Guy Burgess

Guy Burgess born 16 April 1911 (d. 1963)

Guy Francis De Moncy Burgess was a British-born intelligence officer and double agent who worked for the Soviet Union and was part of the Cambridge Five spy ring who betrayed allied secrets to the Soviets before and during the Cold War. Burgess and Anthony Blunt contributed to the Soviet cause with the transmission of secret Foreign Office and MI5 documents that described Allied military strategy.

Burgess was the son of a naval officer and although he attended Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, he failed to follow in his father's footsteps.

Like most of the Cambridge five, he came from a privileged background, attending Eton College, and eventually attending Cambridge University, where he was recruited into the Cambridge Apostles, a secret, elite, debating society, whose members at the time included Anthony Blunt and Kim Philby.

Notorious for his bad behaviour and overt alcoholism, Burgess initially worked for The Times and, briefly, the BBC, as the producer of The Week in Westminster, covering Parliamentary activity - wherein he was able to further his acquaintance with important politicians. He spent some time in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Burgess and the other members of the 'Five' were divided with regard to the impact of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which compromised their hard left ideals as Soviet Russia and the Nazis agreed on the division of most of Eastern Europe.

He was most useful to the Soviets in his position as secretary to the British Deputy Foreign Minister, Hector McNeil. As McNeil's secretary, Burgess was able to transmit top secret Foreign Office documents to the KGB on a regular basis, secreting them out at night to be photographed by his controller and returning them to McNeil's desk in the morning.

Assigned to the British embassy in the USA, Burgess continued his life as an unpredictable heavy drinker and indiscreet homosexual. He lived with Kim Philby in a basement flat, perhaps so that Philby could keep an eye on him. Nonetheless, Burgess was irrepressible, once insulting the wife of a high-ranking CIA official at one of Philby's dinner parties. The FBI allegedly described him in a report as 'a loud, foul-mouthed queer with a penchant for seducing hitchhikers'.

After he was unmasked as a double agent, Burgess moved to Moscow on a moonlit flight with Donald Maclean, arranged by controller Yuri Modin. However, unlike Donald Maclean who became a respected Soviet citizen in exile and lived until the 1980s, Burgess seems not to have taken to life in the USSR so well. Homosexuality was much more frowned upon in the Soviet Union, and this may have been a problem, even though he had a state-sanctioned lover. Also, unlike Maclean, he never bothered to learn Russian, and even continued to order his clothes from his Saville Row tailor.

Becoming ever more dependent on drink, he appears to have been killed by his alcoholism, aged 52.

The Julian Mitchell-penned play and film Another Country and the Alan Bennett play An Englishman Abroad were both either inspired by or directly based on Burgess's life.

Oscar Browning

Oscar Browning born 17 January 1837 (d. 1923)

Oscar Browning was an English writer, historian and educational reformer, born in London, the son of a merchant, William Shipton Browning. He was educated at Eton College, from Eton he went up to King's College, Cambridge, where he became fellow and tutor, graduating fourth in the classical tripos of 1860, and where he was inducted into the exclusive Cambridge Apostles, a debating society for the Cambridge elite.

In 1868 he became the lover of artist Simeon Solomon. He was for fifteen years a master at Eton College, until he was dismissed in the Autumn of 1875 following a dispute over his 'overly amorous' (but purportedly chaste) relationship with a pupil, George Curzon. He had taken Curzon on a trip through Europe with Curzon's father's permission, despite having been warned away from the boy by the Headmaster at Eton, F W Hornby. His parents' church, St. Andrew's, in Clewer, describes the reasons for his dismissal as 'his injudicious talk, his favourites, and his anarchic spirit'.

After Eton he took up a life Fellowship at King's College, Cambridge, where he achieved a reputation as a wit. He was universally known as 'O.B.' He travelled to India at Curzon's invitation after the latter had become viceroy. He resumed residence in 1876 at Cambridge, where he became university lecturer in history. He soon became a prominent figure in college and university life, encouraging especially the study of political science and modern political history, the extension of university teaching and the movement for the training of teachers.

He was principal of Cambridge University Day Training College for Teachers between 1891 and 1909, treasurer of the Cambridge Union Society between 1881 and 1902, founding treasurer of the Cambridge University Liberal Club between 1885 and 1908, and president of the Cambridge Footlights between 1890 and 1895.

He stood for Parliament three times as a Liberal.

He left Cambridge in 1908 and retired to Bexhill-on-Sea. In 1914 he was visiting Italy when World War I broke out. He decided to stay there and spent his later years in Rome where he died in 1923 at the age of eighty-six.

A large part of his papers disappeared. These include 'all Browning's letters to his mother, diaries that covered the whole of his career from his arrival at Eton in 1851, much of his correspondence as an Eton master, and no doubt also a number of his subject files'. This disappearance has been attributed to Hugo Wortham, Browning's nephew and sole executor and legatee, who took the materials to produce a biography of his uncle, Victorian Eton and Cambridge: being the life and times of Oscar Browning.

