despised those of us who played traditional games and sports. I cannot connect him with any outdoor physical activity. Rather, I see him in my mind’s eye in an over-comfortably furnished room, that smelt of incense (or was it cannabis?) … I remember a bronze figure of a Buddha, which he induced to make smoke come out of its navel which he thought amusing and I found disgusting. I cannot recall ever discussing politics with him, though it would fit in well with my memory of him if he had been associated with those undergraduates who were sympathising with Communism. But I cannot think of him as having ‘high ideals’ or working for the greater good of humanity. I thought him a selfish lout, caring most for his own rather dubious pleasures.7
Burgess’s lover during his first year was Jack Hunter, an American who was reading English in the year above at Trinity. His father was the Hollywood film director T. Hayes Hunter, though Jack himself always claimed to be the illegitimate son of Douglas Fairbanks.8
The Eton art master, Eric Powell, had told Burgess to give up exercise on leaving Eton, saying, ‘If you go on taking exercise now, you’ll always have to’, advice which the young man took with gratitude, only making an exception for swimming. But he had continued his interest in art, and in May Week 1931 he had a small part and designed the set for Dadie Rylands’ Amateur Dramatic Club modern-dress production of Bernard Shaw’s Captain Brassbound’s Conversion. The production starred Michael Redgrave, then President of ADC, David Hedley and the future broadcaster Arthur Marshall. Redgrave remembered them as: ‘Very good sets, too. Burgess was one of the bright stars of the university scene, with a reputation for being able to turn his hand to anything.’9
It was also that summer that he first met Anthony Blunt, who had graduated with a First from Trinity the previous year and was now a graduate student. They met surprisingly late, given that they mixed in similar circles – either through Michael Redgrave, who had edited an undergraduate magazine The Venture with Blunt, or the King’s don, Dadie Rylands.10
‘On that occasion I did not take to him, because he began immediately to talk very indiscreetly about the private lives of people who were quite unknown to me,’ Blunt recalled:
but as I got to know him better I became fascinated by the liveliness and quality of his mind and the range of his interests. There was no subject in which he did not have something stimulating to say and although his ideas were not always supported with full evidence or carefully thought out reasons, there was always something in them to provoke thought and set one’s own mind working along new lines.11
In many ways Burgess was the antithesis of Blunt – outrageous, loud, talkative, indiscreet, irreverent, overtly rebellious – but they shared many artistic interests. ‘I relied a great deal on discussions with Guy,’ Blunt later recalled. ‘I often visited the exhibitions concerned with him and I have known few people with whom I have more enjoyed looking at pictures or buildings …’12
They were also drawn together by their mutual homosexuality, though it’s unclear if they were ever lovers. Peter Pollock and Jack Hewit, who slept with both Burgess and Blunt, said it was impossible as they both preferred the ‘feminine’ role in lovemaking, but Blunt’s brother Wilfrid told a friend that Anthony had been seduced by Burgess and this was confirmed to Andrew Boyle.13
Burgess, open about his own sexuality, often played the role of pimp and father confessor to his friends, liberating them sexually either by sleeping with them himself or introducing them to partners, and certainly in Blunt’s case he introduced him to the joys of ‘rough trade’. Blunt was charmed by this bright, amusing, liberated young man, who could talk knowledgeably on a range of subjects. Geoffrey Wright, who had become friendly with Blunt through Cambridge’s gay circles, felt that Burgess liberated Blunt and ‘Guy represented all the things that Anthony kept bottled up.’14
Robert Birley, visiting Burgess that summer, was shocked to find a collection of pornography and Marxist tracts on the bookshelves in his rooms. Clearly something had changed with his former pupil.15
After the summer vacation, Burgess returned for his second year to a Cambridge that was increasingly politicised by the world situation. Unemployment had reached nearly three million, there had been a naval mutiny at Invergordon, Britain had been forced off the gold standard, and Ramsay MacDonald had been required to form an all-party coalition National Government. At the same time there was increasing political instability on the Continent, particularly in Germany. Cambridge was not isolated from these developments and its response was reflected in both overt and covert activities. During the summer of 1931, the Cambridge University Socialist Society had been formed by Harry Dawes, another ex-miner, and it became the focal point for left-wing radicalism in the university and was increasingly infiltrated and used by the communists.
