In November 1935, Oswald Guy, secretary of the Cambridge University Appointments Board, put forward three candidates for a vacancy as an assistant in the BBC Talks Department based in Bristol:
G.F. de M. BURGESS would appear to be much the likeliest of these three candidates. The College describes him as a man of first-rate ability, who might have been expected to be a strong candidate for a Trinity Fellowship but he decided against an academic career, being really more interested in current affairs than in learning. Burgess went through the communist phase, I think; I do not think he has any particular politics now, but I expect they are rather towards the left. He is a somewhat highly-strung fellow, too, but gets on uncommonly well with people … including a close friendship with an ex-miner here. He has done a good deal of journalistic work. Burgess is a man of considerable self-assurance and a fellow for whom it is easy to feel both admiration and liking.1
Burgess was immediately called for an interview and found himself up against fourteen others, including two other recent Cambridge graduates, Gilbert Harding and Philip Milner-Barry.2
The BBC selection panel met at the beginning of December and Burgess had the benefit of a letter of recommendation from a fellow Apostle, the Cambridge Regius Professor of History, G.M. Trevelyan.
I believe a young friend of mine, Guy Burgess, late a scholar of Trinity, is applying for a post in the BBC. He was in the running for a Fellowship in History, but decided (correctly I think) that his bent was for the great world – politics, journalism, etc. etc. – and not academic. He is a first-rate man, and I advise you if you can to try him. He has passed through the communist measles that so many of our clever young men go through, and is well out of it. There is nothing second rate about him and I think he would prove a great addition to your staff.3
On 12 December Burgess was interviewed but, though only runner-up, he had clearly made a good impression, and later in the month he was asked if he wished to be considered as a Regional Talks Assistant in Manchester. On 17 January he was interviewed for the job in Manchester, the Northern Region Director minuting:
At first he appeared anxious not to leave London for a period even of two years. After considering the matter, he began to take a different point of view. Both Mr Harding and I, however, eventually came to the conclusion that his personality was too metropolitan and insufficiently cosmopolitan, and his character not sufficiently formed for him to take over Talks in the Northern Region. On the other hand, we were impressed with his intelligence and alertness, and would record as our opinion that he would do valuable work on Talks or Feature Programmes at Head Office’.4
In July 1936 Burgess applied to the BBC for a second time, but claiming he didn’t want to go to the regions, as he had an invalid mother. He was now invited by the BBC to join a ‘reserve from which to fill certain future programme appointments. The reserve is to consist of twenty people and will start on October 1 next.’ In his application he claimed, with characteristic embellishment, that his hobbies included ‘motor cars and motor racing, rock climbing, the stock exchange (academically), and playing squash and association football’ and that he spoke and wrote French ‘both moderately to bad’.5
Burgess came armed with a host of references. His tutor at Cambridge, John Burnaby, later Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, wrote:
Guy Burgess is an exceptionally able young man, with perhaps the liveliest mind I have known in any of my pupils for five years … He is very good company, and I like him personally. But there is no doubt that he has the faults of a nervy and ‘mercurial’ temperament, and if by ‘taking him without qualms’ you mean taking him with complete confidence in his reliability – well, he is not that sort of man. I do not mean that he is untrustworthy in the sense that you could not be sure of his doing what he was told. But if you take him, you will be getting quite first class and extremely fertile brains, and a most vigorous personality; and you will be taking risks. On the whole I think that if I were in your place, I should think it worthwhile to take them.6
Below, someone has added, ‘I think we need not worry any more about this man.’
There were also references from Jack Macnamara and Dennis Proctor.7 This time Burgess was in and at the top of the list. His various attempts to penetrate the Establishment had at last succeeded.
On 1 October 1936 he reported at 9.30 a.m. to Gerald Beadle, Director of Staff Training, at 4 Duchess Street in Central London, for the three months’ training course learning basic studio and production skills. A portrait of Burgess appears in a memoir, BBC, by a fellow member of the training cohort, Paul Bloomfield, as de Montmorency: ‘a comic character with an air of patronage towards his instructors and a habit, which even his superiors respected, of going to sleep during lectures’, but whom occasionally, ‘started out of his slumbers and asked an intelligent question’ and ‘at the end of the course is given a report so flattering that he blushed’.8
Burgess was indeed making good progress. His chief instructor’s confidential report at the end of his three-month training period noted:
Probably has better brains than any other member of the present course. He is extremely well informed on all historical and political subjects. Can write a very good broadcast talk, topical talk or eyewitness account. His editorial ability has shown itself to be of a high order in the News Bulletins which he has framed for the school programmes. He seems to be well qualified for a talks assistant or news editor or sub-editor. Unfortunately his diction is bad and it is this defect alone which prevents us recommending him as an O.B. assistant. In addition, he could probably fill a good many positions in Public Relations and some in Programme Administration, but he would be more valuable to us in the long run if he were started as a programme assistant doing practical work on the floor of the studios’.9
At the beginning of January 1937, Burgess started as an assistant in the Talks Department, which was responsible for most of the factual programming on the BBC’s only domestic radio station, the BBC National Programme. The Talks Department was run by Sir Richard Maconachie, a former member of the Indian Civil Service who had served as ambassador in Afghanistan in 1930, prior to joining the BBC in 1936.
