On the evening of 25 May 1951, two Cambridge graduates drove out of London and didn’t come back. The Cold War’s most famous defection took place at twenty-eight knots, on a Channel ferry, with a bottle of whisky.
If you want to understand why Cambridge — quiet, donnish, deceptively indifferent — produced more high-level Soviet spies than any other university in the world, you need to start in the 1930s on a staircase in Trinity College.
The recruitment
Cambridge in the early 1930s was the most politically polarised place in Britain. The Depression, Fascism rising in Europe, the Spanish Civil War on the horizon. A particular kind of clever, restless, public-school undergraduate looked at the world and decided communism was the only ethical answer.
Some of them joined the Communist Party openly. Some of them, quietly, were approached by Soviet handlers and asked to do something more useful — bury their politics, take Foreign Office or MI6 jobs after graduation, and report back.
Two of them would, twenty years later, become the most famous defectors in British history.
Donald Maclean
Maclean was at Trinity Hall from 1931. Tall, fair, fluent in French, the son of a Liberal Cabinet minister. He took a First in Modern Languages, joined the Foreign Office in 1935, and was an active Soviet asset from before he sat his finals. By 1944 he was First Secretary at the British Embassy in Washington. By 1949 he was Head of the American Department in London — possibly the most sensitive non-MI6 desk in the British government.
His Soviet codename was “Homer.”
Guy Burgess
Burgess was at Trinity College from 1930. He was brilliant, dishevelled, drank everything he could lay hands on, and the kind of undergraduate who was both extremely well-connected and a moderate disaster. He drifted from the BBC to the Foreign Office to the Washington Embassy, leaving a trail of indiscretions and good gossip. He was a Cambridge Apostle — the secret society of clever undergraduates that turned out to be a useful recruitment pool for several of the spy ring.
His Soviet codename was “Hicks.”
The fall
In the spring of 1951 the American National Security Agency completed a decrypt — part of the project later called VENONA — that identified the Foreign Office mole “Homer” as a senior diplomat who had been posted to Washington during the war and had a pregnant wife at a particular moment in 1944. There were six candidates. By the middle of May the list was down to one: Maclean.
MI5 began surveillance. Maclean was due to be interrogated on Monday 28 May.
On Friday 25 May — Maclean’s thirty-eighth birthday — Guy Burgess drove a hired car to Maclean’s house at Tatsfield, on the Surrey-Kent border. They had dinner. They told Mrs Maclean that Burgess needed to talk to Donald about a private matter. They left the house at nine o’clock in the evening and drove for Southampton.
The night ferry to St Malo — the SS Falaise — was about to sail. They boarded as foot passengers and left the car on the dock with the keys still in it. From St Malo they took trains across France, into Switzerland, and onward east. The Soviets ran the operation; by the time MI5 knocked on the door at Tatsfield on the Monday morning, both men were already inside the Iron Curtain.
They were not seen in Britain again. Both died in Moscow — Burgess in 1963, Maclean in 1983.
Where you can still see Cambridge’s part of the story
Trinity Great Gate. Burgess was admitted as an undergraduate through this gate in October 1930. He left it for the last time, as a Fellow’s guest, in the late 1940s. The Wren-designed gate is unchanged.
Trinity Hall. Maclean’s college on Trinity Lane. The porter’s lodge will not discuss its most famous old member but the college’s own published history records him among its alumni.
The Anchor pub. On Silver Street, by the Mill Pond. A favoured undergraduate watering hole in the 1930s and still in business. The interior has been refitted several times but the location and the river view are unchanged.
Anthony Blunt’s rooms, Trinity. Blunt — the fourth member of the Cambridge Five — held a Fellowship at Trinity until 1937. His rooms on Whewell’s Court are not publicly accessible, but the staircase is. He died in 1983, the same year as Maclean.
The Wren Library. A few yards from where Burgess’s rooms were. The library holds papers relating to the Trinity Apostles — the parts of the archive not yet released to researchers run all the way to the present day.
Walk the Cambridge spy trail yourself
Our Cambridge Spy Scavenger Hunt sends clues by WhatsApp from a starting point at Market Square. The route threads through the streets Burgess, Maclean, Blunt and Philby walked between college and pub between 1930 and 1934. £20 covers your whole group. No app, no booking slot. Cases run 90 to 120 minutes.
The streets are not what they appear.
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Or, if Norwich is more your beat: 10 hidden corners of Norwich most locals walk past.