Cultural history Archives - Page 15 of 23

The Bloomsbury Group – 1920-1987

August 9, 2009 by Roy Johnson

1920. Roger Fry, Vision and Design (a series of essays). Leonard Woolf writes leaders for The Nation. Omega workshop closes. First meeting of the Bloomsbury group Memoir Club. Desmond MacCarthy becomes literary editor of The New Statesman. E.M. Forster becomes literary editor of the London Daily Herald. Duncan Grant has his first one-man show in London. Carrington, Partridge, and Strachey visit Gerald Brenan in Spain.

1921. Virginia Woolf publishes her collection of experimental short stories, Monday or Tuesday, then falls ill and inactive for four months. Lytton Strachey, Queen Victoria. Dora Carrington marries Ralph Partridge, but continues to live with Lytton Strachey (who is in love with Ralph Partridge). E.M. Forster works in India as temporary secretary to Maharajah of Dewas. Leonard Woolf, Stories from the East and Socialism and Co-operation. John Maynard Keynes, A Treatise on Probability.

1922. Virginia Woolf publishes her first modernist novel, Jacob’s Room and starts her love affair with Vita Sackville West. Leonard Woolf is defeated as Labour candidate for the Combined University constituency. John Maynard Keynes, A Revision of the Treaty. Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant decorate Keynes’s rooms at King’s College, Cambridge. Lytton Strachey, Books and Characters: French and English. E.M. Forster, Alexandria: A History and a Guide. T.S. Eliot founder and editor of The Criterion. David Garnett, Lady into Fox. James Joyce’s, Ulysses published in Paris. Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party.

1923. The Hogarth Press publishes T.S. Eliot’s, The Waste Land. John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform: he becomes chairman of the board of The Nation and Atheneum, whilst Leonard Woolf becomes its literary editor. E.M. Forster, Pharos and Pharillon. Leonard and Virginia Woolf visit Gerald Brenan in Spain. Carrington begins an affair with Henrietta Bingham (one of Strachey’s former lovers).

1924. E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India widely acclaimed: (the composition of the novel was interrupted by the first world war – as was Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain). Virginia Woolf’s manifesto on modern literature, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’. The Hogarth Press publishes Freud’s Collected Papers and begins the Psycho-Analytic Library. Lytton Strachey, Carrington, and Ralph Partridge move to Ham Spray House, Berkshire. The Woolfs (and the Hogarth Press) move to 52 Tavistock Square in Bloomsbury. First UK Labour government formed under Ramsey MacDonald (lasts nine months).

The Bloomsbury Group is a short but charming book, published by the National Portrait Gallery. It explores the impact of Bloomsbury personalities on each other, plus how they shaped the development of British modernism. But most of all it’s a delightful collection of portrait paintings and photographs, with biographical notes. It has an introductory essay which outlines the development of Bloomsbury, followed by a series of portraits and the biographical sketches of the major figures.

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1925. Virginia Woolf publishes both The Common Reader and Mrs Dalloway, then is ill for three months. Leonard Woolf, Fear and Politics: A Debate at the Zoo. Lytton Strachey’s play The Son of Heaven is performed, and he lectures on Pope at Cambridge. John Maynard Keynes marries Lydia Lopokova, and takes a lease on a house at Tilton, near Charleston, which remains his country home.

1926. UK General Strike. Adrian Stephen and his wife Karin obtain bachelor of medicine degrees to become psycho-analysts. Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant decorate the house of Mr and Mrs St John Hutchinson. Roger Fry, Transformations. Ralph Partridge leaves Dora Carrington for Frances Marshall. Carrington begins an affair with Julia Strachey (Lytton Strachey’s sister). Vita Sackville-West wins Hawthornden Prize for her poem The Land.

1927. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse. Clive Bell, Landmarks in Nineteenth Century Painting. Leonard Woolf, Essays on Literature, History, and Politics. E.M. Forster gives the Clark lectures at Cambridge, which are published as Aspect of the Novel. He also becomes a fellow of King’s College. Julian Bell enters King’s College as an undergraduate. Roger Fry becomes an honorary fellow of King’s College. His study Cezanne is published.

1928. Virginia Woolf, Orlando, a biographical ‘love note’ to Vita Sackville-West. Lytton Strachey, Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History. Desmond MacCarthy succeeds Edmund Gosse as senior literary critic of the Sunday Times. E.M. Forster, The Eternal Moment and Other Stories. Clive Bell, Civilization. Leonard Woolf, Imperialism and Civilization. Death of Thomas Hardy. First Oxford English Dictionary published. Carrington starts an affair with Bernard Penrose.

1929. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, which was first delivered as a series of lectures at Cambridge. Roger Fry lectures at the Royal Academy. Collapse of New York Stock Exchange. Start of world economic depression. Second UK Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald.

1930. Leonard Woolf helps to found The Political Quarterly and becomes its first editor. Roger Fry, Henri Matisse. John Maynard Keynes, A Treatise on Money. Vanessa Bell has an exhibition of her paintings in London. Pipe-smoking lesbian feminist composer Ethyl Smyth falls in love with Virginia Woolf. Mass unemployment in UK. Death of D.H. Lawrence.

Virginia Woolf is a readable and well illustrated biography by John Lehmann, who at one point worked as her assistant at the Hogarth Press. It is described by the blurb as ‘A critical biography of Virginia Woolf containing illustrations that are a record of the Bloomsbury Group and the literary and artistic world that surrounded a writer who is immensely popular today’. An attractive and very accessible introduction to the writer and her intellectual milieu.

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1931. Virginia Woolf, The Waves. Leonard Woolf, After the Deluge. Lytton Strachey, Portraits in Miniature. John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion. John Lehmann joins the Hogarth Press for the first time. Resignation of UK Labour government, followed by formation of national coalition government.

1932. Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader. Death of Lytton Strachey from stomach cancer, followed by suicide of Dora Carrington. Exhibition of paintings by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant in London. New Signatures published by the Hogarth Press. Roger Fry, Characteristics of French Art and The Arts of Painting and Sculpture. Hunger marches start in UK.

1933. Virginia Woolf, Flush, a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s pet dog. Roger Fry appointed Slade professor of art at Cambridge and, Art History as an Academic Study. Clive Bell becomes art critic of The New Statesman and Nation. John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Biography.

