Ian Maclean was born in 1908, followed by Andrew in 1910, then Donald Duart (known by his parents as “Teento,” for “Teeny Don”) in 1913, Nancy in 1918 and, when Sir Donald (as he had become for his work in the House of Commons during the First World War) was sixty and Lady Maclean forty-four, their fourth son, Alan Duart, in 1924. The expanding family and their cook, parlourmaid, housemaid, nanny and nursery-maid moved into a stuccoed five-storey house at 6 Southwick Place, Bayswater. The house, with its porticoed entrance and gloomy interiors, was just on the north side of Hyde Park, close to Paddington Station for Sir Donald’s visits to his business in Cardiff and to his constituency, which by then was North Cornwall.
The Macleans also bought Elm Cottage in the village of Penn, in Buckinghamshire’s Chiltern Hills. The largely eighteenth-century house had three-quarters of an acre of land, an orchard, a vegetable garden and rosebeds, which the children weeded and pruned during their weekends there. Penn, about twenty-five miles from London, was true to the Quaker foundation that had sent William Penn from there to found the state of Pennsylvania in the seventeenth century; whether or not this influenced the Macleans in their choice of country retreat, Sir Donald did not relax his religious principles there: Ian got into very hot water with his father when he saw “God First” painted on the wall and told villagers that it was announcing the result of a bicycle race. Their summer holidays were spent in Cornwall and carried on the same routine of daily prayers and healthy endeavour.
The senior Macleans (Sir Donald’s mother, speaking Gaelic as her first language, also lived with them until her death in 1924) led blameless lives. He worked “soundly and sweet-temperedly” in Parliament, promoting free trade and improving the lot of his less fortunate countrymen. In the occasional periods when he did not have a seat, Sir Donald was a diligent solicitor, charity campaigner and committee man, as well as a lay preacher.
Religion was always at the centre of family life, claustrophobically so for his children. Sir Donald, in his frock coat and grey silk hat, led his family every Sunday to the Presbyterian church in Marylebone to hear about grace through faith and the absolute sovereignty of God. J. M. Barrie wrote in The Times after Sir Donald’s death that “You did not know him at all unless you knew his religion. He was in London as much a Scotch Presbyterian as though he had never left his native Tiree. He was an elder of the Church and in his home held that ‘family exercise’ in which a Scottish household is seen at its best.” These family prayers were one of young Donald’s strongest memories: enforced daily service to a God one could not believe in would be a good working discipline for when he had formed his own views.
Donald saw his father as a “middle-aged martinet” and “a harsh man.” He was fixed in his ways, Victorian in style and unbending in his outlook, insisting on the highest and purest standards of probity. He was clear that his sons’ privileged start in life meant the offices where they could do most good were easily attainable by them if they worked hard and looked to their morals. There were rows when Ian and Andrew crashed back into the “teetotal fold” in the small hours after late-night parties. Drinking was a source of deep shame in Sir Donald’s eyes. His middle son took this in at an impressionable age, and made increasingly vain attempts to keep his consumption under control until it became mired in his own profound shame and ultimately overwhelmed him. When Sir Donald had reached the peak of his career towards the end of his life he became a “doting old parent” to his two youngest children. Teento was in the middle of these two groups, able to forge his own beliefs unseen behind the paired older boys and their battles, neither the girl nor the baby of the family; the clever one they did not have to worry about, but also the one who had to feel his way, watchful without drawing attention to himself, finding his own outlets for his inherited conscience. Paradoxically, young Donald, who found his father and “his principles daunting,” absorbed so thoroughly “his passionate belief that you did what you thought was right at all costs” that he too became “a genuine political animal.”
The two Donalds felt the same “vehement sense of rectitude” and saw the world in terms of clearly defined certainties which they both acted upon consistently. When Alan and young Donald were sharing a bedroom and recovering from flu, they spent hours playing soldiers together on the floor of their room, the five-year-old Alan trying to ensure that the glorious Highlanders always beat the ragged sepoys ranged against them, the teenage Donald playing for the opposite result. When the younger boy complained that this did not seem to be the way things were in real life, his elder brother said, “Why shouldn’t the Indians win? After all. It’s their country.” Even as a pillar of the diplomatic corps, Donald could be provoked to unstatesmanlike rage by a chance derogatory remark that violated his personal moral codes and the rights of those without a voice. He carried his father’s moral imprint deep within him for the rest of his life.