An important figure was David Haden Guest, the son of a Labour politician, who had come up to Trinity a year ahead of Burgess, to read Philosophy and Mathematical Logic at the feet of Ludwig Wittgenstein. After only two terms, he had gone to the University of Göttingen, attracted by its advanced teaching of philosophy. There he had seen at first hand the beginnings of Nazi violence, which persuaded him that only communism could stand up to Hitler. On his return to Cambridge, after spending a fortnight in solitary confinement in prison in Germany in 1931 for joining in a communist demonstration, he had very publicly marched into college hall wearing a hammer-and-sickle emblem. Guest, whose sparsely furnished college room was dominated by a portrait of Lenin, became the first secretary of the university branch of the Communist Party, which included two dons, Maurice Dobb and Roy Pascal, together with Jim Lees.16
The son of a prosperous Gloucestershire landowner, Dobb had become interested in Marxism as a schoolboy at Charterhouse and had joined the Communist Party in 1922. He had visited the USSR several times and frequently gave speeches at the Cambridge Union on the achievements of Soviet society. He had a flat in The Lodge in Chesterton Lane; the other two flats in the building were occupied by Roy Pascal and a fellow of St John’s, Hugh Sykes Davies, both Marxists, and The Lodge therefore became known as ‘The Red House’.17
On 2 November, at a meeting in George Kitson Clark’s rooms, Burgess was elected to the committee of the Trinity History Society and heard Dobb, a Fellow of Pembroke, talk about ‘Communism: a Political and Historical Theory’. Burgess had gradually become more interested in Marxist teachings, shaped by discussions with contemporaries such as Lees, who argued that compromise with authority did not work and that the Left had to become more radical. He was also influenced by his reading, most notably of Lenin’s The State and Revolution, lent to him by David Haden Guest. His tutor F.A. Simpson’s two volumes on Napoleon had now been replaced by Karl Marx’s The XVIIIth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and Class Struggles in France.
Burgess would later claim his interest in communism had ‘an intellectual and theoretical rather than an emotional basis’. As one of the subjects for the History Tripos, he had to study ‘the theory of the Modern State – what the state is – the point at which the general study of history touches real life most closely’ and he found Marxism had something to say to him. On 30 May 1932, that was put to the test when he sat the first part of his History Tripos with papers in General European, English Constitutional and English Economic History. Three weeks later, the Class lists were published. He was one of fifteen Firsts in Part I History across the university.18
A growing friendship had been developing with the Trinity bachelor don Steven Runciman, an Old Etonian eight years older, whose rooms in Nevile’s Court were famous for their French 1820s grisaille wallpaper, depicting Cupid and Psyche, his exquisite bric-à-brac and his ‘green parakeet called Benedict, which he used to spank with a pencil for misdemeanours’.19 The two men had a great deal in common, sharing an interest in history, literature and gossip. Burgess and Runciman met almost every day from the autumn of 1932 through to 1934, and it is almost certain that they became lovers.20
Runciman was concerned about Burgess’s personality problems and his behaviour and would recall how the undergraduate’s friends tried to restrain his drinking. He believed that Burgess lacked self-confidence and that ‘drink gave him the confidence to behave badly’.21 He later claimed that he had saved him from being sent down and in gratitude Burgess had given him two little black-and-gold Regency candlesticks made of ebony and ormolu.22
During the summer holiday of 1932, Runciman invited Burgess to stay on the Scottish island of Eigg, which the Runciman family owned and where Runciman remembered him as ‘a lively and pleasant guest’.23 The group included Burgess’s devout Catholic history tutor Outram Evennett and his wife, with the glamorous Anne Barnes (there without her husband George) and various other undergraduates, most of them homosexual, who spent the holiday reading, sunbathing and exploring the island. Amongst them was Geoffrey Wright, a member of the Cambridge Footlights Club, who didn’t like Burgess:
He was a very dirty man, jolly clever and sharp but he had a harsh tongue … He had a keen eye for the main chance … He certainly wasn’t insecure for a moment and I don’t think he had any difficulties about his homosexuality … Anything that gave him a thrill. He loved being on the edge. He was a curious, fantasy figure24
In October 1932, Burgess returned to Cambridge for his third year to M2, a set of grand rooms in Trinity’s Great Court. He now possessed a college history award, the Earl of Derby Studentship, awarded to the member of the college who had most distinguished himself in the Historical Tripos.
A month later he was elected a member of the Apostles, sponsored by Anthony Blunt, in a meeting in Blunt’s room.25 The Apostles, one of the best-known secret societies in the world, had been founded in 1820 as the Cambridge Conversazione Society, a discussion group which drew in some of the cleverest of Cambridge students, though most members came from only two colleges, King’s and Trinity. It had passed its high point at the beginning of the twentieth century, when members included the philosophers G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell and mathematician G.H. Hardy, but it was still regarded as a super-intellectual elite, electing only a couple of members each year.