1934. Clive Bell, Enjoying Pictures. E.M. Forster, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson. Death of Roger Fry, and publication of his Reflections on British Painting. Exhibition of Vanessa Bell’s paintings. Virginia Woolf publishes Walter Sickert: A Conversation.

1935. Private performance of Virginia Woolf’s unpublished play, ‘Freshwater: A Comedy in Three Acts’. John Maynard Keynes helps to establish the Arts Theatre in Cambridge. Leonard Woolf, Quack, Quack!.

1936. John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. E.M.Forster, Abinger Harvest, a collection of essays on literature and society. Virginia Woolf ill for two months. Death of George V in UK, followed by Edward VIII, who is forced to abdicate. Stalinist show trials in USSR. Julian Bell goes to participate in Spanish Civil War.

1937. Virginia Woolf, The Years. Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant both have exhibitions of their paintings. John Maynard Keynes seriously ill. Julian Bell killed in Spain.

The Art of Dora Carrington At the age of 38, Dora Carrington (1893-1932) committed suicide, unable to contemplate living without her companion, Lytton Strachey, who had died a few weeks before. The association with Lytton and his Bloomsbury friends, combined with her own modesty have tended to overshadow Carrington’s contribution to modern British painting. She hardly exhibited at all during her own lifetime. This book aims to redress the balance by looking at the immense range of her work: portraits, landscapes, glass paintings, letter illustrations and decorative work.

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1938. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, her ‘sequel’ to A Room of One’s Own. John Lehmann joins the Hogarth Press for the second time as its general manager, buying out Virginia Woolf’s financial interest. Leonard Woolf appointed as member of the Civil Service Arbitration Tribunal, on which he sits for seventeen years. Germans occupy Austria. Chamberlain meets Hitler to make infamous Munich ‘agreement’ to prevent war.

1939. Leonard Woolf, After the Deluge, vol.II, The Barbarians at the Gate, and a play, The Hotel. The Woolfs and the Hogarth Press move to 37 Mecklenburgh Square. Fascists win Civil War in Spain. Stalin makes pact with Hitler. Germany invades Poland. Britain and France declare war on Germany. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake.

1940. Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry: A Biography. Hogarth Press bombed in Mecklenburgh Square, moved to Herfordshire. Angelica Bell’s 21st birthday: ‘the last Bloomsbury party’.

1941. Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts, then commits suicide by drowning herself in the River Ouse. Death of James Joyce.

1942. Virginia Woolf’s essays The Death of the Moth and Other Essays published posthumously. Angelica Bell, Duncan Grant’s daughter, marries David Garnett, her father’s former lover. John Maynard Keynes elevated to the peerage and takes seat as Liberal in the House of Lords. He was also the chairman of the Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (which becomes the Arts Council in 1945).

1943. Virginia Woolf’s A Haunted House and Other Short Stories published posthumously. Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Quentin Bell complete paintings for the parish church at Berwick, near Firle, Sussex.

1944. John Maynard Keynes is senior British representative at the Bretton Woods International Conference to plan for the aftermath of war.

1945. E.M. Forster elected honorary fellow at King’s College Cambridge, and takes up permanent residence there after his mother’s death. John Maynard Keynes goes to America to negotiate a loan for Britain. United Nations founded. Huge Labour victory in UK general election. Clement Atlee becomes prime minister.

1946. Death of John Maynard Keynes. Leonard Woolf sells John Lehmann’s interest in the Hogarth Press to Chatto and Windus. Vita Sackville-West made Companion of Honour for her services to literature.

1947. E.M. Forster, Collected Tales. Posthumous publication of Virginia Woolf’s The Moment and Other Essays.

1948. Death of Adrian Stephen. T.S. Eliot awarded Nobel prize for literature (for the UK).

1949. Posthumous publication of John Maynard Keynes’s Two Memoirs.

1950. Bertrand Russell awarded the Nobel prize for literature. Posthumous publication of Virginia Woolf’s The Captain’s DeathBed and Other Essays.

1951. E.M.Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy (essays) and writes the libretto for Benjamin Britten’s opera Billy Budd. Desmond MacCarthy knighted.

1952. Death of Desmond MacCarthy. Death of George V. Accession of Queen Elizabeth II at 25.

1953. Leonard Woolf, Principia Politica (vol.III of After the Deluge and also publishes extracts from Virginia Woolf’s diaries as A Writer’s Diary. E.M. Forster, The Hill of Devi. Death of Stalin – and Prokofiev on same day. Nobel prize for literature – Winston Churchill (UK).

1956. Leonard Woolf publishes his correspondence with Lytton Strachey. Last meeting of the Memoir Club. Exhibition of paintings by Vanessa Bell.

The Bloomsbury Artists: Prints and Book DesignsThis volume catalogues the woodcuts, lithographs, etchings and other prints created by Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Roger Fry and Duncan Grant – with various colour and black and white reproductions. Of particular interest are the many book jackets designed for the Hogarth Press, the publishing company established by Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf. Also included are ephemera such as social invitations, trade cards, catalogue covers, and bookplates.

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1957. Exhibition of paintings by Duncan Grant. Homosexuality decriminalised in UK.

1958. Posthumous publication of Virginia Woolf’s Granite and Rainbow: Essays. Duncan Grant decorates Russell Chantry, Lincoln Cathedral.

1959. Duncan Grant has retrospective exhibition of his paintings at the Tate Gallery.

1960. Leonard Woolf, Sowing: An Autobiography of the Years 1880-1904 and revisits Ceylon.

1961. Leonard Woolf, Growing: An Autobiography of the Years 1904-1911. Death of Vanessa Bell: memorial exhibition of her paintings.

1962. Leonard Woolf, Diaries in Ceylon 1904-1911. Death of Saxon Sydney-Turner. Death of Vita Sackville-West.

1964. Leonard Woolf, Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911-1918. Death of Clive Bell. Vanessa Bell: A Memorial Exhibition of her Paintings by the Arts Council.

1965. Posthumous publication of Virginia Woolf’s Contemporary Writers. Death of T.S. Eliot.

1967. Leonard Woolf, Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919-1939.

1969. Leonard Woolf, The Journey Not the Arrival Matters: An Autobiography of the Years 1939-1969. Portraits by Duncan Grant: An Arts Council exhibition. E.M. Forster awarded the Order of Merit. Death of Leonard Woolf.

1970. Death of E.M. Forster at the home of friends. Death of Bertrand Russell.

1971. Posthumous publication of E.M. Forster’s overtly homosexual novel, Maurice (written in 1913). Posthumous publication of Lytton Strachey by Himself: A Self Portrait.

