Guy Burgess - Biography

Biography

Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess was born at 2 Albemarle Villas, Devonport, Plymouth, the elder son of Commander Malcolm Kingsford de Moncy Burgess RN and his wife, Evelyn Mary, daughter of a banker, William Gillman. He attended Lockers Park Prep School in Hertfordshire and for a period Eton College. Burgess spent two years at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, but poor eyesight ended his naval prospects and he returned to Eton, where he was an outstanding student. He won an open scholarship to read modern history at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1930, gained a first in part one of the history tripos (1932) and an aegrotat in part two (1933), and held a two-year postgraduate teaching fellowship. At Cambridge, he became a friend of Julian Bell, the English poet who was killed while driving an ambulance in the Spanish Civil War. Whilst at Cambridge, he was recruited into the Cambridge Apostles, a secret, elitist debating society, whose members at the time included Anthony Blunt and with Blunt, Maclean and Kim Philby was recruited by the Comintern.

Upon coming down from Cambridge, Burgess initially was personal assistant to the Conservative MP Captain "Jack" Macnamara. He then worked for the BBC, as a Talks Assistant, producing a wide variety of programmes. As war approached he was recruited into Section D of M.I.6 as a propaganda specialist, then returned to the BBC, eventually becoming the producer of The Week in Westminster, the flagship programme covering Parliamentary activity - wherein he was able to further his acquaintance with important politicians, In London Burgess resided at Chester Square and later 5, Bentinck Street, for sometime with Anthony Blunt and Teresa Mayor, later Lady Rothschild. The house, which belonged to Lord Rothschild, was a famous center of bohemian life during the Blitz. In the Spring of 1944 Burgess was recruited into the News Department of the Foreign Office by Alexander Cadogan, Permanent Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs, a position that gave him access to Foreign Office communications. When the Labour Government took office in the following year, Burgess became an assistant to Hector McNeil, Minister of State in the Foreign Office. As McNeil's assistant, Burgess was able to transmit top secret Foreign Office documents to the KGB regularly, secreting them out at night to be photographed by his controller and returning them to McNeil's desk in the morning. He later worked in the Foreign Office's Far Eastern section and in the Washington Embassy. During the Marshall Plan negotiations, Burgess and Maclean provided information to the Soviets about the negotiations and the implications of the agreements. Just before going to Washington, he fell down a marble staircase in the Royal Automobile Club on Pall Mall during a fight with a colleague and suffered multiple skull fractures, injuries from which he never fully recovered. While assigned to the British embassy in Washington, Burgess lived with Kim Philby in a basement flat, perhaps so that Philby could keep an eye on him.

In 1951 Burgess accompanied Donald Maclean in an escape to Moscow after Maclean fell under suspicion for espionage, even though Burgess himself was not under suspicion. The escape was arranged by their controller, Yuri Modin. There is some debate as to why Burgess was asked to accompany Maclean, and whether he was misled about the prospect for him returning to England. Much of his time in the Soviet Union was spent in sanatoria on the Black Sea.

Unlike Maclean, who became a respected Soviet citizen in exile and lived until 1983, Burgess did not take to life in the Soviet Union very well. Homosexuality was far less acceptable in the Soviet Union than in the United Kingdom, and this may have been a problem, though he lived openly with a state-sanctioned lover. Also, unlike Maclean, he never bothered to learn Russian, furnished his flat from London and continued to order his clothes from his Savile Row tailor.

Becoming ever more dependent on drink, he died, aged 52.