In spite of his aegrotat, Burgess returned to Trinity in the autumn of 1933 as a research student, preparing a thesis on the intellectual background of the Puritan Revolution, and doing a little supervising, at which he seems to have been rather good. One of his pupils, Lord Talbot de Malahide, Milo Talbot, later testified that it was only Burgess’s teaching that had lifted him from a 2:2 in Economics to a First in History and had enabled him to pass the Foreign Office exam.1
External events had created increasing politicisation within the university, but it was the arrival in Trinity of two new young men that transformed the student communist movement: John Cornford, as an orator, and James Klugman, as organiser. This also coincided with a change of tactic of the Communist Party to recruit amongst the intelligentsia and especially students rather than workers.
Cornford, whose father was a Trinity classics professor, and his mother a poet and granddaughter of Charles Darwin, had won a major open History scholarship to Trinity the previous year, aged just sixteen. He came up to Cambridge, having spent a few terms at the London School of Economics, already a committed Marxist and experienced agitator, and he was now living openly with a working-class girl called Ray Peters. Tall, handsome, high-cheeked, with a shock of curly black hair and dark piercing eyes, dressed in his trademark outfit of stained trousers, black shirt, dirty sweater and ragged raincoat, he became the glamour boy of the Cambridge Left. He injected a new sense of purpose into the Marxist membership of the two-hundred-strong CUSS, eventually effecting a communist takeover by ousting the more moderate Labour supporters. His call that action must be taken, if not by politicians then by students, to prevent war, stop fascism, and cure unemployment was as potent as it was naïve.
The other galvanising force in left-wing Cambridge politics was James Klugman, who had been at Gresham’s School with Donald Maclean. Several years ahead of Cornford, chubby, bespectacled and softly spoken, he stood in contrast to the more glamorous and confrontational Cornford. He had already taken a first-class degree in French and German at Trinity and had stayed on to do research. He was, Blunt remembered, ‘the pure intellectual of the Party … the person who worked out the theoretical problems and put them across. He ran the administration of the Party with great skill and energy and it was primarily he who decided what organisations in Cambridge were worth penetrating and what were not.’2 Klugman especially targeted the high flyers, proudly claiming he’d ‘managed to recruit all but three of one year’s intake of scholars’.3
Whilst Cornford’s politics were painful and austere, Klugmann made communism appear attractive and simple, a combination of the best of Christianity and liberal politics. This chimed with the Soviet Union’s new policy of creating a ‘Popular Front’ against Nazi Germany, bringing together all those who were concerned about fascism and the Depression. The communists thus cleverly took charge of various campaigns that might unite the Left – notably resistance to war and fascism. They actively sought to recruit new members in late-night discussions, focusing on those who might subsequently have influential careers, and cultivating foreign students who might take their radicalism back to their own countries.
Philby and Maclean were already communists. Now Burgess, avowedly a socialist since school, made the final leg of his political journey and became part of the communist cell and a member of CUSS. It had been a gradual progress from schoolboy socialist, through his historical study, the Apostles, the Trinity Historical Society, and long political discussions with Cornford, Klugman and Haden Guest.4
Blunt was later to claim that Burgess’s conversion had occurred during the winter term of 1933 and considered that the crucial influence was probably James Klugman and that John Cornford ‘may have had a hand in it’.5
By 1934 CUSS, largely centred in Trinity, numbered about two hundred members, of whom a quarter belonged to CPGB cells, and was one of the most active student groups in the university. Categories of membership varied, from those who kept it secret for career reasons to more overt members.6
The Trinity cell met weekly in student rooms, or at Sunday afternoon teas in town cafés, to discuss the political situation, organise demonstrations, raise funds, target other societies to infiltrate and liaise with other sympathetic Cambridge groups such as the Majlis, a debating forum for colonial students that Burgess addressed. Members were given books to read, elaborate lists were kept of sympathisers and near-sympathisers, and indeed virtually everyone a socialist student knew, which were then followed up with attempts to convert and recruit.