1972. Publication of Roger Fry’s Letters 2 vols. Duncan Grant: exhibition of water colours and drawings. Posthumous publication of Lytton Strachey’s The Really Interesting Question and Other Papers. Posthumous publication of E.M. Forster’s The Life to Come and Other Stories.

1973. Posthumous publication of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway’s Party: A Short Story Sequence. Vanessa Bell: Paintings and Drawings, An Exhibition.

1987. Death and burial of Gerald Brenan in Malaga, Spain.

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The Bloomsbury Group and War – 1/2

September 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

internationalism, pacifism, and social resistance

Almost without exception, the members of the Bloomsbury Group were opposed to the first world war. Their attitudes varied from outright pacifism through conscientious objection to quietism and a form of radical internationalism normally only found in figures such as Trotsky and Lenin. The origins of these attitudes – which were extremely unusual at the time – lay in the liberal, laissez-faire, free-thinking and non-religious beliefs which seemed to have spread from late nineteenth-century intellectuals such as Sir Leslie Stephen (father of the Bloomsbury Group) and the next generation of Cambridge undergraduates of the period 1895-1905 who were heavily influenced by the philosophy of G.E.Moore, whose Principia Ethica promoted ideals of friendship and love towards others.

Conscription began in 1915, and whilst the government lied to the country about conditions at the front for propaganda purposes, the Bloomsbury Group were tipped off about the horrors of the trenches by Maynard Keynes, who as a member of the Treasury, and had insider information on government matters. He had also visited soldiers convalescing at Cambridge. They were recovering from shell shock and the grim truths of bayonet charges and ‘going over the top’. None of them wanted to go back.

Art critic Clive Bell was the son of a nouveau-riche family who had made their money in coal-mining in southern Wales, but established a fake-Tudor manor in Wiltshire, invented a family crest, and sent him to Marlborough College. Despite this very conservative background, in 1915 Bell published a controversial pamphlet, Peace at Once, calling for a negotiated settlement to the conflict. This was considered an outrageous suggestion by the establishment of the time, and copies of his essay were burned by the Public Hangman. Bell resisted conscription on the grounds of being a conscientious objector, and he spent some of the war years doing what was called ‘alternative service’ on a farm owned by the politician Philip Morrell and his wife Ottoline.

Leonard Woolf came from a background quite unlike other members of the Bloomsbury Group. He was the son of a Jewish barrister. Nevertheless, he met his fellow Bloomsberries at Cambridge and like them was influenced by the ethical theories of G.E.Moore. He served in the colonial service between 1905 and 1911 and developed first hand a healthy distaste for imperialism.

With the outbreak of the war, he was rejected as unfit for military service, and campaigned actively for peace. He joined the Labour Party and the Fabian Society and became a regular contributor to the New Statesman. In 1916 he wrote International Government which outlined future possibilities for a international agency to enforce peace in the world. The book was incorporated by the British government in its proposals for a League of Nations at Geneva.

Woolf maintained his anti-war and internationalist stance throughout his life, except for the period of the 1930s and the Second World War, when he somewhat reluctantly accepted that the threat of fascism was worth fighting against. He was also, like George Orwell (who had also served in and quit the colonial service) one of the few British intellectuals who saw through to the totalitarian tyranny underpinning Stalin’s sham democracy.

Bertrand Russell was a contemporary of the other Bloomsberries at Cambridge, but unlike them he took up an academic career, teaching philosophy. Although he was elected to the Royal Society in 1908, Russell’s teaching career at Cambridge appeared to come to an end in 1916 when he was dismissed from Trinity College because of a conviction for anti-war activities. Two years later he was convicted again. This time he spent six months in prison. It was while in prison that he wrote his well-received Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919).

He continued to hold radical and anti-war views throughout the rest of his (long) life. In the 1950s and 1960s he was politically active in the campaign for nuclear disarmament (CND) and he opposed the American war in Vietnam. He established the International War Crimes Tribunal in 1966 with Jean-Paul Sartre and other Nobel prize winners.

The Bloomsbury Group and War — Part 2

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The Bloomsbury Group and War – 2/2

September 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

internationalism, pacifism, and social resistance

The painter Mark Gertler was a pacifist who refused to support Britain’s involvement in the First World War. After the Battle of the Somme he painted Merry-go-Round (1916). Considered by many art critics as the most important British painting of the First World War, Merry-go-Round, shows a group of military and civilian figures caught on the vicious circle of the roundabout. One gallery refused to show the painting because Gertler was a conscientious objector. Eventually it appeared in the Mansard Gallery in May, 1917.

Society hostess Ottoline Morrell was educated at home and at Somerville College, Oxford, where she studied politics and history. Her husband Philip Morrell became a Liberal MP (for Blackburn) following the general election in 1906. He was critical of the government’s position on the First World War. They sheltered a number of conscientious objectors on their farm estate at Garsington near Oxford, including Duncan Grant, Clive Bell, and Mark Gertler. It was there that Siegfried Sassoon, recuperating after a period of sick leave, was encouraged to go absent without leave in a protest against the war.

Much scoffing has been expressed by their guests in thinly-veiled depictions in their novels about the luxury and extravagance of Garsington – but the truth is that the Morrells were sailing financially close to the edge, and eventually they had to sell the entire estate. Because Ottoline Morrell had a brief relationship with one of her members of staff, it’s assumed that this provided the creative spark for D.H.Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

The writer Gerald Brenan was unusual as a member of the Bloomsbury set, because he did serve in the war. He was the son of an army officer, and was partly educated at the military academy at Sandhurst. He served from 1914 to 1919 and was, as his biographer Jonathan Gaythorne-Hardy points out, a ‘brave, successful, conscientious and enthusiastic officer’. He spent over two years on the Western Front, reaching the rank of captain and winning a Military Cross and a Croix de Guerre.

David Bomberg – The Mudbath 1914

Biographer Lytton Strachey was a conscientious objector during the war. He is famous for his confrontation with the board which interrogated objectors. His claims of pacifism were challenged by a board member asking him what he would do if he found a German soldier raping his sister. His witty riposte was ‘I should try and come between them’. What is less well known is that Strachey could easily have evaded the inquisition on medical grounds, but didn’t. Even less well known than that is the fact that he wrote a polemical essay against the war.

