The queer men of H staircase

On the walls of the Senior Combination Room at King’s College, Cambridge, are a number of portraits, mainly of men. Among them is a striking painting of a handsome man with flowing blond locks partially hidden under a wide-brimmed hat. He is much younger than the others, having lost his life at the age of 27.

Rupert Brooke, the figure in the painting, came to King’s to study classics and would go on to become a Fellow at the college. He died in 1915, during the First World War while on his way to the landings at Gallipoli, having contracted sepsis from an infected mosquito bite. He was lauded as a national hero, one of our great poets, known most famously for his poem The Soldier, which begins:

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England

Brooke, alongside several of the other subjects depicted in paintings displayed prominently in King’s, is one of the characters who appears in Queer Cambridge, a new book by Simon Goldhill, Professor of Classics at King’s College.

Goldhill, it is clear, is not a fan.

“He was extremely unpleasant,” he says, shattering the myth that has built up around Brooke.

We will come back to this later.

Queer Cambridge, published by Cambridge University Press, is a fascinating, entertaining – and at times, shocking – account of a community of men whom we would today label as gay or bisexual, though for whom, when the book first picks up their stories, no such labels existed (the phrase homosexual did not appear in English until 1892).

What may surprise the reader, however, is that despite the book’s title – and the rich collection of characters within – nearly everyone featured is a Fellow or alumnus of King’s College.

Not only that, but a large number of them occupied one particular location in the college: H Staircase in the Gibbs Building.

Living and teaching quarters in traditional Oxbridge colleges tended to centre around the vertical, up staircases rather than along corridors, with rooms located either side, up a series of floors, each room with a number (Goldhill is in E5, for example).

‘People often feel very attached to these staircases, because of the intimacy of living so closely together with a few friends (or enemies),’ writes Goldhill in the introduction to his book. ‘In the imagination – and in reality – the staircase becomes a place where emotional memories are laid down, life choices made, friendships for life formed.’

Goldhill got the idea for his book when researching the celebrated Edwardian author Arthur Benson, who did his undergraduate studies at King’s and would go on to write the words for Land of Hope and Glory. Benson lived in H1 – as, too, Goldhill discovered, did two other men, both of whom we might now define as gay, one year either side of Benson.

A room with a view...

Goldhill originally conceived of a post for the college blog that he would call A room with a view, a nod to EM Forster, another notable King’s College alumnus (and homosexual). But the more he investigated, the more names he uncovered, not just on H staircase, but on others, too.

“There was really a whole community in King’s that was quite different from the sorts of stories that one knows about from gay history, usually involving many casual pickups, a lot of despair, a lot of hiding, a lot of misery,” he says.

Instead, this was a “rather happy community” that lived in the same place for many years together. “I thought that was an interesting story that was worth telling, how you could have a gay community in the centre of the British establishment in a period when it was illegal.”

In the late nineteenth century, when his story begins, the college was much smaller, accepting fewer than two dozen undergraduates a year, all male – and then, only boys who had studied at Eton, an environment Goldhill describes as “homosocial”, where boys were often more open to “romantic friendships”.

King’s became known as a place tolerant of men who love men, and this became something of “a self-fulfilling prophecy”, he says. When the college opened up to non-Etonians, it was seen as an attractive place by people from other public schools drawn by the possibility of such romantic friendships.

(This image of King’s persisted, he says, reflecting on how at his book launch, a professor who had studied at the college in the 1990s calculated that a third of the people in his accommodation block were probably gay.)

It was a time when people were more interested in who you were as a person than they were in defining you by what you did.

“How boring it is to label people according to whom they sleep with, rather than what they do,” he says. “It's much more interesting to think that you're a narcissistic and a selfish person who makes people cry. That's much more interesting than that you sleep with a man or woman.”

Heroes and villains

All of this created an atmosphere, a community, where individuals could flourish. The architect Charles Ashbee said that when he entered King’s (in 1883), the gates of Paradise opened before him. (Similar sentiments were expressed by the economist Dennis Robertson, who, despite being a Fellow of Trinity College, spent so much time with his lover at King’s that the porters thought he was one of theirs.)

Ashbee is one of the many characters in the book who would go on to make an indelible mark on the world. He was one of the leading figures behind the Garden City movement and became the first civic advisor in Jerusalem, where he rebuilt the medieval market, fitting it out with shops and small workrooms in order to enable a system of apprenticeships that could revivify the arts and crafts of the city.

“His beliefs about what would make a good world were based partly on beauty, which he learnt here in King's, a very beautiful place, and partly on socialism, which he also learnt here. And that turned into a physical part of a major city in the world.”

The book, of course, is not an exhaustive list of King’s queers, even during the periods he details, but Goldhill says that the individuals he features typify the impact made by King’s graduates and Fellows.

“An awful lot of them went out into the world and changed the world in their own fields because of who they were, not despite who they were. There are plenty of people who took that sense of alienation from society and the tolerance they found at King’s and tried to turn that into either a political programme, an artistic programme or cultural programme, to make the world a better place to live in.”

It's not by chance, he says, that Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson was involved in the foundation of the League of Nations, for example, and that Edward Dent, also involved with the League  of Nations, set up trans-European music festivals in the hope that music could bring people together.

