The Cambridge Apostles; A history of Cambridge University's elite

by Richard Deacon

This is the story of the Apostles - Cambridge University's elite intellectual secret society - from its modest beginning in the 1820s to the revelation in recent decades that two of the most notorious "moles" for the Soviet secret service - Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt - Kim Philby's pals - were Apostles.

Hardcover

First published September 26, 1985

About the author

George Donald King McCormick (11 December 1911 – 2 January 1998) was a British journalist and popular historian, who also wrote under the pseudonym Richard Deacon.

Reviews

[Roy Lotz · Rating 3 out of 5]

With the vague sense that this book would appeal to my fondness for arcane academic history, my brother gave me this last Christmas. Well, he was right

The Cambridge Apostles is a secret debate society, founded in the early nineteenth century and continuing up to this day. Although the active membership of the group has always been small—twelve or even less—the society has included a remarkable number of influential thinkers and writers: the poet Alfred Tennyson, the mathematician G.H. Hardy, the historian Eric Hobsbawn, the philosophers G.E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittenstein (who didn’t like attending meetings), the economist John Maynard Keynes, the biographer Lytton Strachey, and the novelist E.M. Forster, just to name some of the most famous.

For all its secrecy, the society seems pretty tame. The members get together on Saturday evenings, when one member presents a paper—usually on a hazy philosophical question—and then the rest of the members debate the question, and finally votes are cast for answering ‘yes’ or ‘no’. These questions are sometimes silly or frivolous, as the author notes. The society seems to have been more important as a place to network than as a source of serious intellectual development. Indeed, probably nobody would ever have bothered talking about the Apostles, if not for two controversies.

First, according to the author (Richard Deacon is a pseudonym, his real name is Donald McCormick), John Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey used their power as senior members to seduce new recruits. This was, you remember, an era in which homosexuality was still regarded as criminal and nefarious. I must say that Deacon himself comes across as somewhat reactionary in this book, writing about homosexuality with an unmistakably guarded tone. In any case, Deacon is often unclear as to his sources of information (he relied on oral informants, who sometimes declined to identify themselves), so I am not sure how far to credit this assertion about Keynes and Strachey.

The second controversy—far larger and more serious—began when authorities discovered that two prominent Apostles, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt, were passing information to the Soviet Union. This naturally led to the suspicion that the Cambridge Apostles—with all its secrecy and its many socialist and communist members (many intellectuals were Marxists in those days)—was a kind of espionage organization for the KGB. Deacon repeatedly attacks this claim, seeing it as totally alien to the prosaic reality of the society's activities.

I must say that this book does not make for a satisfying reading experience. Due to the secretive nature of the Apostles, Deacon can only piece together a sketchy narrative, with seemingly all the most important bits of the story hidden from view. Nevertheless, he does manage to draw a basic outline of the history of the Apostles, from its founding to the time of the book’s writing (1985). For any aficionados of secret intellectual societies of the British variety, this book should be on your short list.

What was more surprising than the book’s sketchiness of detail was Deacon’s authorial voice. In most popular histories of this kind, the author strives to make himself invisible. But Deacon is a highly opinionated guide, and he does not hesitate to judge the works and thoughts of the Apostles. Even more surprisingly, he is often dismissive and critical, letting drop deprecatory comments about works of philosophy, economics, politics, literature, and architecture, among much else. These comments were both amusing and annoying: they did lend personality to the book; but since Deacon did not take any time to explain or justify his opinions, they did not shed any light on the topic.

As a side note, it seems that the Cambridge Apostles has attracted the attention of certain right-wing conspiracy theorists, who believe that they are, to quote another review on this site, a "homosexual anti-Christ cult." Unless this book is wildly inaccurate, there is nothing cult-like about the Apostles, and its members do not seem more hostile to religion than is typical among intellectuals. It is true that homosexuality came to be viewed in a positive light by the Apostles; but nowadays that seems progressive, if anything. I suppose theories of this kind will spring up whenever secrecy is involved. We humans don't like being denied entrance, even if it is entrance to a nerdy debate society.