The painter Duncan Grant was a pacifist, like most of the members of the Bloomsbury group, In order to be exempted from military service during World War I, he and David Garnett (his lover at the time) moved to Wissett in the Suffolk countryside to become farm labourers. Although they were at first refused exemption by a tribunal, they appealed and were eventually recognised as conscientious objectors.

Harold Nicolson worked as a diplomat in the Foreign Office. Because of this, he was exempt military service during the first world war. After the end of the first world war he took part in the Paris Peace Conference, and he was very critical of the punitive reparations extracted by the allies (which also caused his fellow Bloomsburyite John Maynard Keynes to resign from the commission).

Between the wars he flirted briefly with Sir Oswald Mosley’s fascists, but then entered the House of Commons as National Labour Party member for Leicester West in 1935. (His wife refused to visit the constituency, regarding it as ‘bedint’ – a family slang term for ‘unacceptably low class’.)

He was very active as a parliamentarian, and became a keen supporter of Winston Churchill, especially during the second world war, when he was appointed private secretary to the Minister of Information in the government of national unity. He lost his seat in the 1945 election, and then despite joining the Labour Party, he failed to get back into parliament. He is a fairly rare example of someone from the upper class whose political allegiances moved leftwards as he got older.

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John Maynard Keynes lectured in economics at Cambridge on and off from 1908. He also worked at the India Office and in 1913 as a member of the Royal Commission on Indian finance and currency, published his first book on the subject. His expertise was in demand during the First World War. He worked for the Adviser to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and to the Treasury on Financial and Economic Questions. Among his responsibilities were the design of terms of credit between Britain and its continental allies during the war, and the acquisition of scarce currencies.

He represented the Treasury at the Versailles Peace Conference, but resigned in strong opposition to the terms of the draft treaty which he set out in his next book Economic Consequences of the Peace, (1919). Keynes argued that the war reparations imposed on Germany could not be paid by a country which had been devastated by war. He warned that this would lead to further conflict in Europe – which of course turned out to be true.

The poet Rupert Brooke is often (quite erroneously) classed as a ‘war poet’ because some of his early works glamourised the idea of war – and he was in fact a fervent supporter of it. But he never saw active service. His poetry gained many enthusiasts and he was taken up by Edward Marsh, who brought him to the attention of Winston Churchill, who was at that time First Lord of the Admiralty. Through these connections he was commissioned into the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as a temporary Sub-Lieutenant shortly after his 27th birthday and took part in the Royal Naval Division’s Antwerp expedition in October 1914.

He sailed with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force on 28 February 1915 but developed sepsis from an infected mosquito bite. He died on 23 April 1915 off the island of Lemnos in the Aegean on his way to a battle at Gallipoli. As the expeditionary force had orders to depart immediately, he was buried in an olive grove on the island of Skyros, Greece.

The Bloomsbury Group and War — Part I

Bloomsbury Recalled is written by Quentin Bell, one of the last surviving members of the Bloomsbury circle. He offers a disarmingly candid portraits of his father, Clive Bell, who married the author’s mother, Vanessa Stephen (Virginia Woolf’s sister). He pursued love affairs while Vanessa, after a clandestine affair with art critic Roger Fry, lived openly with bisexual painter Duncan Grant, with whom she had a daughter, Angelica. Clive, Duncan and Vanessa were reunited under one roof in 1939, and the author conveys a sense of the emotional strain of growing up in ‘a multi-parent family.’ Acclaimed biographer of his aunt, Virginia Woolf, Bell here defends her as a feminist and pacifist. Along with chapters on John Maynard Keynes, Ottoline Morrell and art historian-spy Anthony Blunt, there are glimpses of Lytton Strachey, novelist David Garnett (Angelica’s husband) and Dame Ethel Smyth, the pipe-smoking lesbian composer, who fell in love with Virginia Woolf.
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The Bloomsbury Group audio book

January 15, 2010 by Roy Johnson

cultural history – voices from the past

The Bloomsbury Group audio book is a collection of archive recordings taken from long-unheard BBC broadcasts and recordings from the Charleston Trust, many of them published here for the first time. They come in a two-CD boxed set, accompanied by a sixteen page explanatory booklet. Contributors to the Virginia Woolf Internet discussion group often comment on how astonishing it is to hear these voices from the past – and how remarkable their accents seem to us now. This is living proof that speech patterns and accents change over time.

Remember that Woolf began writing over a hundred years ago, and her father married Thackeray’s daughter – so these recordings carry with them direct links back as far as the Victorian era. For Bloomsbury Group aficionados and lovers of period nostalgia, this is a rare treat. Secondary Bloomsbury figures throw interesting light on life at that time via their first-hand accounts and memories of each other.

Virginia Woolf reading an extract from a radio talk on the importance of language
Leonard Woolf proffering a Who’s Who of the Bloomsbury Group
Desmond McCarthy meditating on ‘tears’ in literature
Duncan Grant discussing the infamous Dreadnought Hoax
Clive Bell remembering Lytton Strachey asking, ‘Who would you most like to see coming up the drive?’
Frances Partridge speaking about the Group’s larger influence
William Plomer discussing the Group’s exclusivity
David Garnett candidly describing the relationship between Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington
David Cecil detailing Virginia Woolf’s day-to-day appearance
Angelica Garnett opining on various attitudes towards members of the Group
Harold Nicholson reciting a talk on the members and attitudes that dominated the Group
Vita Sackville-West talking about the inspiration behind Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
Quentin Bell exactingly describing the fashions of Virginia Woolf
Benedict Nicholson remembering Virginia Woolf’s visits to Sissinghurst
Margery Fry holding court on Virginia Woolf’s flights of fancy
Elizabeth Bowen recalling Bloomsbury parties and Virginia Woolf’s antics
Ralph Partridge reminiscing on time spent with Leonard and Virginia Woolf
John Lehmann describing his reactions to Woolf’s final novel, Between the Acts
Bertrand Russell on Lytton Strachey and his family
Gerald Brenan recalling times spent with Lytton Strachey, Ralph Partridge, and Dora Carrington
Grace Higgins describing daily life at Charleston, the Bloomsbury outpost in Sussex

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The Bloomsbury Group (Spoken Word), British Library; 2 CD audio set with 16 page booklet, edition (November 15, 2009), Language: English, ISBN: 0712305939

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The Bloomsbury Group memoirs and criticism

July 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

memoirs, commentary, and criticism

This is a collection of memoirs, commentary, and criticism – all of which relate to the Bloomsbury Group and its members – of whom it was said that they were ‘a circle of friends who lived in squares and loved in triangles’. Many of the materials are available elsewhere – people’s letters, diaries, and various published papers; but these are scattered sources, whereas here they are all shepherded into one single pen, with the title ‘Bloomsbury’ writ large at the entrance.