Not everyone in the book is viewed so favourably by Goldhill, however.

“Quite a lot of them are horrid,” he says. “It's quite important to remember that someone like Rupert Brooke, who was very cute and much beloved, was also absolutely foul in his behaviour.”

Goldhill describes how Brooke set out “consciously and coldly to lose his virginity with a man for whom he felt nothing emotional”. At the time, Brooke also had a girlfriend, whom he “invited to Germany and then bullied into having sex”.

Viewed through a modern lens, Goldhill says, these sexual encounters look very much like assault or even rape. “He was extremely unpleasant, but it's extremely hard to shift the floppy haired, blond image.”

There are descriptions, too, of the economist John Maynard Keynes keeping ledgers of his list of lovers and the acts he committed with them, ‘a dispassionate account of sex’, writes Goldhill.

“He treats his pickups like he does his shares, you know. He tries to make maximum profit.” (Virginia Woolf, who knew several of the characters in Goldhill’s book, was also not kind, describing Keynes as ‘a gorged seal… brutal, unimaginative’.)

Be who you want to be

While the outside world would become increasingly hostile towards homosexual men, the walls of King’s provided a shelter, a protective environment. One of the anecdotes in the book tells of Boris Ord, who as Director of Music was responsible for making King’s College choir what it is today. Ord was arrested for trying to pick up a man in a public toilet in Bristol. Although he escaped prosecution, it would no doubt have been humiliating.

Goldhill picks up the tale. “He came back to King’s, back to high table, and walked into the room. There was total silence. You would think that was an indication that everyone was thinking, ‘Oh my god, there’s a gay criminal amongst us’. But the silence was broken by another Fellow saying, ‘Oh don't worry, Boris old fellow, it could have happened to any one of us!’”

The sense that you could be yourself, and you were respected for who you were, is captured in a description given by the classicist Sir John Tresidder Sheppard, Provost of King’s from 1933-54, in a paper given to the Apostles, a Cambridge intellectual society notorious for its overt homosexuality. Sheppard said that at King’s, “We care for what we call ‘character’; I think we care for it more than intellect”. (Goldhill is withering about the paper, though, describing it as ‘not a talk to support the belief that the Apostles represented the cream of Cambridge intellects’.)

There is one particular juxtaposition in the book that drives home the contrast between the tolerant atmosphere at King’s and the hostility met by those outside its walls: the stories of Frank Adcock and Alan Turing.

Adcock was a historian, Turing a mathematician. Both were Fellows at King’s when they were enlisted to work as cryptologists at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. Their work – in particular, that of Turing – was crucial to the Allied victory.

Adcock remained at King’s for sixty years. He would often be seen walking around the college grounds with his fellow homosexuals. Turing, on the other hand, left Cambridge to take up a research post at the University of Manchester. Perhaps used to the openness at King’s, Turing seems to have thought little about living with a man whom he had met on the street. When his house was burgled by an acquaintance of his lover, the police were less interested in the burglary than they were in what Turing got up to in bed. Turing was arrested, convicted of gross indecency and offered the choice of jail or chemical castration. He chose the latter, lost his security clearance, was denied entry to the United States, and shortly afterwards was found dead from eating an apple dipped in cyanide, his death determined as suicide.

“All of this because he basically said what would have been perfectly normal in King’s,” Goldhill points out. “The sort of thing you could say at high table at King’s ended up in suicide, if you said it in Manchester.”

A different time

Times have, fortunately, changed: in 1967, homosexuality was decriminalised for men over 21 years old (though for several decades police aggressively pursued even consensual encounters between men of legal age); the age of consent has since been equalised; and same sex couples can now get married and enjoy the same legal recognition and protections as heterosexual couples.

But in some ways, says Goldhill, this has come at a price. When he first came to King’s fifty years ago, there was “a genuine sense of exploration, experimentation, and politicisation of what was going on. The sense that it was both transgressive and was likely to cause havoc was revelled in, celebrated.”

Once homosexuality became legal, widely accepted and more open, so the sense of precise community faded away, and with it “the need to be obviously outrageous, to go really hard against the grain while pretending with great insouciance that it was normal.”

Goldhill is not naïve in how he views the queer community of old at King’s – the fact that many of the relationships he uncovered while researching the book involved undergraduates and Fellows, which would be considered unacceptable today, and that when the college began opening up to women, the gay ‘cliques’ could be unwelcoming or even openly hostile to their female peers. But it was a world where, he says, it was “actually quite hard to be homophobic if you're living around a load of people you like, who are gay.”

He finishes with an anecdote told to him recently by someone who, in the 1990s, was a graduate student helping with the college’s fundraising campaign. She called one alumnus who had studied at King’s in 1948 and was from a military family, “dead posh” as she described him.

“She phoned him up and said, ‘Hello, I'm from King’s. I'm raising money for the college’,” relates Goldhill. “And he said, ‘King’s, huh? Is it still full of queers?’ She said ‘Oh yes.’ ‘Right’, he said, and gave her a hundred thousand quid on the spot. Which is not the end of the story you expect!”