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By Root 1719 0

left Berlin. I arrived in Cambridge quite determined to join the Communist Party at last and plunge into politics. As it turned out, I was not alone. Mine was the reddest and most radical generation in the history of the university, and I was in the thick of it. It happened that I also arrived in the middle of what, even allowing for a past that contained the names of Newton, Darwin and Clerk Maxwell, was probably the most distinguished era in the history of a university that was for some decades virtually synonymous with British scientific achievement. The two were not entirely separated: the 1930s was one of the few periods when an unusual proportion of eminent natural scientists was also politically radicalized. I am bound to add that the achievements of Cambridge science in the 1930s have survived better than those of the political radicalism of Cambridge students. Few of these have left much trace, even on public memory, except for one minor spin-off from 1930s communism, the ‘Cambridge spies’.

Since I was one of the leading Cambridge undergraduate communists in the second half of the 1930s, most readers of this book who belong to the Cold War generations will certainly ask what I knew about them. I might as well answer this question at the outset. Yes, I knew some of them. No, I did not know they were or had been working for Soviet intelligence until after this became public knowledge. The ‘big five’ (Blunt, Burgess, Cairncross, Maclean and Philby) belonged to an earlier student generation than mine, and my contemporaries associated none of them with the Party except Burgess, whom we regarded as a traitor, because he took care to advertise his alleged conversion to right-wing views as soon as he had gone down. I knew none of them personally before the war, and only Blunt and Burgess casually after 1945. What I know about them came not from politics but via the Apostles (for which see chapter 11) or from homosexual friends or from survivors of the interwar Oxbridge establishment such as Isaiah Berlin, whose passion for gossiping about the people he had known was irrepressible. I recall Burgess only from two annual dinners of the Apostles – the one he presided over in 1948 at the Royal Automobile Club (a suitably bizarre location), recorded in the memoirs of Michael Straight whom Blunt tried to recruit for the Soviets,1 and the one I organized in the late 1950s in a shortlived Portuguese restaurant in Frith Street, Soho, and to which, knowing his nostalgia for England, I sent him an invitation addressed to ‘Guy Burgess, Moscow’. I remember the first occasion because Burgess asked us to agree that Roman Catholics were not suitable for membership of the Apostles, because their commitment to the Church’s dogma precluded the intellectual frankness so essential to the society. I remember the second because he woke me with an early morning phone call from Moscow to Bloomsbury, regretting his inability to be at the dinner, and, I assume, making absolutely certain that my phone would thenceforth be bugged. His message helped to make the dinner a great success. If I had known Anthony Blunt at all well, I would not have committed a heartless gaffe, for which I am still sorry. When I found myself standing next to him at the bar at yet another Apostles dinner in Soho, shortly after the flight of Burgess and Maclean, and made some fairly cynical wisecrack, I had no idea of the close emotional ties between him and Guy Burgess. My words must have hurt him, but how could one tell? That elongated, elegant, slightly supercilious face showed no emotions it did not want to. According to his Soviet handler, he was the toughest of the bunch. He was a man of such ruthless self-control that he spent the day of his public exposure, besieged by the hacks and the paparazzi in the house of a friend, quietly correcting proofs.

I knew those of my contemporaries who became Soviet agents as militant members of the student Party, which makes it 99 per cent certain that they were not yet recruited for work which, by general convention, was quite separate