The abiding memory of fellow member of the Trinity cell Francis Hovell-Thurlow-Cumming-Bruce, later Lord Thurlow and a distinguished diplomat, was Burgess’s sense of mischief:
He liked breaking things. He was very irresponsible … He had enormous energy, mental energy, every kind of energy. He was very amusing. He was the most wonderful, amusing talker on anything. I always thought of him as a kind of court jester. He was not likeable, because he hadn’t got any roots. He certainly had no morals … No one in their senses would ever have given him a sensible job. He was far too indiscreet … He had a need to commit himself to something.7
The young rebel without a cause had now found one.
Burgess joined Communist Party campaigns to support striking city bus drivers and sewage workers, and against high rents for council house tenants. He helped organise a strike on behalf of Trinity waiters against the casual labour system, which laid most of them off during vacations – though Nigel Burgess later remembered that ‘nobody was more trouble, more demanding to my mother’s servants, than he was’.8
In November 1933, Granta carried an editorial which observed that ‘the sports field, the beer glass and the loud guffaw still play a part in the average undergraduate’s life. But there has grown up alongside of these interests a very real concern for, and understanding of, contemporary problems and events.’9
That month the Anti-War Council staged a large meeting in the Guildhall, addressed by the German dramatist Ernst Toller. They also mounted a major Anti-War exhibition, organised by Maurice Dobb and Julian Bell, in St Andrew’s Hall. However, the argument wasn’t all going their way. On Friday 10 November there was a large attendance at a debate between the Cambridge communists and the university Liberal Club on the motion ‘That democracy can develop no further under Capitalism; the only hope for man lies under a Communist system’. The motion was heavily defeated.10
In early November the Cambridge communists had organised a protest outside the Tivoli cinema near Jesus Green, which was showing a recruitment film Our Fighting Navy, that led to fights between left-wing students, who claimed to be protesting against military propaganda, and ‘patriotic’ undergraduates. Though the anti-war group came off worse, the management withdrew the film, so the protest had achieved its purpose.
Emboldened by the publicity achieved, the Socialist Society, in conjunction with the Student Christian Movement, now organised another demonstration for Saturday 11 November, protesting against the growing militarism of the Cenotaph celebrations. The Students Anti-War Council, chaired by Alistair Watson and comprising a variety of groups from pacifists to communists, organised a three-mile anti-war march through Cambridge to the town war memorial, where a wreath would be placed bearing the inscription: ‘To the victims of the Great War from those who are determined to prevent similar crimes of imperialism’. The police insisted that ‘of imperialism’ be removed, as it was not conducive to maintaining public order. The idea for the march had supposedly come from Burgess.11
Hundreds of students joined the procession through the town and the police were forced to make repeated baton charges to break up the fighting between the rival groups. Amongst those taking part was Julian Bell in his battered Morris, which had been ‘armoured’ with mattresses, with Burgess acting as his navigator to clear a path for the procession – not least after an attempt was made to stop the marchers with a barrier of cars.
Despite the hearties pelting them with tomatoes, eggs, flour and even fish, the pair made a couple of good charges before they were ordered to leave by the police, whereupon Julian Bell merely changed his tactics, drove round through a circuitous route and rejoined the march towards its head, to allow the wreath to be safely laid. The Armistice Day demonstration was to mark a major turning point in the recognition and organisational ability of the Cambridge communists. As Miranda Carter put it, ‘Thus the erstwhile literary aesthetes began to fall in love with the idea of themselves as men of action.’12
Cambridge had now been thoroughly politicised. A few weeks after the march, Julian Bell wrote that in the Cambridge he had first known in 1929 and 1930:
the central subject of ordinary intelligent conversation was poetry … By the end of 1933 we had arrived at a situation in which almost the only subject of discussion is contemporary politics and in which a very large majority of the more intelligent undergraduates are Communists or almost Communists … It is not so much that we are all Socialists now as that we are all Marxists now.13
In February another public milestone in the growth of the Cambridge communists came when many students – over a hundred from Trinity alone, including Burgess – joined a contingent of hunger marchers, groups of unemployed men who were walking to London to draw attention to their plight. For many students it would be their first encounter with the realities of unemployment, poverty and hunger, and the Cambridge communists were keen to publicise and exploit the march as part of a strategy of heightening student consciousness of the political situation.