[Matthew · Rating 1 out of 5]

Given McCormick's intellectual dishonesty elsewhere, the information in this book that is supposed to have come from secret Society documents, unnamed persons who "wish to remain anonymous", or persons recently deceased probably can't be relied on.  This makes anything drawn from these claimed sources--which is a good deal of the book--essentially worthless.  Add to this the poor (and sometimes, frankly, bizarre) accounts of his subjects' ideas, the often amateurish writing, and the frequent insertion of McCormick's personal opinions, in which I found no interest, and The Cambridge Apostles is easily one of the worst books I've ever read.

[Mick Maurer · Rating 3 out of 5]

A side excursion in reading. Wittgenstein attended two meetings, resigned but it was not accepted. He was retained as a member but did not have to attended the weekly meetings. When he returned to Cambridge in 1929 he was made an ‘Angel’.

[Edward]

I want to read this because Deacon documents here one of the most important roots of the New World Order, the homosexual anti-Christ cult that arose at Cambridge in the early 20th century. As Rushdoony points out, Deacon's book is not at all critical of the Apostles, he is at least slightly sympathetic, but the history is still valuable and revealing.

"Hardly pleasant reading, but all the same important reading. It is by Richard Deacon as in a church deacon, but it is emphatically what deacon is not. He is a leading writer in the field of espionage and diplomacy. He is a British writer...

Well, this is exactly what it was, a secret society which began as a Church of England group and before too many years became a society of sodomites who expounded what they called the higher sodomy. So these men became Soviet agents within the British government. Others became very, very powerful within the British government. They were, of course, very quickly not only no longer interested in the Church of England, but were also militantly anti Christian. They read papers regularly. They were the ones to espouse the idea that homosexuality between consenting adults is legal or should be legal. The papers they read to one another often had to do with preposterous subjects. And a G. E. Moore who is regarded as one of the great English philosophers was a member and he was not a great philosopher. And in one of his papers he made this statement. I quote.

“In the beginning was matter and matter begat the devil and the devil begat God,” unquote.

Bertrand Russell was a member of this society. Lichtenstein, of course, a very powerful member was Keynes whose economic is still with us and destroying the world.
Their way of life, of course, was to them a highly noble one.

The interesting thing, of course, is these members of the apostles or the higher sodomy group have always preferred to exercise power and authority behind the scenes in the civil service, in the diplomatic service or advisory or experimental agencies rather than to take a public part in government. They have loved the behind the scenes influence.

Incidentally, one of their more important members was Edward Marsh who very early became a secretary, a private secretary and right hand man to Winston Churchill and, as such, exercised a very, very powerful influence there.

One of the early and ostensibly a member during the period of orthodoxy was Hort, H O R T, Fenton John Anthony Hort. But there is a good question as to whether in Hort’s day the society was as innocent as Deacon seems to believe because Hort was the man who did most of the work in the preparation of the Westcott and Hort version of the Greek New Testament which supplanted the Received Text with scholars. There is no question that Hort was a hater of everything that was orthodox, a hatred that extended to the received text so that, perhaps even in the early years, behind the façade of Church of England orthodoxy, the society was not what it pretended to be.

Let me add that Deacon is not writing critically of the apostles. He goes so far as to say in his conclusion that, “The outside world, the influence of members, has over the past 40 years been more significant in science, medicine, economics and technology than in any other fields. Membership of the society may well have encouraged feelings of elitism in some and, what is worse, privilege, elitism. Some apostles. Some apostles such as Harry Johnson have acknowledged this. As we all suffer from ill effects of counter elitism in its worst forms today, I should be the last to attack any –ism while still condemning privileged elitism. But in the long run, as I hope this book will prove, the cut and thrust of debate and arguments of such societies as the apostles have in very many instances paved the way to better things and justified their existence. So, if as an outsider, one may raise one’s glass to the apostles and may they long continue.”

So much for Deacon’s perspective which, indeed, I assure you, is hardly mine.