 Trinity College Great Court. The Cambridge Apostles were for decades centered around Trinity and King's. The Cambridge Apostles (aka the Cambridge Conversazione Society) is an elite intellectual secret society of Cambridge University, founded in 1820 by George Tomlinson, who became the Bishop of Gibraltar. The society allegedly takes its name from the tongue-in-cheek idea that its members are the 12 cleverest students at Cambridge. The membership consists largely of undergraduates, though there are some graduate student members. The society traditionally centered around King's College and Trinity College, although this is no longer the case.
Membership
The Apostles retain a leather diary of their membership stretching back to its founder, which includes handwritten notes about which member spoke on which topic. The diary is usually kept by whoever is appointed Secretary of the society. Every year, amid great secrecy, all current and former Apostles are invited to an annual dinner at a Cambridge college.
Students being considered for membership are called "embryos" and are invited to "embryo parties," where members of the society judge whether he or she (usually he) is considered intelligent and well-read enough to receive an invitation to join. Embryos attend these parties without knowing they are being considered for membership. Full members are called "Apostles" and former members are called "Angels". Fellows are not allowed to be members, and usually agree to become Angels after graduating or being awarded a fellowship. Becoming an Apostle involves taking an oath of secrecy and listening to the reading of a Masonic-type curse, originally written by Apostle Fenton Hort, the theologian, in or around 1851.
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 large percentage of "Angels" who later acquire top jobs at Cambridge, 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, said of the Apostles that "the tie of attachment to this society is much the strongest corporate bond which I have known in my life."
Meetings
The society holds a meeting every week, traditionally on Saturday evenings, during which one member gives a prepared talk on a topic, which is then thrown open for discussion, while the members eat sardines on toast, which they call "whales". The only rule is that there are no rules. While delivering their talk, members may say anything they like, with no ideological constraints. Members may raise any idea they feel they can mount an argument for, no matter how controversial or politically incorrect.
The Cambridge Spies
The Apostles became well-known outside Cambridge over the so-called Cambridge Spies scandal, also known as the Cambridge Five or Cambridge Spy Ring. Four men, two of them former Apostles, with access to the top levels of government in Britain were discovered to have been passing information to the KGB. The four known agents were Guy Burgess, an MI6 officer and secretary to the deputy foreign minister; Anthony Blunt, director of the Courtauld Institute, art adviser to the Queen and MI5 officer; 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 fifth-man-rumor to Victor Rothschild, another Apostle, who had supplied an apartment in London for some of the Cambridge spies to meet in, though he may have done this unwittingly. The former editor of the New Republic, Michael Straight, was also later identified, but was not the fabled fifth man.
Of the four named spies, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt, both homosexuals, had been members of the Apostles, at a time when homosexuality seemed to be an attribute of many of the students chosen for membership. There were stories that the membership was mainly homosexual and Marxist, though that was never shown to be true. Arguably, the fact that members were prepared to discuss any topic, no matter how unpopular, reinforced the idea that they were anarchists, rebels, Marxists and the like.
It is believed that Anthony Blunt, a communist, was recruited first, during a visit to Russia in 1933. He, in turn, return to Britain and recruited other Cambridge students, at the instruction of his KGB handlers, including American Michael Straight, although he was not the person who recruited Burgess, Philby and MacLean, according to author Russell Aiuto. [1] (http://www.crimelibrary.com/terrorists_spies/spies/cambridge/2.html?sect=23)
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 Cambridge Apostles have included (with the year they joined in brackets, where it is known):
- George Tomlinson, Bishop of Gibraltar (1820)
- 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 Darwin, brother of Charles Darwin (1823)
- Arthur Hallam, poet (1829)
- Alfred Tennyson, English poet, member of the House of Lords (1829)
- Fenton 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)
- Leslie Stephen, philosopher
- 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
- Julian Bell, poet
- John Tressider "Jack" Sheppard, classicist, provost of King's College
- Victor Rothschild, financier, member of the House of Lords
- Michael Straight, American magazine publisher, KGB spy
- Noel Annan, intelligence officer, provost of King's College, Cambridge, vice-chancellor of the University of London, member of the House of Lords
- Eric Hobsbawm, historian
- Geoffrey Lloyd, emeritus professor of classics at Cambridge and, as of December 2004, master of Darwin College, Cambridge
- Paul Levy, food critic for The Observer, as of December 2004
References
- Deacon, R., The Cambridge Apostles: A History of Cambridge University's Elite Intellectual Secret Society
External links
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