Frank O'Hara

Frank O'Hara born 27 March 1926 (d. 1966)

Francis Russell O'Hara was an American poet who, along with John Ashbery and James Schuyler was a key member of what was known as the New York School of poetry.

Frank O'Hara was born at Maryland General Hospital, Baltimore and grew up in Grafton, Massachusetts. He attended St John's High School in Worcester. He studied piano at the New England Conservatory in Boston from 1941 to 1944. O'Hara served in the South Pacific and Japan as a sonarman on the destroyer USS Nicholas during World War II.

With the funding made available to veterans he attended Harvard University. Although he majored in music and did some composing, his attendance was irregular and his interests disparate. He regularly attended classes in philosophy and theology, while writing impulsively in his spare time. O'Hara was heavily influenced by visual art, and by contemporary music, which was his first love (he remained a fine piano player all his life and would often shock new partners by suddenly playing swathes of Rachmaninoff when visiting them).

While at Harvard, O'Hara met John Ashbery and began publishing poems in the Harvard Advocate. Despite his love for music, O'Hara changed his major and graduated from Harvard in 1950 with a degree in English.

He then attended graduate school at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. While at Michigan, he won a Hopwood Award and received his MA in English literature 1951. That autumn O'Hara moved into an apartment in New York City with Joe LeSueur, who would be his roommate and sometimes his lover for the next 11 years. Known throughout his life for his extreme sociability, passion, and warmth, O'Hara had hundreds of friends and lovers throughout his life, many from the New York art and poetry worlds. Soon after arriving in New York, he was employed at the front desk of the Museum of Modern Art and began to write seriously.

O'Hara was active in the art world, working as a reviewer for Art News, and in 1960 was made Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions for the Museum of Modern Art. He was also friends with artists like Willem de Kooning, Norman Bluhm, Larry Rivers and Joan Mitchell.

O'Hara died in an accident on Fire Island in which he was struck and seriously injured by a man speeding in a beach buggy during the early morning hours of July 24, 1966. He died the next day of a ruptured liver at the age of 40 and was buried in the Green River Cemetery on Long Island.

George Melly

George Melly born 17 August 1926 (d. 2007)

Alan George Heywood Melly was an English jazz and blues singer and writer. From 1965–1973 he was a film and television critic for The Observer. He also lectured on art history, with an emphasis on Surrealism.

He was born in Liverpool and was educated at Stowe school, where he discovered his interest in modern art, jazz and blues and started coming to terms with his sexuality. This period of his life is described in Scouse Mouse, a volume of his autobiography.

He joined the Royal Navy at the end of the Second World War because, as he quipped to the recruiting officer, the uniforms were 'so much nicer'. As he related in his autobiography, Rum, Bum and Concertina, he was crestfallen to discover that he would not be sent to a ship and was thus denied the 'bell-bottom' uniform he desired. Instead he received desk duty and wore the other Navy uniform, described as 'the dreaded fore-and-aft'. Later, however, he did see ship duty. He never saw active combat, but was almost court-martialled for distributing anarchist literature.

After the war Melly found work in a London surrealist gallery, working with E L T Mesens and eventually drifted into the world of jazz music, finding work with Mick Mulligan's Magnolia Jazz Band. This was a time when jazz was very popular in Britain - a time known as the trad-boom.

He retired from jazz in the early 1960s when he became a film critic for The Observer. He also became the writer on the Daily Mail's satirical newspaper strip Flook, illustrated by Trog. He was also scriptwriter on the 1967 satirical film Smashing Time. This period of his life is described in Owning Up.

He returned to jazz in the early 1970s with John Chilton's Feetwarmers, a partnership that only ended in 2003. He later sang with Digby Fairweather's band. He released three albums in the 1970s including Nuts in 1972 and Son of Nuts the next year. He wrote a light column – Mellymobile – in Punch magazine describing their tours.

He was an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society and a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association. He was also a member of the Max Miller Appreciation Society and on 1 May 2005 joined Roy Hudd, Sir Norman Wisdom and others in unveiling a statue of Miller in Brighton.