Illustration: an 1888 cartoon of Oscar Browning from a Vanity Fair series of Teachers and Headmasters.

E M Forster

E M Forster born 1 January 1879 (d. 1970)

Edward Morgan Forster was an English novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He is most famous for his novels, most of which have been filmed. Forster is also known for a creed of life which can be summed up in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End, 'only connect'.

Born in London, the son of an architect. As a boy he inherited £8,000 from his paternal aunt, which was enough to live on and enabled him to become a writer. He attended Tonbridge School in Kent as a day boy.

At King's College, Cambridge between 1897 and 1901, he became a member of the Apostles, a discussion society. Many of its members went on to constitute what came to be known as the Bloomsbury Group, of which Forster was a peripheral member in the 1910s and 1920s. There is a famous account of Forster's Cambridge and that of his fellow Apostles at the beginning of The Longest Journey.

After leaving university he travelled on the continent with his mother and continued to live with her until her death in 1945. His early novels, set in England and Italy, were praised by reviewers but did not sell in large quantities. Howards End (1910) made him famous.

He travelled in Egypt, Germany and India with the classicist Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson in 1914. Doing war work for the Red Cross in Egypt, in the winter of 1916-17, he met in Alexandria a tram conductor, Mohammed el-Adl, a youth of seventeen with whom he fell in love and who was to become one of the principal inspirations for his literary work. Mohammed died of tuberculosis in Alexandria in spring of 1922. After this loss, Forster was driven to keep the memory of the youth alive, and attempted to do so in the form of a book-length letter, preserved at King's College, Cambridge. The letter begins with the quote from A.E. Housman: 'Good-night, my lad, for nought's eternal; No league of ours, for sure' and concludes with an acknowledgement that the task of resurrecting their love is impossible.

He spent a second spell in India in the early 1920s as the private secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas. The Hill of Devi is his non-fictional account of this trip. After returning from India he completed A Passage to India (1924) which became his most famous, most widely-translated, and last novel.

Forster wrote little more fiction apart from short stories intended only for himself and a small circle of friends. People have speculated about his decision to stop writing novels at the age of 45.

In the 1930s and 1940s Forster became a successful broadcaster on BBC radio. He also became a public figure associated with the British Humanist Association.

Forster had a happy personal relationship beginning in the early 1930s with Bob Buckingham, a constable in the London Metropolitan Police. He developed a friendship with Buckingham's wife May and included the couple in his circle, which also included the writer and editor of The Listener J R Ackerley, the psychologist W J H Sprott and, for a time, the composer Benjamin Britten. Other writers Forster associated with included the poet Siegfried Sassoon and the Belfast-based novelist Forrest Reid.

After the death of his mother, Forster accepted an honorary fellowship at King's College, Cambridge and lived for the most part in the college doing relatively little. In 1969 he was made a member of the Order of Merit. Forster died in Coventry the following year at the age of 91 at the home of the Buckinghams.

Forster had five novels published in his lifetime and one more, Maurice, appeared shortly after his death although it was written nearly sixty years earlier. A seventh, Arctic Summer, he never finished.

His first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), is the story of Lilia, a young English widow who falls in love with an Italian, and of the efforts of her bourgeois relatives to get her back from Monteriano (based on San Gimignano). Where Angels Fear to Tread was adapted into a film in 1991.

Next, Forster published The Longest Journey (1907). Forster's third novel, A Room with a View (1908) is his lightest and most optimistic. It was started before any of his others, as early as 1901, and exists in earlier forms referred to as 'Lucy'. The book is the story of young Lucy Honeychurch's trip to Italy with her cousin, and the choice she must make between the free-thinking George Emerson, and the repressed aesthete Cecil Vyse. George's father Mr Emerson quotes thinkers who were influential on Forster including Samuel Butler. A Room with a View was memorably filmed by Merchant Ivory in 1987.

Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Room with a View can be seen collectively as Forster's Italian novels. Both include references to the famous Baedeker guidebooks and concern narrow-minded middle-class English tourists abroad. Many of their themes are shared with some of the short stories collected in The Celestial Omnibus and The Eternal Moment.