Characters reflect on each other – Virginia Woolf on her nephew Julian Bell, Duncan Grant on Virginia Woolf, Clive Bell on Roger Fry, David Garnett on E.M.Forster, and Leonard Woolf on Lytton Strachey.

Some of the materials are well known because they come from fairly accessible sources, such as Virginia Woolf’s diaries, or Gerald Brenan’s South from Granada (which contains the hilarious account of Lytton Strachey riding a donkey in the Alpujarras in southern Spain). But others are pieces you would not easily find elsewhere – such as essays from the Memoir Club.

There are also relatively scarce items, such as Adrian Stephen’s first-hand account of the Dreadnought Hoax, and Vanessa Bell’s memoir of Bloomsbury, as well better-known pieces as Maynard-Keynes‘ ‘My Early Beliefs’, which is an account of his youthful days at Cambridge with Bertrand Russell and Lytton Strachey, along with the Apostles under the influence of G.M. Moore.

Many of the longer pieces are written in defence of Bloomsbury, because (though it might seem odd now) it was under a considerable degree of negative criticism from the 1920s onwards. Some of that criticism is reproduced here, which makes the book all the richer for it. The objections of the Leavis camp have evaporated with the passage of time, but I think it’s worth recalling them for the sake of historical perspective.

As a repository of social history it relies very heavily on extracts from Leonard Woolf’s excellent Autobiography, but as a source for fans of Bloomsbury, this is a valuable resource.

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S.R. Rosenbaum (ed), The Bloomsbury Group: A Collection of Memoirs, Commentary and Criticism, Toronto: University of Toronto, 1975, pp.444, ISBN: 0802062687

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The Bloomsbury Group portraits

August 11, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Sir Leslie Stephen (1832—1904)

Julia Stephen (1846—1895)

Thoby Stephen (1880—1906)

Adrian Stephen (1883—1948)

Vanessa Bell (1879—1961)

Virginia Woolf (1882—1941)

Lytton Strachey (1880—1932)

John Maynard Keynes (1883—1946)

Leonard Woolf (1880—1969)

E.M. Forster (1879—1970)

Roger Fry (1866—1934)

Bertrand Russell (1872—1970)

T.S. Eliot (1888—1965)

Duncan Grant (1885—1978)

Clive Bell (1881—1964)

Vita Sackville-West (1892—1962)

Harold Nicolson (1886—1968)

Mark Gertler (1896—1939)

David Garnett (1892—1981)

Ottoline Morrell (1873—1938)

Gerald Brenan (1894—1987)

Dora Carrington (1893—1932)

Katherine Mansfield (1888—1923)

Rupert Brooke (1887—1915)

Desmond MacCarthy (1977-1952)

Saxon Sydney-Turner (1880-1962)

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The Bloomsbury Group: who were they?

August 5, 2009 by Roy Johnson

modernist culture and arts 1900-1950

The Bloomsbury Group is a name given to a loose collection of writers, artists, and intellectuals who came together during the period 1905-06 at the home of Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell. Following the death of their father, Sir Leslie Stephen, they set up home in Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, in central London, close to the British Museum.

The group included Virginia Woolf (writer) and her husband-to-be Leonard Woolf (writer and later political figure); her sister Vanessa Bell (artist) and her husband Clive Bell; the artist and critic Roger Fry; the novelist E.M.Forster and poet T.S.Eliot; economist John Maynard Keynes and philosopher Bertrand Russell; the writers Gerald Brenan, Lytton Strachey, and Vita Sackville-West; artists Duncan Grant and Dora Carrington.

The Bloomsbury Group is a short but charming book which explores the impact of Bloomsbury personalities on each other, plus how they shaped the development of British modernism. It’s actually the illustrated catalogue of an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. But most of all it’s a delightful collection of portrait paintings and photographs, with biographical notes. It has an introductory essay which outlines the development of Bloomsbury, followed by a series of portraits and the biographical sketches of the major figures.

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Toby invited his friends to soirees, and Vanessa invited hers. The two groups met, networked, formed liaisons with each other (that’s putting it mildly) and created some of the central works of the modernist movement in Britain in the period 1905-1930.

They were in conscious revolt against the artistic, social, and sexual restrictions of the Victorian age. They were on the whole from an upper middle class intellectual elite, but it has to be said that in their personal lives they defied the status quo, and most of them were very productive.

In fact, the true centre of the group was Cambridge University, where their brother Toby had met a number of intellectuals who had come under the influence of G.M. Moore, whose Principia Ethica (1903) had made a serious impression on undergraduates who formed a group called the ‘Apostles’. He propounded a notion of ethics which rested on the pursuit of friendship, happiness, and the cultivation of the intellect.

Influenced by this notion of free-spirited friendship, intellectual liberty, and radical life-styles, many of the men were conscientious objectors during the First World War. They were liberals or socialists at a time when the English establishment was overwhelmingly conservative; and in their personal relationships they pushed back the boundaries of what could be done in a way which was not seen again until the 1960s.

Many of these people became sexually involved with each other in a way which even now seems quite bewildering. Married to one person, but in cahoots with someone else, often of the same sex. Some of them even lived with a person of the opposite sex yet shared the same lover.

It has to be remembered that at that time homosexuality was a criminal offence (though only for men) and many gay men got married as a legal cover and a smokescreen to provide social legitimacy.

There were also lots of minor figures who are counted amongst the Bloomsbury Group – people such as Harold Nicolson (diplomat and writer); Mark Gertler (painter); Desmond MacCarthy (literary critic); Saxon Sydney-Turner (civil servant); David Garnett and John Lehmann (writers); and Ottoline Morrell (social hostess).

Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900—1930 was written by Virginia Nicholson, Quentin Bell’s daughter and grand-daughter of Vanessa Bell, who was Virginia Woolf’s sister. Bloomsbury lies at the heart of the book in its portraits of Ralph Partridge, Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant, Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, and Katherine Mansfield, plus peripheral figures such as Arthur Ransome, Rupert Brooke, Augustus John, Nina Hamnett, and Dylan and Caitlin Thomas. Very amusing, well written, and every page dense with top class gossip and anecdotes. She looks at their tangled love lives naturally, but also their radical ideas on money (and poverty) food, dress, and even child-raising. Highly recommended.
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The intellectual connections between these people were amazing. For instance, the Woolfs established the Hogarth Press in their own home as a hobby-cum-therapy to help Virginia through her periods of depression and madness. The Press published not only her own works, but books by T.S.Eliot, Vita Sackville-West, and Christopher Isherwood. They even pioneered the work of Sigmund Freud, whose writing was translated by James Strachey, Lytton Strachey’s brother.

