The longest journey: EM Forster’s stolen nameplate comes home to King’s after 56 years

For 56 years, it has been an unsolved mystery, involving a midnight raid on a Cambridge college, a screwdriver and a famous author’s stolen nameplate.

When porters at King’s College discovered that the nameplate that was screwed on to the door of EM Forster’s rooms for 24 years had been stolen the day after he died, they had no clue who had taken it.

But they might well have suspected the culprit had hatched the cunning plan in the college bar.

Now, more than half a century later, the nameplate for “Mr Forster” has been returned by the recalcitrant student thief – now in his 70s.

The man, who wishes to remain anonymous, confessed to the crime and handed over the stolen loot at a college reunion earlier this year. He was said to have been “proud” he had “preserved” the plate for posterity.

The plot to carry out the “somewhat irrational” heist was forged while he was “drowning his sorrows” with his friends in the bar, shortly after hearing the news of Forster’s death on 7 June 1970 at the age of 91.

Forster, the author of the much-adapted novels A Room with a View, Howards End and A Passage to India, lived at the college for the last 24 years of his life as an honorary fellow.

He first studied classics and then history at King’s, which he attended from 1897 to 1901, and moved back into college accommodation in 1946 as a celebrated writer, aged 67, after his mother, Alice, died near the end of the second world war.

Prof Nicolette Zeeman, keeper of the college collections, said Forster – who was gay – felt at home at King’s, which has “a long tradition of being very tolerant of homosexuality, that runs right back into the 19th century”. Even though homosexuality was illegal at the time, other fellows were openly gay.

“As it was for Alan Turing,” she said, referring to the mathematician and cryptographer who helped to crack the Nazis’ Enigma code, “the college was a place where people who were gay felt comfortable and welcomed – I’m sure that’s part of the reason why Forster came here.”

While residing in a three-room suite overlooking the chapel, he revised his novel Maurice, which he began writing in 1913 and that became a queer literary classic when it was published posthumously in 1971. But Zeeman said he did not teach students, mostly enjoying “being in his rooms and in King’s collegiate community of fellows”. She added: “He did have a room with a view.”

It was a small but unforgettable act of kindness on Forster’s part that motivated the theft of the nameplate as a “souvenir”, the culprit confessed.

He revealed he had once approached Forster and asked him to sign a copy of his collected short stories after enjoying reading The Machine Stops, a prescient tale of a technological apocalypse that Forster wrote in 1909.

“One afternoon, I approached him as he was sitting in Webb’s Court [inside King’s] and asked him to sign it, which he did most courteously. The book remains a treasured possession,” he said.

He learned of Forster’s death in a location where students – even those clever enough to get into Cambridge – rarely make their best decisions: the college bar.

“After my final exams, in early June 1970, I spent an evening – or several – in the college bar with friends,” he said. “‘Drowning our sorrows’ might rightly characterise the mood. Mention was made that Mr Forster had just died and, somewhat irrationally, a plan was hatched on how the doorplate on Mr Forster’s room might be preserved for posterity.

“To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure that thought was uppermost in our minds. As if by magic, a suitable screwdriver was produced and the doorplate was removed.

“After graduation, I went home and took with me – somewhat to my surprise – the doorplate from Mr Forster’s room.”

In the intervening 56 years, the plate has been kept in various boxes labelled “souvenirs”, he said, adding that he was “proud that I had preserved it for so long”.

Zeeman said the college was “delighted – and somewhat amused” to have it back. “It’s rather touching that he kept it all these years.”

The three rooms the author lived in are being renamed the EM Forster Suite, to mark the anniversary of Forster’s death on Sunday. “Our plan is to have it on display there... somewhere near the door and probably fix it to the wall. Nothing is completely safe, but I think that’s a risk worth taking,” said Zeeman.

The thief managed to avoid a long-overdue rebuke from the college provost, and there was no need for a getaway punt to leave the college’s hallowed grounds after his reunion. “[I am] grateful that it was so unquestioningly accepted,” the elderly alumnus said.

The screwdriver remains unaccounted for.

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Photograph shows EM Forster in his King’s College sitting room. Taken by Edward Leigh, 1968, courtesy of the provost and fellows of King’s College, Cambridge