Howards End (1910) is an ambitious condition of England novel concerned with different groups within the Edwardian middle classes represented by the Schlegels (bohemian intellectuals), the Wilcoxes (thoughtless plutocrats) and the Basts (struggling lower-middle-class aspirants). Howards End was also turned into a multi-award (Oscars, Baftas, Golden Globes) winning film by Merchant Ivory in 1992

Forster achieved his greatest success with A Passage to India (1924). The novel is about the relationship between East and West, seen through the lens of India in the later days of the British Raj. In it, Forster connected personal relationships with the politics of colonialism through the story of the English Adela Quested and the Indian Dr Aziz and the question of what did or did not happen between them in the Marabar Caves. A Passage to India was turned into another multi-award-winning film by David Lean in 1994

Maurice (1971) was published after the novelist's death. It is a homosexual love story which also returns to areas familiar from Forster's first three novels such as the suburbs of London in the English home counties, the experience of being at Cambridge, and the wild landscape of Wiltshire. This novel, coupled with Forster's famous What I Believe essay, also published posthumously, created controversy as Forster's sexuality was not previously known or widely acknowledged. Today's critics continue to argue over whether Forster's sexuality and even alleged personal activities were relevant or influenced his writings.

Forster's views as a secular humanist are at the heart of his work, which often features characters attempting to understand each other, in the words of Forster's famous epigraph, across social barriers. His humanist views are expressed in the non-fictional essay What I Believe.

Forster's two most noted works, A Passage to India and Howards End, explore the irreconcilability of class differences. Although considered by some to have less serious literary weight, A Room with a View is also notable as his most widely read and accessible work, remaining popular for the just more than a century since its original publication. His 1914 novel Maurice, published posthumously in 1971, explores the possibility of reconciling class differences as part of a homosexual relationship - as Forster did himself with Bob Buckingham.

Sexuality is another key theme in Forster's works and it has been argued that Forster's writing can be characterised as moving from heterosexual love to homosexual love. The foreword to Maurice expresses his struggle with his own homosexuality, while similar themes were explored in several volumes of homosexual-themed short stories. Forster's explicitly homosexual writings, the novel Maurice and the short-story collection The Life to Come, were published shortly after his death.

Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson born 6 August 1862 (d. 1932)

Goldworthy Lowes Dickinson was an English historian and political activist. He led most of his life at Cambridge, where he did a dissertation on neo-platonism before becoming a fellow. He was closely tied with the Bloomsbury Group.

A noted pacifist, Dickinson protested Britain's involvement in World War I. His essay on the Covenant from the Treaty of Versailles (The Future of the Covenant, London: League of Nations Union, 1920) helped shape public opinion towards the League of Nations.

Born in London, his parents were artists and early Christian socialists. Educated at Charterhouse School and King's College, Cambridge, he graduated in 1884, as an outstanding scholar. That same year, he was also inducted into the Cambridge Conversazione Society, the Apostles or fratres, a club that once included Alfred Lord Tennyson and Arthur Hallam and that became the progenitor of the Bloomsbury group.

Dickinson studied medicine but never practiced. Instead, he wrote mostly indifferent poetry and pursued humanitarian projects, such as working on a cooperative farm and, like his friend Edward Carpenter, supporting the university extension programme through lecturing. He also met with many members of the socialist Fabian Society and immersed himself in classical and modern civilisation, avidly reading Plato, Shelley, and Goethe.

In 1887, he was named fellow of his old college (based on a thesis on the neo-Platonist Plotinus), which provided a more stable professional environment. In 1892, however, his fellowship was not renewed. He then became a librarian, but was appointed college lecturer in political science in 1896. In 1920, he was given a pension fellowship, tenable for life. He worked also as a lecturer at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

In 1900, Dickinson made a visit to Greece, followed by lecture tours in the United States, and finally trips to India, China, and Japan, where he soon realised the ills of Western imperialism and colonialism. He experienced a mystical heightening of consciousness and began to form a new concept of civilisation, shaped by Occidental humanism, Oriental philosophy, mystical religion, and classical wisdom.

When World War I broke out, Dickinson was deeply shocked. He founded the pacifist Bryce Group, became president of the Union of Democratic Control, joined Bertrand Russell in his stance against the war, advocated the establishment of the League of Nations (a phrase he possibly coined), and was instrumental in its conception. He hoped that his work on behalf of the League would help end future warfare.

He wrote an enormous number of books, most of which are now out of print and remain primarily of interest to specialists of the League of Nations and students of the influence of Platonism and Cambridge idealism. But the sheer number shows Dickinson's contribution to the society of his day and the unusually broad range of his interests and learning. The tomes range widely across cultures, histories, civilisations, denominations, philosophies, music, and more.

His most significant work from a gay perspective was the immensely popular The Greek Way of Life (1896), in which he delicately broaches homoeroticism and expounds his scholarship on Plato and his idealisation of male friendship.

After a prostate operation in 1932, Dickinson appeared to be recovering, but died on August 3. Memorial services were held in King's College Chapel, and in London.

E M Forster, by then a good friend who had been influenced by Dickinson's books, became his literary executor. Dickinson's sisters then asked Forster to write the dead man's biography, which was published as Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson in 1934. Forster has been criticised for refraining from publishing details of Dickinson's sexual proclivities - but that may have said as much about Forster as Dickinson.

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