It also has to be said that many of the group were enormously productive and high-achievers. Despite her periods of mental illness, Virginia Woolf was a voluminous diarist and letter writer – as was her husband Leonard Woolf. Together they also ran the Hogarth Press. Economist John Maynard Keynes produced an almost unbroken stream of influential political studies and policy documents whilst working in a number of high-ranking government positions. And Vita Sackville-West was a best-selling novelist and award-winning poet who also wrote books on historic houses and gardens.

A Bloomsbury Canvas is a selection of essays on the Bloomsbury Group. Essayists include Hermione Lee, biographer of Virginia Woolf; art historians Richard Shone and Frances Spalding; Nigel Nicolson, author of Portrait of a Marriage, a study of his parents, Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson; and the last survivors of those closely connected to the Bloomsbury Group – Frances Partridge, Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett. The text is illustrated with many previously unpublished works.
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The Blues – a very short introduction

August 31, 2010 by Roy Johnson

history of blues music 1910 to the present

Most people imagine that ‘the Blues’ is a form of musical expression characterised by mournful lamentations about life’s hardships or expressions of lost love. Ask any musician, and they will tell you that it’s the name of a musical form, moving from the tonic to the sub-dominant fourth, then via a flattened seventh, back to the dominant. And a singer might point out that it is a four-bar ‘call’ or phrase that is repeated then completed by a four-bar ‘answer’. Elijah Wald’s strength is to show that it means all these things – and more besides. The blues is also a thorough mixture of European and African American musical elements that first became popular via very politically incorrect minstrel shows in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Wald is particularly good at explaining the distinctions between different styles – which are usually the products of different geographical areas – and showing the social and economic context out of which these styles emerged. In terms of structure he first of all covers the classic country-based blues artists of the period 1910-1930, then he looks at the blues as a mainstay of popular bands such as Count Basie, Louis Jordan, and Lionel Hampton. He several times emphasises that the big stars of this period wer almost all women singers – Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington (real name, Ruth Jones).

When it comes to the 1950s and the arrival of blues-based rock-and-roll he explains again the case he makes at length in How the Beatles Destroyed Rock N Roll. This is the argument that the new young white groups, even though inspired by the old blues masters, pushed them out of the record charts. However, it is a mistake to imagine that they universally resented this. Many of them had lost their original black audiences, and were grateful for finding new ones by association with the likes of the Rolling Stones and the Beatles.

The final chapters trace the influence of the blues on American culture – first in its relation with jazz music. It’s really quite difficult to say where the blues ends and jazz begins, as all great jazz performers have have included blues as part of their repertoire from Buddy Bolden’s “Blues” to John Coltrane’s “Cousin Mary”.

It is the penultimate chapter that blues purists will find most controversial, since Wald argues that in the racially segregated world of country and western music, white performers such as Jimmy Rogers and Hank Williams were just as influential on black singers as the other way round – and he has the evidence from black performers themselves to support this idea.

He ends with a chapter on the poetry of the blues – extolling the virtues of its sexual frankness and unsentimental treatment of life’s harsher realities. I thought he missed a good chance to point out the use of amazingly inventive allegories and metaphors (Robert Johnson’s “Terraplane Blues” and Willie Dixon’s “Little Red Rooster”) – but you cannot expect everything in a ‘very short introduction’.

Anyone who wants an introduction to this rich musical genre would do well to start here. I read it with my connection to www.Spotify.com open – and checked all his major recommendations. They were spot on.

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Elijah Wald, The Blues: a very short introduction, Oxford Oxford University Press, 2010, pp.140, ISBN: 0195398939

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The Bride of the Wind: The Life of Alma Mahler

July 27, 2012 by Roy Johnson

Alma Mahler was one of the most famous (some would say infamous) grandes dames of the first part of the twentieth century. She was rich, famous, gifted, and very glamorous in her younger years. And she had a penchant for artists, writers, and men of power that led to a succession of husbands and lovers. She was born in 1879 to a father who was a rather feckless painter and a mother who was an ex-singer. The family eventually became successful via some royal patronage that was common in the Hapsburg Empire at that time. But their rise in fortunes was cut short when the patron shot himself and her father died when she was quite young.

Alma was not close to her mother, and had no time at all for her younger sister. The remainder of her life seems to have been a search for powerful authority-figure substitutes for the father she had lost. As a young woman, obviously aware of her physical attractiveness, she had a series of chaste but coquettish relationships with older men. Her widowed mother married one of her father’s artistic colleagues, and Alma mixed at her social ease in the Secessionist artistic circles that were established in Vienna towards the end of the nineteenth century.

One of her first serious connections was with Gustav Klimt, but the relationship was nipped in the bud by her mother, who disapproved of the liaison. When she began to develop her own interests in music in the form of song composition, she engaged the services of Alexander von Zemlinsky. She thought he was hideously ugly, but in order to become his student she flattered him by saying that he was ‘becoming too attractive to her’.

This characteristic flirting would persist throughout her life. Nevertheless, she was on the point of giving herself to Zemlinsky when she met Gustav Mahler, a composer who was just on the point of becoming great. He proposed to her on their fourth meeting – on the condition that she give up all thought of her own musical ambitions for herself. There was only to be room for one musician in the Mahler household.

She submitted to this egoism, produced two children, yet kept her musical friendships with Zemlinsky and Pfitzner alive in order to maintain her self-respect. It’s perhaps understandable that passages in this excellent biography dealing with her marriage to Mahler are dominated by the husband’s professional difficulties and triumphs rather than her own development.

Gustav Mahler achieved great success in Europe and even America where the family lived for the part of each year. But Alma characteristically developed a sense of restless disaffection from her husband, and ended up having a nervous breakdown which called for a sanitorium ‘cure’. [This is the era Thomas Mann deals with in his novel The Magic Mountain.]

