Anthony Frederick Blunt (26 September 1907, Bournemouth, Hampshire – 26 March 1983, Westminster, London), known as Sir Anthony Blunt, KCVO between 1956 and 1979, was a British spy, art historian, Professor of the History of Art at the University of London, director of the Courtauld Institute of Art, London (1947-74), and Surveyor of the King’s Pictures (1945-72).
Blunt was an acclaimed art critic and the “Fourth Man” of the Cambridge Five, a group of traitors and spies working for the Soviet Union from some time in the 1930s to at least the early 1950s.
Blunt was born in Bournemouth, the third and youngest son of a vicar, the Revd (Arthur) Stanley Vaughan Blunt (1870–1929) and his wife, Hilda Violet (1880–1969), daughter of Henry Master of the Madras civil service. He was the brother of writer Wilfrid Jasper Walter Blunt and of numismatist Christopher Evelyn Blunt, and the grandnephew of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt.
Blunt is frequently spoken of as a distant relative of Queen Mary (Mary of Teck) – generally Prince Michael of Hesse is given as their common cousin – however, the exact lineage is never produced. He was, however, demonstrably a cousin of Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the late Queen Mother, through his mother, Hilda V. Master, daughter of John Henry Master, son of Frances Mary Smith, sister of Oswald Smith, father of Frances Dora Smith, mother of Claude George Bowes-Lyon, 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, father of Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon, making Blunt and the Queen Mother third cousins, by common descent from George Smith and his wife Frances Mary Mosley.
He was educated at Marlborough College, where he joined the College’s secret ‘Society of Amici’, in which he was a contemporary of Louis MacNeice (whose unfinished autobiography The Strings are False contains numerous references to Blunt), John Betjeman and Graham Shepard. He later read mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, and earned his first degree in that subject. But he switched to Modern Languages, eventually graduating in 1930, to become a teacher of French. He became a Fellow of the college in 1932, and was a member of the Cambridge Apostles, a secret society which at that time was largely Marxist, formed from members (students, alumni, and professors) of Cambridge University.
After visiting the Soviet Union in 1933, Blunt was recruited in 1934 by the NKVD. A committed Communist, Blunt was recruited by his student Guy Burgess at Cambridge although there is reason to believe that Blunt, the older, was control. He joined the British Army in 1939 and in 1940 was recruited to MI5, the military intelligence department. He passed on ULTRA intelligence from decrypted Enigma intercepts to the Soviet Union. He reached the rank of major.
As World War II was ending, Blunt successfully undertook a special mission to the defeated Germany on behalf of the British Royal Family, to recover incriminating letters written by the Duke of Windsor to Adolf Hitler. The mission may have also recovered the so-called ‘Vicky Letters’, between Queen Victoria and some of her German relatives.
Following the defection in May 1951 of fellow spies Guy Burgess and Donald Duart Maclean to the Soviet Union, Blunt came under suspicion as well. He had been a close, longtime friend of Burgess, from their time at Cambridge. Maclean was in imminent danger of being unmasked as a spy by decryptions from VENONA. Blunt was interrogated by MI5 in 1952, but gave little, if anything, away. Blunt was knighted in 1956 by the British Government for his work for MI5.
In January 1964, Arthur Martin from MI5 interviewed Michael Straight (later owner and editor of The New Republic and chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts), an American who had studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, and who had become friends there with Blunt, Kim Philby, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess. Straight claimed that Blunt had tried to recruit him to become a Soviet spy. Arthur Martin and Jim Skardon had interviewed Blunt 11 times since 1951 but Blunt admitted nothing. Martin, now equipped with Straight’s story, went to see Blunt again and this time Blunt made a confession. Queen Elizabeth II was informed shortly thereafter. He admitted to being a Soviet agent and named John Cairncross, Peter Ashby, Brian Symon and Leo Long as spies he had recruited. In return for Blunt’s full confession, the British government agreed to keep his spying career an official secret for 15 years, plus immunity from prosecution. Martin himself was disappointed when it was discovered that MI5 Director-General Roger Hollis and Attorney General Sir John Hobson decided not to put Blunt on trial. He again argued that there was still a Soviet spy working at the centre of MI5, but Hollis thought Martin’s suggestion was highly damaging to the organization, and ordered Martin to be suspended from duty. In Peter Wright’s best-selling 1987 book Spycatcher, Wright argues that Hollis was the best fit for the possible Soviet spy in MI5.
Blunt’s role as a Soviet agent was exposed – albeit under a false name – in Andrew Boyle’s book, Climate of Treason in 1979 and he was publicly named by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the same year. Queen Elizabeth II stripped Blunt of his knighthood, and he was removed as an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College. Blunt is supposed to have fled the country after the public revelation and lived somewhere in southern Europe. However, he returned to London, but may not have fully realized the strength of feeling that had been whipped up against him until one day in February 1980, when he tried to see a film in Notting Hill, he was booed out of the cinema. That same month, his partner since 1953, John Gaskin, threw himself from a sixth-floor balcony but survived. Blunt died at his home in London in 1983.
Bletchley Park 