Maconachie’s deputy was George Barnes, whom Burgess already knew and with whom he had much in common. Barnes was only seven years older than Burgess, had been educated at Dartmouth and, like Burgess, had been forced to leave because of his poor eyesight. After taking a First in History at King’s College, Cambridge, he had returned to teach at Dartmouth in 1927 just as Burgess was leaving. Prior to being recruited personally by Lord Reith to the BBC in 1935, he had spent five years as assistant secretary of Cambridge University Press, and it was during this period that he and Burgess had got to know each other.10
The real power, however, rested with the Talks Producers, who chose the speakers, arranged the voice tests, negotiated the contracts and edited their texts. For the next few months, Burgess worked on various miscellaneous talks and readings. One of his colleagues in Talks was Gorley Putt, whose abiding memory was of a ‘cartoonist with dimples … a snob and slob’. He was not impressed with his colleague. ‘It gave me no pleasure to show him the ropes in matters like rehearsals and advance programme notes for future issues of the Radio Times. It amazed me, much later in life, to learn that he had been irresistibly attractive to most people he met.’11
BBC producer Frank Gillard was more complimentary:
Burgess was opinionated and conceited. But for a time he was regarded as the blue-eyed boy by some of the senior people in the department. He threw his weight around no end. I was in Bristol producing talks for the various networks and found him intolerable. But you have to recognise that he had a great deal of ability and a kind of charisma. Among the producers he stood out and he knew that. And he didn’t hesitate to make use of it.12
At the end of March 1937 and his six-month probationary period, Burgess’s appointment was confirmed at a salary of £300 per annum. ‘An extremely able young man. Prolific as regards ideas and a quick learner,’ said his report. ‘While he has his own opinions, he is available to discipline and is extremely pleasant to work with. Strongly recommended for confirmation and for service in the Talks Department.’13
But relations with his superiors, who tended to operate on Civil Service lines, were never easy. On 21 June 1937 he requested a rise to take into account the fact that he was twenty-six and older than the others who had just completed training, and that ‘at least one of my own contemporaries now in the Civil Service is already drawing more than £675 per annum’, pointing out that he had been earning more than £300 from his freelance work before joining the BBC. The following day a memo records it had been agreed to raise his salary to £400: ‘Mr Burgess is pulling his weight in the Department, and is by no means the least valuable member … and that he be given an undertaking that, provided his work continues to justify it, annual increments will bring it up to £600 by the time he is thirty.’14
To which Maconachie had added, ‘Mr Burgess is a man of outstanding ability. He gained First Class Honours in History at Cambridge, and was Research Scholar and Research student at Trinity. He is working hard and well. I strongly support this recommendation which does not seem to me at all extravagant. The proposed increase in Mr Burgess’s yearly salary after all amounts to less than the cost of three hour’s broadcast talks.’15 But a BBC memo dated 25 June argued this raise of salary was not justified, as he had accepted an offer of £260 and it had already been raised to £300 in April. ‘We also graded him B1 – I think he is the youngest member of staff to have this grade, with the substantial corollary of £40 increment.’16
It was to be the beginning of long-running tensions on Burgess’s BBC pay and entitlements. Burgess’s disregard for conventional housekeeping was already apparent in his failure to produce a suitable staff security photograph, which had occasioned a stiff rebuke from the General Establishment Officer in July, after four reminders from the Photograph Section had gone unheeded. Burgess responded indignantly that he had ‘already supplied two which have been rejected’. It subsequently transpired these showed ‘him sitting on the sands at Margate’ and eventually a more suitable one was provided.17
The range of programmes he worked on varied enormously – four talks on ‘Food and Exercise’; ‘Your Handwriting and Your Character’; ‘Tramping Through the White Sea’; a talk by Sir William Bragg on Science; ‘Adventures in Afghanistan’; and a book programme with Desmond McCarthy – but Burgess made the job very much his own, subtly introducing subjects of personal interest, not least Russia, and bringing in several friends. In August 1937 a Midlands school teacher, J.E. Whittaker, spoke of his visits to Russia in 1930 and 1936, whilst in November he produced a talk on ‘Soviet Russia is a New Civilization’.
In February, Burgess had commissioned Roger Fulford, a journalist he knew from his month on The Times and through Steven Runciman, for a talk on ‘When George IV was Crowned’, based on his book on the coronation of George IV, to go out on 3 April. He then invited him to write a series called ‘They Came to England’, on the experiences of travellers such as Erasmus and Caesar ‘of first setting foot on this wretched island’.18 John Betjeman, whom Burgess knew through Oxford friends, agreed to talk in a series on Eccentrics, Kim’s father St John Philby spoke about Mecca and the Arabs, and Keynes’s wife, the ballerina Luydia Lopokova, read some Russian short stories. Harold Nicolson was already a frequent broadcaster on the BBC, but now Burgess became his producer. Frequently the two would then dine afterwards, with all the high-level gossip dutifully relayed to Moscow.
Some requests initially came to nothing, such as an invitation to Christopher Isherwood for some short stories. ‘I have seen a certain amount of Wyston, Wiston, Wistin A. [W.H. Auden] since I saw you & I must say became devoted at once’, wrote Burgess to one friend.19 Burgess had met Isherwood, a history scholar at Cambridge just ahead of him, through Rudolph Katz, a homosexual German Jewish communist, with whom Burgess had edited a financial magazine on behalf of the Rothschilds for a short period before joining the BBC, and whom Isherwood had known in Berlin at the beginning of the 1930s.20
It was his friend Anthony Blunt, however, who was to benefit most from his patronage, giving talks on the Winter Exhibition at the Royal Academy, the Sistine Chapel, Modern Art (with William Coldstream) and on the rescue of works of art from the Nazis. The talks did much to establish him as an authority on modern art and raise his public profile. Burgess was now to give his friend a new role.