An advance party of CUSS was responsible, as one of the ‘United Front Committees’, for feeding them and raising funds. The students met the marchers on the main road a few miles outside Cambridge and accompanied them into the city. ‘The undergraduate group fell in with them,’ recalled Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit, a member of the CUSS party, ‘a Buchmanite Peer, Lord Phillimore, beating the hunger marchers’ own big drum. They had a brass band and, shades of 1914-18, they marched in fours to the tunes many of them had known in France. The column paraded over Magdalene Bridge and on through the town to the Guildhall.’
That evening Sinclair-Loutit washed and dressed blistered feet, applying Dr Scholl’s patches supplied free by a local chiropodist, whilst local doctors gave free medical help to the many marchers who were in poor shape. ‘A number were wearing their war medals,’ Sinclair-Loutit remembered, ‘which engendered a sense of remorse amongst those who remembered that the men who returned in 1918 had been promised “a land fit for heroes to live in”. Though I did not then realise it, this was my baptism into socio-political activity.’14
The town authorities provided a bivouac for the marchers in the Corn Exchange and the next evening there was a public meeting on their behalf that Burgess attended. The next day he marched with them to Saffron Walden, before joining them again later in the week in Hyde Park. Margot Heinemann, who had known Burgess from before Cambridge and was now the girlfriend of his school-friend David Hedley, had a clear memory of Burgess. ‘He was wearing a Pitt Club yellow scarf, singing, “One, Two, Three, Four. Who are we for, We are for the Working Class”,’15 whilst Alan Hodgkin, a fellow member of the Apostles also on the march, noticed how he had ‘a zipped-up cardigan which he could zip down to reveal an Old Etonian tie. He said this would come in useful if he were arrested by the police.’16
Burgess was by now an active member of the Trinity cell, which numbered about thirty – Cambridge communists were organised by college, with separate groups for dons and scientists and a town branch run by Kitty, the sister of James Klugman, and her husband Maurice Cornforth. The poet Gavin Ewart, a Cambridge contemporary, claimed Burgess would say, ‘If you want to know about dialectical materialism come to see me.’ Steven Runciman agreed. ‘Communism sat very strangely on him. But one didn’t take it very seriously. But he was the only person who managed to explain Marxism to me in a way that made sense.’17
Victor Kiernan, who came up to read History just after Burgess and was in the Trinity cell, said it was Burgess who had helped to induct him into the party. He remembered him as:
a rather plump, fresh-faced youth, of guileless, almost cherubic expression. I heard him spoken of as the most popular man in the college, but he must have suffered from tensions; he smoked cigarettes all day, and had somehow imbibed a notion that the body expels nicotine very easily. He told me once a story that had evidently made a deep impression on him – of a Hungarian refugee who had been given shelter at his home, a formerly ardent political worker reduced to a wreck by beatings on the soles of the feet. I came on Burgess one day in his room sitting at a small table, a glass of spirits in front of him, glumly trying to put together a talk for a cell meeting that evening; he confessed that when he had to give any sort of formal talk he felt foolish.18
Having spent six months researching his doctoral dissertation ‘Bourgeois Revolution in Seventeenth-Century England’, Burgess was shattered to discover in March 1934 that the subject had already been covered comprehensively in Basil Willey’s forthcoming The Seventeenth Century Background. All he could do was review it expertly, favourably and generously, which he did in the Spectator – Blunt was its art critic – and abandon the subject in favour of a monograph on the Indian Mutiny of 1857-8, but it was a bitter blow.19 The dominant themes of Burgess’s life had hitherto been poised between academia and communism. This setback tipped it towards the latter.
