Derived from A Question of Retribution? The British Academy and the Matter of Anthony Blunt, edited by Professor Sir David Cannadine FBA (2020).
On 15 November 1979, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher revealed in the House of Commons that Anthony Blunt FBA had been a Soviet spy, and it was announced that he would be stripped of his knighthood. J.H. (‘Jack’) Plumb, a member of the Academy’s Council, immediately wrote to the President of the British Academy, Kenneth Dover, demanding that the Academy take ‘immediate action’ to remove Blunt from its Fellowship: ‘I do not think we should harbour traitors.’
Under the British Academy’s Bye-Laws, the Council of the Academy could make a recommendation to the Annual General Meeting that it should ‘remove the name of a person from the list of Fellows on the ground that he or she is not a fit and proper person to be a Fellow’. The Council held its first discussion of the expulsion procedure at its meeting on 15 February 1980.
The fact that the Blunt question had been discussed by Council was leaked to the Sunday Telegraph (the presumption is that Plumb was the source). This prompted a flow of correspondence to the President, expressing quite divergent views. A.J.P. Taylor wrote: ‘I shall of course resign my Fellowship if the motion [to expel Blunt] is carried.’ On the other hand, Plumb wrote: ‘if the question of Blunt’s expulsion is not brought before the general meeting, a number of Fellows, including myself, will resign and make our position clear in the public press as to why we are doing so.’ Dover moaned: ‘I find it profoundly depressing that neither set of potential resigners understands very readily the intelligent & honourable thinking which has led the other set to the conclusion it has reached.’
At its meeting on 18 March, Council narrowly voted to recommend Blunt’s expulsion to the Annual General Meeting in July. Informal sounding out via an intermediary ascertained that Blunt ‘felt most strongly that he did not wish to resign.’
In the run up to the AGM, two former Presidents, Lionel Robbins and Isaiah Berlin, concocted an alternative motion that they hoped might be less divisive, inviting the AGM to ‘deplore’ Blunt’s past conduct but otherwise take no further action.
The AGM, 3 July 1980
On the afternoon of the Annual General Meeting, a steady stream of journalists assembled in the courtyard outside the Academy’s offices at Burlington House. To protect the meeting’s privacy, the blinds of the ground-floor lecture room had been drawn, and staff were stationed at the doors to ensure that only Fellows were admitted. On a hot day, the room was packed: in 1980 there were 409 Fellows, 188 of whom attended the meeting – this remains the best attended AGM in the Academy’s history.
When the penultimate item on ‘Conduct of a Fellow (Professor Anthony Blunt)’ was reached, Dover said: ‘there is one assurance I would like to give every individual Fellow who votes on this matter. Whichever way you vote, you will find yourself in the company of people just as intelligent and just as honourable as you would have found on the other side’.
Robbins spoke in favour of his alternative motion; he acknowledged the gravity of Blunt’s misconduct, but he argued that the Academy’s function was to advance learning and to give public recognition to scholarly excellence, and that there would be ‘grave difficulties of principle’ if it based its approach to disciplinary action on wider considerations. T.B. Smith spoke to oppose this motion, arguing that Blunt would not have been elected if Fellows had known about his subversive activities, and indeed he had continued these activities since becoming a Fellow; Smith insisted that Blunt had done real harm and yet had shown no real regret. Taylor told the meeting that he would vote for Robbins’ motion but wished to disassociate himself from the ‘deplore’ part of it; he maintained that Blunt’s conduct beyond the field of art history had nothing to do with the Academy. Throughout the discussion, Christopher Blunt – Anthony Blunt’s older brother, and also a Fellow – ‘sat with his eyes to the ground, unmoving but looking grim’.
After 40 minutes of debate, L.C.B. (‘Jim’) Gower proposed that the meeting should move on to the next item on the agenda. After a moment of procedural doubt, Robbins withdrew his motion, and instead Gower’s proposal was passed by 120 votes to 42. The AGM therefore avoided making a decision either on Council’s original recommendation to expel Blunt, or on Robbins’ alternative suggestion that members, whilst deploring Blunt’s conduct, would take no further action in the matter.
