| Guy Burgess |
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BIOGRAPHY 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 in the media for '' The Times '' and a brief career at the BBC as the Producer of "The Week in Westminster" covering Parliamentary activity - wherein he was able to enlarge his acquaintance of important politicians . He spent some time in Spain during the Spanish Civil War . At Cambridge, he had been a friend of Julian Bell , the English poet who was tragically killed driving an ambulance in that conflict. He, and apparently the other members of the "Five" were also very divided about the impact of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact , which compromised their hard left ideals. He was most useful to the Soviets in his position as secretary to the British Deputy Foreign Minister, ?" 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 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 Yuri Modin . However, unlike Donald Maclean who became a respected Soviet citizen in exile and lived until the 80s, Burgess seems not to have taken to life in the USSR so well. Homosexuality in particular, 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 Savile Row tailor. Becoming ever more dependent on drink, he appears to have been killed by his alcoholism. Harold Nicolson , diplomat and writer, describes Burgess a year before his defection in a letter to his wife: :'I dined with Guy Burgess. Oh my dear, what a sad, sad thing this constant drinking is! Guy used to have one of the most rapid and acute minds I knew. Now his is just an imitation (and a pretty bad one) of what he once was. Not that he was actually drunk yesterday. He was just soaked and silly. I felt angry about it.' :-Harold Nicolson to his wife Vita Sackville-West , January 25, 1950 CHRONOLOGY
WORKS BASED ON HIS LIFE
BIOGRAPHIES, ETC. Deacon, Richard ( 1986 ), ''The Cambridge Apostles : a History of Cambridge University's Elite Intellectual Secret Society''. Modin, Yuri ( 1994 ), ''My Five Cambridge Friends''. Newton, Verne W. ( 1991 , ''The Cambridge Spies: the Untold Story of Maclean, Philby, and Burgess in America''. EXTERNAL LINKS |