Francis Hovell-Thurlow-Cumming-Bruce was to recall, ‘Burgess, we had been told, was going to make a very valuable and serious contribution to human knowledge.’ But when his thesis was forestalled, ‘he was absolutely crushed. He had put all his eggs in one basket. And now he was left high and dry. From then on, he went from bad to worse. He became more irresponsible and just drifted. I have no doubt that this disappointment changed his personality.’20 Communism was no longer a mere student enthusiasm: it began to replace his academic studies, giving him a new sense of purpose, identity and a focus and he increasingly lost interest in his academic career. As his tutor and friend Steven Runciman accepted, ‘He wasn’t really capable of settling down to steady research.’21
A week after his review of Willey’s book appeared, a depressed Burgess wrote to Dadie Rylands – partly in French – to say he couldn’t go on holiday with him to France, because of lack of money. ‘I am very depressed indeed and with no news of any kind and reading Blake about the man in the wood.’ He was reading Willey’s book again and thought it ‘so much a better thing than I could ever have attempted that I am in one way glad but in another sorry, because if I do try and do anything on the subject, his work is so good that it will be impossible not to think in his terms (having come near his matter)’.22
The letter was sent from Ascot Hill House, where his mother was now living in an eleven-bedroom rambling Victorian house in twenty acres on the hill above Ascot station. A previous occupant had been Rajah Brooke’s daughter, who had given numerous parties in the ballroom with its linenfold panelling, and even by the standards of the day, it was a large house, with servants’ quarters for half a dozen. Its primary attraction, however, was its proximity to Ascot Racecourse, at which the Bassetts were assiduous attendees.
Through Dadie Rylands, Burgess had been introduced to Maurice Bowra, a Fellow of Wadham College, and he would often visit Oxford. Bowra, who liked to portray himself during this period as the leader of an ‘immoral front’ of communists, homosexuals and non-conformists, who stood for pleasure and conviction and enjoyed the company of young men, took a particular shine to Burgess. A witty conversationalist, a homosexual and radical, he was a man of wide-ranging interests, who had travelled in Russia as a young man and spoke the language. The two men got on famously and Bowra was to open numerous doors for Burgess at Oxford and elsewhere.
Whilst staying with Bowra at the beginning of the summer term, Burgess renewed an acquaintance with a young don, who was to become one of his closest friends. Goronwy Rees, eighteen months older than Burgess, had been born in Aberystwyth, the son of a clergyman, and educated at Cardiff High School for Boys. He had graduated with a First in PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) from New College in 1931 and immediately been elected a Fellow of All Souls.
Rees had already met Burgess in Cambridge, but it was at a dinner party given by Felix Frankfurter (later a justice of the US Supreme Court and then spending year in Oxford as a visiting professor) that they cemented their friendship. Other guests included Isaiah Berlin, another All Souls Fellow, and the philosopher Freddie Ayer, who had been at Eton with Burgess.23
Rees was later to recount:
I had heard of Guy before, because he had the reputation of being the most brilliant undergraduate of his day at Cambridge, and I looked forward to his visit with some interest … Indeed, he did not belie his reputation. He was then a scholar of Trinity and it was thought that he had a brilliant academic future in front of him. That evening he talked a good deal about painting and to me it seemed that what he said was both original and sensitive, and, for one so young, to show an unusually wide knowledge of the subject. His conversation had that more charm, because he was very good looking in a boyish, athletic, very English way; it seemed incongruous that almost everything he said made it quite clear that he was a homosexual and a communist.24
Rees invited him to All Souls for after-dinner drinks, where Burgess couldn’t help making a pass at Rees. ‘At first he made tentative amorous advances, but quickly and cheerfully desisted when he discovered that I was as heterosexual as he was the opposite; he would have done the same to any young man, because sex to him was both a compulsion and a game, which it was almost a duty to practise.’ The two men discussed painting and its relation to the Marxist interpretation of history, and the busmen’s strike, which Burgess was then helping to organise in Cambridge.