After the meeting, Taylor told the journalists gathered outside that he was proud that the Academy had shown itself able to ‘tolerate the intolerable’. A press release issued by Dover concluded: ‘The implication of the decision is that the Academy is an inappropriate body to pass judgement on conduct in matters other than scholarship.’
In the aftermath of the AGM
In the days after the AGM, three Fellows of the British Academy wrote to Dover to resign their Fellowships.
Theodore Skeat believed that, as a body established by Royal Charter, the Academy should not keep within its number ‘someone whom the Sovereign has publicly degraded from the order of knighthood’. He could no longer remain a Fellow of ‘a body in which personal integrity is regarded by the majority of members as an irrelevancy’.
As a member of Council, John Crook had voted to recommend Blunt’s expulsion – a view that at the AGM had been ‘so overwhelmingly thrust aside … as not to be voted on at all’. He was ‘deeply dismayed at the evident size of the majority’ who held what seemed to him ‘an untenable view’ of the Academy’s nature and ‘its necessary relationship to the life of the nation in general’. The Academy could not be ‘an ivory tower of nothing but scholarship’.
Colin Roberts, who had not been present at the AGM, found the outcome of that meeting ‘deeply disturbing’, because it implied that scholarship could be ‘carried on in a vacuum’ – an attitude that was ‘dangerous as well as distasteful’.
After a lull of about a fortnight, from late July correspondence and comments about the Blunt business appeared in the press on an almost daily basis. This triggered a fourth resignation, by Charles Bawden, who argued that, during the time Blunt had been associated with the ‘Stalinist régime’, many scholars in the USSR ‘were killed or allowed to die in prisons and concentration camps’.
But other Fellows were determined to contest the AGM’s decision from within the Academy’s ranks. Robert Blake published an article in the Daily Mail under the lurid headline ‘British Academy of cowards’, asking the question ‘If they won’t expel this traitor, who will they ever kick out?’ Others conspired to write to Dover with threats of resignation and to make their intentions known to the press: ‘I do not see how I can remain a member of an academic body which includes in its number this creature’ (Sidney Allen); ‘unless Blunt has been persuaded to resign by 31 December 1980, I shall resign from the Academy myself’ (Plumb); ‘unless the effect of that decision [at the AGM] can somehow be reversed by the end of the year, I shall no longer wish to have anything to do with the Academy’ (Ian Christie).
After the AGM, Dover had returned to his home in St Andrews. Here he had a meeting with another discontented Fellow, Norman Gash. Although Dover went into that meeting ‘strongly of the opinion that the threatened resigners were making asses of themselves’, Gash spooked him into fearing that there might be ‘a landslide of resignations which the Academy could ill afford’. That evening Dover wrote to Blunt, asking him to consider the possibility of ‘healing the wound’ by resigning. Blunt rang him to explain that he would gladly resign to help the Academy, but there were Fellows who were determined to resign if he did. A couple of days later, Blunt rang again to say that his letter of resignation was in the post, and that he had persuaded his friends not to resign in sympathy.
But Taylor was determined to live up to his earlier utterances, and fired off a letter of resignation. He argued that, instead of letting the decision at the AGM be the end of the matter, Dover had allowed ‘a small group of Fellows to thwart the wishes of a substantial majority’. He concluded: ‘I will not be a party to a witch hunt’ – a phrase that was picked up in the newspapers. Other Fellows wrote expressing similar sentiments, but there were no further resignations (though some flirted with the idea). And after Dover had circulated to Fellows and the press a (self-justifying) narrative of how the affair had unfolded, the whole episode finally fizzled out – apart from a few further retrospective exchanges in periodicals over the following 12 months.
Geoffrey Elton FBA reflected that the whole affair had been ‘a prime example of the academic skill in making mountains out of molehills or finding issues of principle in the most unpromising corners.’ On the plus side, he suggested that, through the press coverage of this ‘good silly-season subject’, ‘a great number of people have now heard of the Academy who had never before done so’.
Text: James Rivington
Listen to Art historian, professor, writer, spy – the extraordinary story of Anthony Blunt, a British Academy 10-Minute Talk by Professor Sir David Cannadine FBA.
This page was created to mark 12 Decades of the British Academy.
