DWYER - LAYE

FAMILY HISTORY

Cunynghame Dwyer: 
Last Update 17 May 2003    

 
Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess
     
Born: Devonport, Devon, England 1911.  Died 30 Aug 1963, Moscow, Russia

 
"There is no doubt that Burgess presented, in the late 1930's, the very image of the well-educated young man in England. He was, when sober, a charming, witty, handsome fellow who made brilliant conversation and always played to the person with whom he was speaking. He had an instinct of when to say precisely the right thing."  ( See below: Guy Francis De Moncy Burgess     Soviet Spy Against Britain  (1911 - 1963).
 


      

Poor Burgess seems to have been guided at the deepest level by the cruel muse of failure. He is one of the great instructive  and human wrecks . .  . What begins as brilliant youth can easily sink into some awful region between the second and third ranks, the anonymous place where so often even the best of the quite good sinks and drifts forever. In 1931, it was generally assumed that Guy would become one of the great academics of his era. Given how Burgess ended bleary, sentimental, slobbering it is difficult to grasp how many serious people thought Guy Burgess the youth one of the most brilliant, compelling, promising human beings they had ever met.
      Review by Joseph T Major of DOUBLE LIVES: Spies and   Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas Against the West  by Stephen Koch (Free Press:1994)
http://members.iglou.com/jtmajor/2Lives.htm Double Lives 197. 

  

Burgess continued to drink heavily. His once chiseled handsome face became bloated. He took on weight and seemed to want to talk of his native country. He obviously missed all things British. Miserable at having to live inside a puritanical state, Burgess drank himself to death on August 30, 1963


   
When Guy Burgess defected to Russia with Donald Maclean in 1951, all he packed was his dinner jacket, an overcoat which belonged to Jackie Hewit (Anthony Blunt’s boyfriend at that time), much to Mr Hewit’s fury, and his collected edition of Jane Austen!  
    From Anthony Blunt – His Lives by Miranda Carter

              
Guy Francis de Moncy BURGESS , entered Royal Naval College at Dartmouth at an early age, leaving  abruptly for Eton graduating from there in 1930. He went on to Cambridge, and at Trinity College, fell in with the left-wing set, the sons of well-to-do men who got drunk at posh clubs almost every night toasting the lower classes and vowing that Communism was the only salvation for the oppressed of the earth .Burgess was a BBC broadcaster, an agent in the M.I.6., secretary to Deputy Foreign   Minister Hector McNeil, the British Foreign Office secretary.  In brief: he was a KGB, a double agent.      Burgess seemed to know everyone, the Rothchilds, Churchill, Muggeridge, Auden, Spender, Neville Chamberlain and more. "As war approached, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who had also been interviewed by Burgess, entrusted the BBC commentator with secret dispatches which he clandestinely delivered to French leader Edouard Daladier and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Chamberlain had hoped that these secret messages would help avert the war that Adolf Hitler so eagerly sought. They did not. But  Burgess's act gained him a job as a British spy.  British Intelligence had no idea he was already working for the Russians."  
Evelyn Burgess married Naval Officer Lt Commander Malcolm Kingsforth Burgess, son of Col. Burgess, Royal Artillery.   Her maiden name was Evelyn Gillman. The Gillman family is very much tied in with the Dwyer family in England, descendents of Robert Hoare Dwyer.  He is hence what I call, "Our outlaw/inlaw." 
 
He had a brother: Nigel G. K. BURGESS, Drama Club at Cambridge 

 


CAMBRIDGE  ALUMNI  
                                                                              
BLUNT Elected a Trinity fellow 1932).    MACLEAN attended Trinity Hall    PHILBY Trinity October 1929
                                                                                  
                                                                  BURGESS Trinity October 1930        

Many movies, plays and books have been written about Burgess. Why are all sympathetic? I believe that people are more concerned with style than with black and white facts. Outrageous, drunken,  predatory homosexual and a turncoat is good drama.  Villians may be villians, but they must not bore.
 Blunt: The Fouth Man (1985) (UK-TV/Drama) Anthony Hopkins as Burgess. About the Philby/Burgess/MacLean spy scandal (and the "fourth man") that stunned Britain in 1951.  [Excellent]
    
 
 
AN ENGLISHMAN ABROAD (1983)
 Alan Bates as Burgess and Coral Browne playing herself  [I thought she was a bit old for the part].
The mirror crack'd from side to side;
"The curse is come upon me," cried
The Lady of Shalott.  
 Burgess recites this and more of  Tennyson poem
 climbing up his stairs with Coral Browne. 

 .                     


Single Spies by Alan Bennett:  Editorial Reviews From Library Journal
Bennet is best known as a member of the quartet (along with Dudley Moore, Peter Cook, and Jonathan Miller) responsible for the comedically influential London and Broadway revue Beyond the Fringe . "An Englishman Abroad" and "A Question of Attribution," the two one-act plays here which comprise Single Spies, concern, respectively, Guy Burgess, a Foreign Office diplomat, and (Sir) Anthony Blunt, an eminent art historian and former Keeper of the Royal Pictures, both spies recruited by the KGB during World War II. The resultant juxtaposition is an interesting portrait of the traitor in exile (Burgess) and a metaphorical discussion between critic (Blunt) and monarch concerning art forgery. The six monologs of Talking Heads, originally written for television, are all delightfully quirky; the abundance of British idioms and expressions may thwart North American readers. For all libraries actively collecting 20th-century British playscripts.    - Barry Miller, Austin P.L., Tex.  Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Another Country 1982    The play                 Colin Firth as Guy Bennett 
 
                                           

Colin Firth belongs to a group of actors who's career were all rocket-launched by one work [the play Another Country - between the play and the film, Another Country introduced audiences to Colin Firth, Rupert Everett, Daniel Day Lewis, and Kenneth Branagh. Firth was the only one of this quartet deemed adaptable enough to play both lead roles: on stage he was Bennett, the incipient traitor; in the film he switched to Judd


                                               
Christopher Webber as Guy Burgess        Clive Francis in An Englishman Abroad   Northcott Theatre in Exeter                                         as Guy Burgess with Prunella Scales as Corale Browne.
                      
                                                                  
          

                     Robert Powell and Liza Goddard in An Englishman Abroad