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 takes its name from the idea that its members are supposedly the 12 cleverest
students at Cambridge. The active membership consists largely of undergraduates, though
there have been graduate student members. The society traditionally centered around
King's College and Trinity College, though this is no longer the case.
Contents
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1 Activities and membership
2 Bloomsbury
3 The Cambridge spy ring
4 Former members
5 Appearances in Literature
6 References
Activities and membership
The society is essentially a debating club. 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," though it's not known whether they still do. There are no
constraints regarding which topic may be raised and how it is approached: members may
raise any idea they can mount an argument for, no matter how controversial or politically
incorrect.
The Apostles retain a leather diary of their membership stretching back to its founder,
which includes handwritten notes about the topics each member has spoken on. The diary
is retained by the secretary of the society. The members referred to as the "Apostles" are
the active, usually undergraduate members; former members are called "angels".
Undergraduates usually agree to become angels after graduating or being awarded a
fellowship; they then look out for new members among the undergraduate population.
Every few years, amid great secrecy, all the angels are invited to an Apostles' dinner at a
Cambridge college.
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 Hort, the theologian, in or around
1851.
King's College, Cambridge
There have been very few women members. The first woman to join, an American Ph.D
student in social anthropology, became a member in 1985, 165 years after the society was
founded.
Critics say the society's secretive nature, combined with the small number of women
members, and the significant percentage of angels who have acquired fellowships at
Cambridge, and positions in the media, government and the church, places the Apostles
at odds with the meritocratic ideals the university espouses. 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."
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Bloomsbury
The Apostles first 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. Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey and his brother, and G.E. Moore
were all Apostles and subsequently prominent as members of Bloomsbury.
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The Cambridge spy ring
The Apostles were once again thrust into prominence following the exposure of
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.
Guy Burgess, who made the Apostles famous by working for MI6 and spying for the
KGB, drank himself to death in Moscow in 1963.
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. Anthony 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 in turn recruited other Cambridge students, at the instruction of his KGB
handlers, including Straight, though Blunt was not the person who recruited Burgess,
Philby, and MacLean, according to writer Russell Aiuto. [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.
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Former members
Members of the Cambridge Apostles have included (with the year they joined in brackets,
where it is known):
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George Tomlinson, Bishop of Gibraltar (1820)
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J.F.D. "Frederick" Maurice, Christian socialist writer
John Sterling, writer and poet
Charles Buller, barrister and MP
Arthur Buller, judge of the Supreme Court, Calcutta
Richard Trench, Christian writer, Archbishop of Dublin
John Mitchell Kemble, historian
Erasmus Alvey Darwin, brother of Charles Darwin (1823)
Arthur Hallam, poet (1829)
Alfred Tennyson, English poet, member of the House of Lords (1829)
Sir William Harcourt, Chancellor of the Exchequer
Fenton John Anthony Hort (1851), theologian
Brooke Foss Westcott, theologian, Bishop of Durham
James Clerk Maxwell, physicist (1852)
Henry Sidgwick, philosopher (1857)
Edward Fitzgerald, poet and translator of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
G. H. Hardy, mathematician.
C. P. Snow, writer and physicist
A.N. Whitehead, mathematician, logician and philosopher (1884)
Roger Eliot Fry, art historian (1887)
Bertrand Russell, philosopher, member of the House of Lords (1892)
Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, historian and philosopher
J. M. E. McTaggart, philosopher
G.E. Moore, philosopher (1894)
E. M. Forster, writer (1901)
Desmond McCarthy, newspaper critic
Lytton Strachey, writer and critic (1902)
Arthur Waley, Chinese and Japanese translator and historian
Robert Trevelyan, poet and translator
Saxon Sidney Turner, writer
Francis Birrell, critic and journalist
John Maynard Keynes, economist, member of the House of Lords (1903)
Rupert Brooke, poet (1908)
Raymond Mortimer, art critic, journalist, editor of the New Statesman
Stephen Tomlin, sculptor
Ludwig Wittgenstein, philosopher (1912)
Aldous Huxley, writer
Gerald Shove, economist
Guy Burgess, MI6 officer, KGB spy
Anthony Blunt, art adviser to the Queen, MI5 officer, KGB spy (1927)
G.M. Trevelyan, historian
Robin Gandy, mathematician
Julian Bell, poet
John Tressider "Jack" Sheppard, classicist, provost of King's College
Victor Rothschild, financier, member of the House of Lords
Michael Whitney Straight, American magazine publisher, member of the Whitney
family, Presidential speechwriter, KGB spy
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Noel Annan, intelligence officer, provost of King's College, Cambridge, provost
of University College, London, vice-chancellor of the University of London,
member of the House of Lords
Eric Hobsbawm, historian
Geoffrey Lloyd, emeritus professor of classics at Cambridge; Master of Darwin
College, Cambridge
Paul Levy, author (Moore:G.E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles); co-executor
of Lytton Strachey's literary estate; food critic for The Observer
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Appearances in Literature
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Avenging Angel, a murder mystery by the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah
The Longest Journey by E.M. Forster
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References
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Deacon, R., The Cambridge Apostles: A History of Cambridge University's Elite
Intellectual Secret Society, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986. ISBN 0374118205
"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
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Apostles"
Categories: University of Cambridge | Secret societies