They arranged to visit the Soviet Union during the summer vacation, but in the end Rees, for unspecified ‘personal reasons’, was unable to go, so Burgess went instead with a communist Oxford friend, Derek Blaikie. Guy Burgess’s momentous first visit to the proving ground of world communism occurred in June 1934. He and Derek Blaikie sailed from Harwich, armed with introductions from David Astor of the Observer, whose mother Nancy Astor had visited Russia with George Bernard Shaw three years earlier. They travelled Intourist ‘hard class’ costing a pound a day, including travel, meals and excursions, breaking their outward journey at Hamburg, where they met a German communist in a bar, who asked if he could escape to Russia, as the Gestapo apparently had ‘blood lists’ of Hamburg activists who were being arrested.
As they talked, there was a disturbance outside and fighting broke out between the two Nazi factions: the SS and SA. Burgess returned to his ship to the sound of distant shooting, but his eyes had been further opened to the European political situation on a practical level. It was 30 June 1934 and the conflict he had witnessed had been one act in the ‘Night of the Long Knives’, when the SS, on Hitler’s orders, settled its accounts with the SA, culminating the next day in the execution of the SA leader, Ernst Roehm.
Leaving this political carnage behind, Burgess and Blaikie sailed on to Russia. From Leningrad the two young men took the train to Moscow, where they are said to have been received by Ossip Piatnitski, a member of the Western bureau of the Soviet propaganda organisation Communist International, known as the Comintern; it has also been suggested that Burgess met Nicolai Bukharin, the former Secretary of the Comintern and editor of Pravda.25 They flitted around Moscow, meeting Russian officials and English exiles, including Alexander Wicksteed, who had arrived as part of Quaker Relief during the Volga famine of 1921 and ‘gone Russian’, growing a long beard and giving up western clothes. Burgess also met the former anarchist Novomirsky and an assistant to Lunacharsky, minister of education, who showed him a list of English and French books then being translated for publication in the Soviet Union. One was Celine’s Voyage au bout de la Nuit to which Burgess objected, calling it ‘a fascist book’. He argued the point so convincingly that the official agreed that Celine should be struck off the list. For the first time, a Soviet official had acted upon Guy Burgess’s advice.26
Burgess also challenged the Russians’ preoccupation with publishing John Galsworthy – the Russians thought The Forsyte Saga a faithful account of the English bourgeoisie – an intervention that didn’t endear Burgess to Blaikie, who was related to the writer. Burgess’s first impressions of Mother Russia were mixed. Whilst he loved the paintings in the Hermitage in Leningrad, he found Moscow ‘just a Balkan town – you know, pigs in the trams’.27
He would later claim he had been rebuked by a militiaman for walking on the grass in the Park of Rest and Culture, which didn’t tally with Wicksteed’s claims ‘that Soviet Russia was the freest country he had ever lived in’.28 However, according to a later account, based on Blaikie, Burgess had not been rebuked for walking on the grass, but for being dead drunk.29
On his return to Britain, Burgess gave a lukewarm report to the Cambridge communists. He did not think Russia would go to war, given domestic undertakings, believed that there were greater tensions with Trotsky than had been realised in the West, and that Western communists must not look at living conditions in Russia through rose-tinted glasses. There was, indeed, no unemployment, but housing conditions were appalling. However, he was impressed by the success of the Soviet authorities in dealing with national minorities, such as the Uzbeks, the Georgians and the Kazakhs, where the policy should be ‘Socialist in content, national in form’. It would be a mantra he would later repeat in his Foreign Office career.30
What most struck his friend Goronwy Rees, however, was that – apart from ‘a long and brilliant disquisition on the pictures of the Hermitage’ – he never heard Burgess talk about his experiences in the Soviet Union, ‘and I do not think they ever affected his beliefs one way or another. It was as if his communism formed a closed intellectual system which had nothing to do with what actually went on in the socialist fatherland.’31