Whilst taking the cure she met the architect Walter Gropius and started an affair with him. On return to Vienna she was prepared to equivocate between these two attachments, but Gropius upped the ante by writing to Mahler, saying that he wanted to marry his wife. Mahler was devastated, and suddenly found it in himself to support Alma’s musical interests – but it was too late. He died shortly after this.

Gropius perhaps wisely, put his relationship with Alma on hold – and she meanwhile temporised with relationships with musician Franz Schrecker and biologist Paul Kammerer – then in 1912 met the artist Oskar Kokoshka.

Their’s was a stormy love affair that lasted three years. Kokoshka wanted to marry her, but she resisted shackling herself to a poor and (then) unknown artist. They quarrelled a lot, and he was terribly jealous of her previous attachments, but he produced lots of important work, including his masterpiece The Bride of the Wind which gives this biography its title.

Kokoshka enlisted in the first world war, almost as a gesture of despair about their relationship; he was badly wounded, and whilst he was convalescing she married Gropius.

If the Gustav Mahler episode was not sufficient proof, her relationship with Kokoshka certainly demonstrates to power of Alma Mahler as an inspiring muse to great artists. It’s interesting to note just how many of Kokoshka’s great paintings were produced around this time.

However, with Gropius she seemed to have found a partner with whom she could find some semblance of emotional tranquillity. She was even eager to start another family with him, which they did in 1915, after a secret marriage. The outcome was her daughter Manon, who proved to be a tragic child who died of poliomyelitis whilst still young.

Gropius was himself called back into the war, leaving Alma to fall in love with the poet Franz Werfel who was ten years younger than her, and just at the start of his career. In 1918 Alma suffered the premature birth (with complications) of her fourth child Martin. Gropius was summoned from military duty on the assumption that the child was his. He discovered fairly rapidly that it was not.

There was a showdown between Gropius, Werfel, and Alma – but she refused to choose between them as husband and lover. Eventually, Gropius agreed to a divorce. He went on to establish the Bauhaus project: Werfel gradually abandoned poetry and wrote instead a series of commercially successful novels, all of which are now completely forgotten.

Alma now had everything she wanted, yet her life continued to be full of restlessness, distress, and antagonism with her daughter Anna, who was married several times, and had an affair with the writer Elias Canetti.

Alma eventually married Werfel, despite their political differences. He was a leftist with non-partisan sympathies for both the communists and the social-democrats: she was an arch conservative who admired Mussolini and was so anti-Semitic she even thought her own children were tainted by ‘miscegenation’.

She rejoined the Catholic Church in 1932 and almost immediately started an affair with Father Johannes Hollnsteiner, a professor of theology – an affair that Werfel knew about and tolerated in exchange for a quiet life.

Fortunately, all these dubious goings on are surrounded in this biography by some first rate political mise en scene. There’s a very readable account of the collapse of Austria and Vienna in particular amidst the competing factions of fascists, social-democrats, monarchists, and communists.

Despite her right-wing sympathies, when Austria was threatened by Germany in 1938 Alma had the good sense to transfer her money to Zurich, and she escaped with Werfel, ending up in the south of France along with many other European refugees at that time. Their escape route was the now familiar one of Marseilles to Perpignon on the Spanish border; over the Pyrenees in secret; then from Spain to Portugal, and a boat journey to freedom. It was a route travelled by many others, including Victor Serge, Walter Benjamin (who did not survive the suicide capsule he shared with Arthur Koestler), André Breton, Max Ernst, and Marcel Duchamp.

After a rapturous reception in New York Alma settled in California. As her fellow refugee Arnold Schoenberg put it she was ‘exiled to paradise’. A comfortable home with a strictly Ayrian butler was established, from which she deemed the Allied forces fighting in Europe were ‘weaklings and degenerates’. She thought Hitler was a ‘superman’ and claimed that the Red Cross facilities in the concentration camps were ‘excellent’. When her husband died in 1945 she didn’t even go to his funeral.

Yet after Werfel’s death she seems to have lost her sense of purpose and direction. She sorted out his papers and wrote her own self-justifying autobiography And the Bridge is Love, and went to live in New York. There were some attempts to retrieve her property in post-war Austria, but when she visited her old home in Vienna it was in ruins. Even the marble had been ripped out to furnish nearby houses.

There was a quasi-reconciliation with her daughter Anna, who was so disoriented she didn’t even know who had won the war. They were like characters at the end of Thomas Mann’s novel Doktor Faustus. She lived until 1964, still drinking a bottle of Benedictine a day, then at the age of eighty-six the light went out on her life – and on the end of an era.

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Susan Keegan, The Bride of the Wind: The Life of Alma Mahler, London: Secker and Warburg, 1991, pp. 346, ISBN: 0670805130

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The Cambridge Apostles

February 2, 2016 by Roy Johnson

secrecy, intellectual elitism, and cultural history

The Cambridge Apostles was a quasi-secret discussion group (also known as The Cambridge Conversazione Society) that was established at Cambridge University in the nineteenth century, drawing its members largely from Christ’s, St John’s, Jesus, Trinity, and King’s Colleges. It was called The Apostles because there were originally twelve founder members, who met on Saturday night to discuss a given topic. Members were generally undergraduates, but post graduates and even teaching staff were permitted. Membership was strictly by invitation only, and former members of the group were called ‘angels’. The group met at midnight, drank coffee, and ate sardines on toast – which were called ‘Whales’.

Cambridge University – King’s College

The Cambridge Apostles – history

The group was founded in 1830 by George Tomlinson, who went on to become the Bishop of Gibraltar – a fact that reflects both the religious and the evangelical origins of the group. Most of its early members were destined to become clergymen of one kind or another. It began as a debating society which met each Saturday night, and the element of secrecy was such that no member even knew he had been proposed until he was elected.

The group had its own coded language. Someone being considered for membership was called an ’embryo’. All matters relating to the group were known as ‘reality’, whilst everything and all people outside it were referred to as ‘phenomena’. All records of membership and copies of delivered talks were kept in a wooden trunk called ‘the ark’.

Although the group was religious in origin and debated issues of conscience and belief, it gradually changed from an ideology of Toryism to a radical examination of general ethics. An early influence was Samuel Taylor Coleridge – not as a poet, but as a social philosopher who was renowned in his day both as a powerful intellectual and a great talker. He was also given to fuelling his tirades by doses of laudanum (opium).

Tennyson was an early member, but was fined five shillings and asked to resign for non-attendance. However, he was later re-admitted as an ‘angel’. The spirit of radicalism was in the group from its earliest days. They debated the possibility of admitting women (motion defeated) and gave assistance to the Spanish revolutionaries of 1850.