The Apostles, like many such societies, had its own rituals and language, which helped sustain a sense of being special. Potential recruits – called ‘embryos’ – were spotted first by an Apostle and then if considered ‘Apostolic’ were sponsored by a member called his ‘father’. The first meeting for a new member was his ‘birth’, where he would take an oath, and after being elected he would address his fellow Apostles as ‘brother’.
The society met on Saturday evenings in either King’s or Trinity, where members took turns to stand on the hearth rug and deliver a paper on some philosophical question that had been agreed the previous week. Once the speaker, known as ‘moderator’, had finished his essay, other Apostles commented. Following this intellectual prelude, sardines on toast, known as ‘whales’, would be served. The society also held annual dinners in London attended by current Apostles and by ‘Angels’ – members who had ‘taken wings’ and left Cambridge.
Members in this period, many of whom were homosexual, included the Regius Professor of History G.M. Trevelyan; the writer E.M. Forster; the literary critic Desmond McCarthy; Churchill’s private secretary and close friend of Rupert Brooke, Edward Marsh; the economist John Maynard Keynes; and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.
It is perhaps not surprising that Burgess should be elected, as many of his friends, such as Anthony Blunt’s lover, Julian Bell, and the King’s English don, Dadie Rylands, were already members, but it was still a great acknowledgement of his intellectual abilities. Burgess was to be an active undergraduate Apostle, attending most of the weekly meetings, sometimes hosting them and providing supper in his rooms, acting as moderator and eventually, in June 1933, becoming secretary.
The Apostles appealed to his love of ideas and intelligent conversation and also gave him the opportunity to network – a resource which he ruthlessly exploited for the rest of his life. Many writers have suggested that it was the Apostles that politicised Burgess and Blunt, but an examination of its minute books shows that in the early 1930s it was simply a society exploring abstract ideas. It’s certainly true that of the thirty-one Apostles elected between 1927 and 1939, fifteen were communists or Marxists, but most of those were members during the latter half of that period, after Burgess’s time. Indeed, it was not the Apostles that politicised Burgess, but rather the reverse. He and Blunt brought in fellow sympathisers as part of a strategy to infiltrate communists into important university societies. Victor Rothschild was to write despairingly to Keynes: ‘We talk endlessly in the society about communism, which is rather dull.’26
Rothschild had been elected to the society at the same time as Burgess and also with the support of Anthony Blunt. Coming up to Trinity from Harrow in 1929 to read Natural Sciences, he had quickly switched to a pass degree in English, French and Biology, in which he’d taken a triple First. Darkly handsome, highly intelligent, a talented sportsman – he had played cricket for Northamptonshire and Cambridge – and an excellent jazz pianist, as the heir to the Rothschild banking fortune, he was also extremely rich.
He was a glamorous figure who drove a Bugatti, collected paintings, English silver and rare books, and was a generous friend – in 1933 he had ‘lent’ Blunt £100 to buy Poussin’s Rebecca and Eliezer at the Well from Duit’s in Jermyn Street, which Burgess had collected on his behalf – but there were also dark secrets.27 In the autumn of 1931 he had killed a cyclist whilst driving from Cambridge to London and was put on trial for manslaughter. He was defended by St John Hutchinson, whose daughter he would marry shortly afterwards.28
The Apostles created a strong sense of being special and separate, with a different set of allegiances to those who were not members. Apostolic virtues included the importance of sexual and emotional honesty, truth, beauty and friendship, which were placed above conventional sexual morality and orthodoxy. Many of the Apostles were also part of the Bloomsbury Group, a collection of writers, philosophers, economists and artists, who were generally left-wing, atheists, pacifists, lovers of the arts and each other. The group was influenced by the philosopher and Apostle G.E. Moore, who believed that ‘affectionate personal relations and the contemplation of beauty were the only supremely good states of mind’. It is perhaps not surprising that the Apostles should prove to be so open to communist infiltration.
It’s clear from the topics on which Burgess chose to speak that by the spring of 1933 he was interested in Marxism. Whilst topics over the term included, ‘Me or Us?’, ‘Is Art more than a Craft?’ and ‘Is Reality Absolute?’, Burgess’s talk on 28 January was a Marxist analysis, ‘Is the Past a Signpost?’ It is also clear that Marxism was taking root in the university.