His singing style, particularly for the blues, was strongly influenced by his idol, the American Blues singer Bessie Smith. While many British musicians of the time treated jazz and blues with almost religious solemnity, Melly rejoiced in their more bawdy side, and this was reflected in his choice of songs and exuberant stage performances. He recorded a track called 'Old Codger' with The Stranglers in 1978 especially written for him by the band.

Technically, Melly was bisexual, but moved from strictly homosexual relationships in his teens and twenties to largely heterosexual relationships from his thirties onwards. He married twice and had a child from each marriage. He married his second wife, Diana, in 1963. Their son, Tom, was born two days after the wedding. In 2005, Diana published an autobiography of their life and (open) marriage together. In an incident that others might have considered hugely embarrassing, Diana and George participated in a televised celebrity couples quiz in the 1970s. Asked separately what made them decide to marry, Diana announced 'I was pregnant!' and George, in his turn, merely said, 'The less said about that, the better.' At the time this was considered scandalous.

He was still active in music, journalism, and lecturing on Surrealism and other aspects of modern art until his death, despite worsening health problems such as vascular dementia, incipient emphysema and lung cancer.

In addition to age-related health problems, Melly suffered from environmental hearing loss due to long-term exposure to on-stage sound systems, and his hearing in both ears became increasingly poor. On Sunday 10 June 2007, George Melly made an appearance, announced as his last ever performance, at the 100 Club in London. This was on the occasion of a fund-raising event to benefit the charity supporting his carers.

He died at his London home of lung cancer aged 80 on 5 July 2007

Anthony Blunt

Anthony Blunt born 26 September 1907 (d. 1983)

Anthony Frederick Blunt, known as Sir Anthony Blunt, KCVO between 1956 and 1979, was an English art historian, formerly Professor of the History of Art, University of London and director of the Courtauld Institute of Art, London (1947-74). He was the 'Fourth Man' of the Cambridge Five, a group of spies working for the Soviet Union from sometime in the 30s, to the early 50s.

Blunt was born in Bournemouth, where his father was a vicar. He was educated at Marlborough College, where he was a contemporary of Louis MacNeice, John Betjeman and Graham Shepard, and later read mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, but he switched to Modern Languages after his first year, eventually graduating in 1930, to become a teacher of French. He became a Fellow of the college in 1932, and in 1965 was Slade Professor of Fine Art in Cambridge. He was a member of the Cambridge Apostles, a secret society which at that time was Marxist, formed from members of Cambridge University. He was also a homosexual.

After visiting Russia in 1933, Blunt was recruited in 1934 by the NKVD (forerunner of the KGB). A committed Marxist, Blunt was instrumental in recruiting Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean.

He joined the British Army in 1939 and in 1940 was recruited to MI5, the military intelligence department. He passed on ULTRA intelligence from decrypted Enigma messages to the Soviet Union.

After the war he became director (1947-1974) of the Courtauld Institute of Art. His students there included Brian Sewell and Nicholas Serota.

In 1945 Blunt became Surveyor of the King's Pictures, and retained the post under Queen Elizabeth II, for which work he was knighted as a KCVO in 1956. He retained the post until 1972. He was particularly knowledgeable on the works of Nicolas Poussin.

Interested in architecture, he attended a summer school in Sicily in 1965; this led to a deep interest in Sicilian architecture, and in 1968 he wrote the only authoritative and in-depth book on Sicilian Baroque.

In 1963 MI5 learned of his espionage from an American, Michael Straight, whom he had recruited. Blunt confessed to MI5 on 23 April 1964, but his spying career remained an official secret until he was publicly named by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1979. He was promptly stripped of his knighthood, and removed as an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College.

According to MI5 papers released in 2002, that agency had been told by the writer Moura Budberg in 1950 that Blunt was a member of the Communist Party, but the information was ignored.

Anthony Blunt at Wikipedia
The Cambridge Five