The group facilitated the establishment of lifelong friendships and in many cases established an Old Boys network which oiled the wheels of promotion in employment, be it in the university system, the Church, or in government. The close bonding also merged effortlessly into the homosexuality that easily took root in an all male environment in which females were generally regarded as lesser beings:

the theory that the love of a man for man was greater than that of a man for woman became an Apostolic tradition.

This tendency was fuelled intellectually later in the century by the pervasive influence of G.E. Moore who promoted a philosophy of close friendships and the pursuit of both pleasure and ‘the Good’ – without specifying what it was. In the early twentieth century this continued under the influence of Lytton Strachey (‘the arch bugger of Bloomsbury’) who controlled events and set the tone of the Apostles as its secretary and founded a powerful leadership with his fellow homosexual and one time lover, John Maynard Keynes.

John Maynard Keynes

The Bloomsbury Group

Without a doubt, the father of the Bloomsbury Group was the Victorian biographer and essayist, Sir Leslie Stephen. He attended Trinity Hall Cambridge and was elected a fellow – though not as an Apostle. However, his two sons Thoby and Adrian were also Cambridge undergraduates, where they became friends with Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes, Saxon Sydney-Turner, and E.M. Forster, all of whom were Apostles.

These friendship networks were formed in the university, but then consolidated when individuals began to socialise at the soirees held by Thoby Stephen and his sisters, Vanessa (painter) and Virginia (writer) in their new home in Gordon Square, which at that time was considered a slightly bohemian district of London. Vanessa eventually married the apostle Clive Bell (art critic) and Virginia married the writer Leonard Woolf. There was therefore a considerable overlap between the Apostles and the Bloomsbury Group, which eventually included people such as Roger Fry (art critic and painter) and Desmond MacCarthay (journalist and editor) both of whom were Apostles.

Lytton Strachey

To be elected as an Apostle was generally regarded as a recognition of outstanding ability and talent, but some of the members of this elite group were quite unorthodox. The reclusive Saxon Sydney-Turner for instance, described by Leonard Woolf as ‘an absolute prodigy of learning’, attended meetings but hardly contributed a single word to discussion. When he returned from his holidays he showed photographs of rural Finnish railway stations and was considered a monumental bore. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was elected a member in 1912, but resigned almost immediately because he could not tolerate the atmosphere of levity and the style of humour prevalent amongst members.

Desmond MacCarthay on the other hand was a great talker and a writer considered to be of great promise. However, the promise never resulted in the production of the great novel he was always threatening to write. His gifts as a speaker are illustrated by a famous incident from a meeting of the Bloomsbury Memoir Club, at which attendees would give papers recalling past events and fellow members. E.M. Forster recalls:

he had a suit-case open before him. The lid of the case, which he propped up, would be useful to rest his manuscript upon, he told us. On he read, delighting us as usual, with his brilliancy, and humanity, and wisdom, until – owing to a slight wave of his hand – the suit-case unfortunately fell over. Nothing was inside it. There was no paper. He had been improvising.

It is interesting to note the subtle connections that allowed the Apostles to control much of the literary and intellectual life in its heyday in the early twentieth century. Leonard Woolf was in charge of the literary pages of The Nation, Desmond MacCarthy did the same at the New Statesman, and Lytton Strachey’s uncle was at the helm of The Spectator.

During the first world war the society was split between pacifists – Bertrand Russell, Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Saxon Sydney-Turner – and those who chose to fight – Ralph Wedgwood and Rupert Brooke – the ‘war poet’ who was never in the war and who died of an infected mosquito bite.

In the post-war period of the 1920s the society took a generally leftward direction and the first of the Marxists formed a sub-group, supporting the miners during the General Strike. The other momentous event in 1929 was the re-election of Ludwig Wittgenstein who was to dominate intellectual life at the university during the next ten years, although he did not get on well with the other influential figure of the 1930s, F.R. Leavis.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

The next generation to join the Apostles included figures such as Julian Bell (son of apostle Clive Bell and his wife Vanessa) and the art historian Anthony Blunt. There was a generally sympathetic attitude taken towards the Soviet Union shared by many except those who had actually been there. The central event of this period was the Spanish Civil War when almost everyone supported the Republicans. But the same period also saw the establishment of what later became known as the Cambridge Spy Ring.

During the second world war Cambridge and its Apostles were all active in the fight against Nazism – some of them at Bletchley Park working on the Enigma decoding system under the direction of the brilliant mathematician Alan Turing – who was not elected an Apostle.

In the 1950s and 1960s the society included names which form a link to the modern world: Arnold Kettle, literary critic who became Professor at the Open University; Peter Shore, the Labour Party minister; the historian and unrepentant Marxist, Eric Hobsbawm; and polymath doctor and theatre director, Jonathan Miller. The society eventually decided to include women – though these remain few in number.

The Cambridge Spy Ring

In the 1930s the Apostles were largely sympathetic to left-wing causes and continued to generate personal links on the basis of their homosexual links. Both of these issues were at the root of the spy ring, which was formed between Anothony Blunt, Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, and Donald MacLean. Various other contemporaries have been accused and investigated as spies, but without positive outcomes.

Anthony Blunt is possibly the most spectacular example of establishment deception, since he was a friend of the royal family, eventually became keeper of the Queen’s pictures, and was given a knighthood. But in 1953 the American writer Michael Straight, who was an apostle and publisher of The New Republic was uncovered as a Soviet spy and named Blunt in his confession. Blunt named others in his deposition, and was eventually stripped of his knighthood by Margaret Thatcher in 1979.

In 1951 Burgess and MacLean both fled to Moscow when they came under suspicion of espionage. MacLean became a respected Soviet citizen, but Burgess never even bothered to learn Russian and lived in a seedy flat furnished with English memorabilia, became more or less an alcoholic, and died aged fifty-two.

The Cambridge Apostles – study resources

The Cambridge Apostles – Early Years – Amazon UK
The Cambridge Apostles – Early Years – Amazon US

The Cambridge Apostles – A History – Amazon UK
The Cambridge Apostles – A History – Amazon US

The Cambridge Apostles – 1820-1914 – Amazon UK
The Cambridge Apostles – 1820-1914 – Amazon US

G.E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles – Amazon UK
G.E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles – Amazon US

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The Cambridge Apostles – history

The Cambridge Apostles – study resources

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