On 3 March the ‘Letter from Cambridge’ in the Spectator noted that ‘politics and religion, so recently mere supers in the drama of discussion, have achieved a startling come-back; Dr Buchman and Karl Marx bask in the warm limelight of interest from which so suddenly and so decisively they have elbowed Proust and Picasso … much of the gay froth has gone’.29 Two months later, the same correspondent was struck by how the Socialist Society was moving to the left and communists ‘comprised the intellectual side of undergraduate opinion’.30
Over the course of 1932 the Cambridge University Socialist Society (CUSS) had grown and was now affiliated to the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). It still had only twenty-five members, but was especially strong in Trinity, where its members included Kim Philby, who handled finance and publicity, and a Trinity philosopher, Maurice Cornforth, who acted as secretary of the town branch of the CP, while Haden Guest was secretary for the university.
Another organisation the communists had penetrated was the Trinity Historical Society, where on 8 May Philby, but not Burgess, heard John Strachey on ‘Communism & Fascism: The Historical Alternative’, drawn from his forthcoming book The Menace of Fascism. Victor Kiernan, the year below Burgess, was determined to make the society ‘very much a Marxist debating ground with its emphasis on the economic interpretation of history’ and it, likewise, was to prove as fertile for the communists as the Apostles.31
In his third year Burgess continued to work hard, but there were signs that his political activity was interfering with his academic work. Tom Driberg in Burgess’s authorised life was to write that Burgess ‘in his third year was given another First in Part II of the Tripos, even though illness prevented him from completing his papers. This illness was one that has afflicted him constantly since the age of sixteen: insomnia, sometimes aggravated by severe headaches.’32
The strict truth was Burgess received not a First, but an aegrotat – an ungraded degree awarded to those too ill to take finals but deemed to have deserved honours. It is not clear whether his ‘illness’ was a genuine nervous breakdown, as his friend Goronwy Rees later claimed, or one staged because he had done no work. According to one Trinity contemporary, Michael Grant, ‘Guy thought all you had to do was work fourteen hours before the exam and have a lot of strong coffee. He cracked up on it.’33 Another, Lord Thurlow, claimed that Burgess had taken amphetamines before the exam and then had to be carried out in the middle of it: according to another contemporary it was Benzedrine and that after the Trinity dons retrieved his papers, they found that they were first class.34
Shortly after finishing his exams, at a party given by Eric Duncannon (later Earl of Bessborough), Burgess noticed a good-looking young man wearing a Brooklands tie-clip. Micky Burn was writing a book on the racing track and the two were immediately drawn to one another by a love of cars and mutual admiration for A.E. Housman, becoming lovers that very night. Burn was eighteen months younger than him and had dropped out of Oxford after a year; he remembered how Burgess:
made no secret of being homosexual and a Marxist … He had blue eyes and tight wavy hair, was a good swimmer and looked menacingly healthy. I have seen his looks described as ‘boyish’; he did convey a dash of pertness and sham-innocence, as if he had just run away after ringing some important person’s doorbell … he was in love with Marxism; more precisely with the Marxist interpretation of history … ‘History’ had taken the place of God, (as Bertrand Russell hoped that mathematics would). The Marxist testaments explained all that had ever happened, all that was happening, and all that would happen, and what each person should do to help it all along. Everything was related once one had the key …35
The affair spanned that summer and would continue in a desultory way for several more years. Burn spent several weekends with Burgess in Cambridge, where they spied over a wall on A.E. Housman reading in a deckchair in a college garden and Burn was introduced to F.A. Simpson, whom Burgess conspiratorially informed him had been in love with Rupert Brooke.36 The two young men stayed in Grantchester, drawn there by its association with Brooke, and swam in the Cam, going to lunch with E.M. Forster, where Burn made the faux pas of asking if he agreed that Somerset Maugham was ‘the greatest living English novelist’. Burgess took Burn to meet his mother Eve and one romantic evening they drove to Oxford in Burgess’s MG to see Max Reinhardt’s OUDS production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Magdalen deer park.37
That summer Burgess went on holiday with Anthony Blunt, Victor Rothschild, Anne Barnes and Dadie Rylands, Rothschild driving the four of them in his Bugatti to Monte Carlo, where they stayed for the weekend with Somerset Maugham at his Villa Mauresque.38
From the South of France Blunt went on to the British School in Rome, where his school-friend Ellis Waterhouse had recently been appointed librarian, to work on his thesis ‘The History and Theories of Painting in Italy and France from 1400 to 1700’. Burgess joined them there later that summer.
The holiday was most notable for Burgess’s politicising of Blunt. The three men visited museums, bars and went for long walks around the city, and Waterhouse noticed that Burgess seemed to have gained an ascendancy over Blunt, using arguments about the importance of the state in supporting the arts to shape Blunt’s Marxism. The Young Marxists were about to extend their reach and consolidate their influence.39
Drawing perhaps inspired by Somerset Maugham’s short story ‘Rain’