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n the 1979 classic Smiley’s People, John le Carré depicts George Smiley – about to be lured back into the secret service from retirement – engaged in innocent literary research, “toiling obliviously, with whatever conviction he could muster, at his habitual desk in The London Library in St James’s Square, with two spindly trees to look at through the sash-window of the reading room”. Smiley is not the only famous spy with a Library connection. In On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, 1963, James Bond packs his suitcase ready for his first meeting with Blofeld, who is masquerading as a French count. Q has thoughtfully supplied the Library’s copy of Burke’s General Armory – a standard work on heraldry – to enable Bond to unveil Blofeld’s deception. Ian Fleming was a longstanding member of the Library; he joined in July 1952, four months after finishing his first Bond novel, Casino Royale.
One of Fleming’s most familiar characters is M, fictional head of MI6. M is loosely based on Sir Mansfield Cumming, who ran the Secret Intelligence Service (the precursor of MI6) from 1916 until his death in 1923. Cumming was famed for signing secret correspondence with the initial C in green ink. He joined the Library in September 1918, and completed his membership application in the same colour. Fiction aside, the Library also became a home for three of the Cambridge spies. Guy Burgess joined on Christmas Eve 1932, then still an undergraduate at Trinity College Cambridge where he had just been introduced to the Cambridge Apostles by fellow student Anthony Blunt. Burgess’s recruitment by Soviet intelligence – engineered by émigré academic Arnold Deutsch – took place two years later. Deutsch had been put onto Burgess by Trinity undergraduate Kim Philby, who had been involved with
“Cumming was famed for signing secret correspondence with the initial C in green ink, and completed his membership application in the same colour” Soviet intelligence since meeting Deutsch in June 1934. A committed anti-Nazi activist and communist, Philby worked quietly in London as a journalist on minor trade titles. He joined the Library in September 1936, and after two years chiefly covering the Spanish Civil War, as he later wrote, “emerged from the conflict as a fully-fledged officer of the Soviet service”. Last of the spies to join the Library was Anthony Blunt, by then a University Professor, who joined in September 1937. He was nominated by his mother Hilda Blunt, who had herself been a member since 1930. Accounts differ as to Blunt’s early association with Russian intelligence. He visited the Soviet Union in 1933 and some suggest he was recruited in 1934, possibly by Burgess. Biographer Miranda Carter argues that it wasn’t until 1937 (the year he joined the Library) that he became a spy. What is known is that in 1940 he joined MI5 and was routinely passing Enigma transcripts on German troop movements to the Soviets. Eleven years later he tipped off fellow spies Burgess and Donald Maclean that the net was closing in on them, occasioning their hasty escape to Moscow. C would have turned in his grave.
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(From left) Sir Mansfield Cumming’s Library membership application; Guy Burgess in 1935, the year after he was recruited by Soviet intelligence. Images: Suzie McCracken; Keystone Press / Alamy Stock Photo
