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Cambridge Apostles

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Trinity College Great Court. The Cambridge Apostles were for decades centered around Trinity and King's.

The Cambridge Apostles, also known as the Cambridge Conversazione Society, is an elite intellectual secret society at Cambridge University founded in 1820 by George Tomlinson, a Cambridge student who went on to become the Bishop of Gibraltar.

The society got their nickname 'the Apostles' from the fact that their founders were twelve in number. Membership consists largely of undergraduates, though there have been graduate student members, and members who already hold university and college posts. The society traditionally drew most of its members from St John's College, King's College and Trinity College, though this is no longer the case.

Activities and membership

King's College, Cambridge

The society is essentially a discussion group. Meetings are held once a week, traditionally on Saturday evenings, during which one member gives a prepared talk on a topic, which is later thrown open for discussion; during the meetings, members used to eat sardines on toast, called 'whales'.

They did not accept women until the 1970s.

The Apostles retain a leather diary of their membership ('the book') stretching back to its founder, which includes handwritten notes about the topics each member has spoken on. It is included in the so-called "Ark," which is a collection of papers with some handwritten notes from the group's early days, about the topics members have spoken on, and the results of the division in which those present voted on the debate. It was a point of honour that the question voted on should bear only a tangential relationship to the matter debated. The members referred to as the "Apostles" are the active, usually undergraduate members; former members are called "angels". Undergraduates apply to become angels after graduating or being awarded a fellowship. Every few years, amid great secrecy, all the angels are invited to an Apostles' dinner at a Cambridge college. There used to be an annual dinner, usually held in London.

Undergraduates being considered for membership are called "embryos" and are invited to "embryo parties", where members judge whether the student should be invited to join. The "embryos" attend these parties without knowing they are being considered for membership. Becoming an Apostle involves taking an oath of secrecy and listening to the reading of a curse, originally written by Apostle Fenton John Anthony Hort, the theologian, in or around 1851.

Former members have spoken of the life-long bond they feel toward one another. Henry Sidgwick, the philosopher, wrote of the Apostles in his memoirs that "the tie of attachment to this society is much the strongest corporate bond which I have known in my life."

Bloomsbury

The Apostles became well-known outside Cambridge in the years before the First World War with the rise to eminence of the group of intellectuals known as the Bloomsbury Group. John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey and his brother James, G.E. Moore, and Rupert Brooke were all Apostles and subsequently prominent as members of Bloomsbury.

The Cambridge spy ring

The Apostles came to public attention again following the exposure of the Cambridge spy ring in 1951. At least four men with access to the top levels of government in Britain — two of them former Apostles — were found to have passed information to the KGB. The four known agents were Guy Burgess, an MI6 officer and secretary to the deputy foreign minister; Anthony Blunt, MI5 officer, director of the Courtauld Institute, and art adviser to the Queen; Donald MacLean, foreign office secretary; and Kim Philby, MI6 officer and journalist.

Although only four men were identified, there were rumors of a fifth man, a senior British intelligence officer, who was never found. Many stories linked this rumor to Victor Rothschild, another Apostle, who had supplied an apartment in London for some of the Cambridge spies to meet in, though there is no evidence that he knew about their spying activities. In 1963, American writer Michael Straight, also an Apostle, and later publisher of his family's The New Republic magazine, admitted to spying.

Of the four named spies, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt, both homosexual, had been members of the Apostles at a time when homosexuality seemed to be an attribute of many of the undergraduates chosen for membership, and stories persisted that the membership was mainly homosexual and Marxist. Blunt, a communist, was the first to be recruited by the KGB, during a visit to Russia in 1933. When he returned to Britain, he recruited other Cambridge students, including Straight. [1] As the Queen's art advisor, Blunt was knighted in 1956, but was stripped of his knighthood in 1979 after Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher publicly named him as a spy.

Former members

Members of the Apostles have included (with the year they joined in brackets, where known):

Appearances in literature

References

  • Allen, Peter, The Cambridge Apostles: the early years, Cambridge University Press, 1978.
  • Deacon, Richard (pseudonym for Donald McCormick), The Cambridge Apostles: A History of Cambridge University's Elite Intellectual Secret Society, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986. ISBN 0-374-11820-5
  • Levy, Paul, Moore: G. E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles, Oxford, 1979.
  • Lubenow, W. C., The Cambridge Apostles, 1820-1914: Liberalism, Imagination, and Friendship in British Intellectual and Political Life", Cambridge University Press, 1998. ISBN 0-521-57213-4
  • "All About the Cambridge Spies" by Russell Aiuto
  • "Michael Straight: Cambridge spy whose testimony was crucial in exposing Anthony Blunt", obituary, by Richard Norton-Taylor, The Guardian, January 9, 2004
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