*
After a few years at St Mary’s College in Lancaster Gate, near the family’s London home, Maclean went at the age of ten to Gresham’s School, Holt, isolated just outside a picturesque Georgian town on the far eastern edge of England. The great and misnamed “public” schools that nurtured the British elite—Eton, Harrow, Winchester, Marlborough and the rest—tended to be within easy reach of London. Alongside this geographical difference, the school had developed a unique ethos that set it even further apart from its rivals, and made it the perfect psychological training-ground for a nascent spy.
W. H. Auden wrote shortly after leaving Gresham’s that he thought its disciplinary code had been the most “potent engine” for turning his schoolmates into “remote introverts, for perpetuating those very faults of character which it was intended to cure.” It meant that “the whole of our moral life was based on fear, on fear of the community, not to mention the temptation it offered to the natural informer, and fear is not a healthy basis.” If Maclean had absorbed from his home life the need to follow his conscience, but not its spiritual corollary of openness, his education at the same school as Auden gave him the ability to turn himself inwards, to live as a high achiever for both the country that he loved and the country with the system he would crave. He turned out to be such a natural keeper and supplier of secrets himself that he was able to maintain his two lives in balance for decades, until the division between them, and not being sufficiently recognised in one of them, became too much for him to bear.
*
Most of the schools of the time emphasised sport and the classics, promoted Christianity of the Anglican sort and produced men to run the country and Empire that were theirs by inheritance. These attributes did not fit with the more radically non-conformist outlook of the Macleans, and when the time came to choose a school for their eldest son Ian, they took the advice of Dr Gillie, the minister of the Presbyterian church in Marylebone, to send him to Gresham’s. Until 1900 the sixteenth-century foundation had mainly served the sons of local clergymen and merchants in the prosperous farmlands of East Anglia, under the motto “All worship be God.” In one measure used to judge a school’s academic standing, between 1858 and 1900 it had sent a mere twenty-four pupils to Cambridge, and three to further-off Oxford. In 1900, by which time the number of pupils had fallen to an unsustainable fifty and the fabric of the school was in disrepair, a new headmaster, G. W. S. Howson, took charge.
Howson and his successor from 1919, J. R. Eccles, changed Gresham’s into a forward-looking school that would attract the sons and grandsons of some of the leading liberal thinkers of the time, including those of C. P. Scott of the Guardian, Walter Layton of the Economist, the Presbyterian John Reith, first Director General of the BBC, the Liberal MP and future Chairman of the BBC Ernest Simon, Erskine Childers, executed Irish nationalist and author of The Riddle of the Sands, and Sir Donald Maclean, MP. The school also fostered a remarkable artistic roll-call of alumni in this period that included Stephen and Humphrey Spender, W. H. Auden and Benjamin Britten; and some notable scientists and engineers, among
them the future Nobel laureate Alan Hodgkin and the inventor of the hovercraft, Christopher Cockerell. In 1932 alone, the year after Donald Maclean left the school, fifty-seven former pupils went to Cambridge and twenty-one to Oxford. By the time of Donald’s arrival in 1923, it was the school of choice for those of a progressive outlook who recognised the educational needs of a changing world. Ian had passed through the school in exemplary fashion, becoming head boy before going to Cambridge and eventually starting work without much enthusiasm in their father’s law firm. The next brother, Andy, had difficulty adjusting to the school, and was withdrawn after a bout of pneumonia just as Donald, his junior by three years, started to outshine him.
The curriculum was modernised to concentrate on the sciences and modern languages rather than the classics, and Greek was abandoned altogether. Caning was abolished far ahead of most schools, and punishments instead involved the more wholesome essays, being “off jam” or runs of three or four miles. After the First World War the school was the first of the public schools to become a member of the League of Nations Union, reflecting a more modern outlook that valued negotiation over conflict and debate over bloodshed—lessons the future diplomat took to heart. Gresham’s developed a culture far removed from the hierarchical outlook of the more traditional schools, in effect creating an environment in which pupils were able to work out their own beliefs and were more inclined to join the professions or, a significant attraction to the liberal parents of the new pupils, become committed public servants. Charles Trevelyan, the first Labour Minister of Education, gave the Speech Day address in 1924, and the hidebound Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, A. C. Benson, reported that “he made a vulgar attack on the old Public Schools—and rejoiced that the blue-blooded land-owning aristocratic product was down in the market . . . He spoke idealistically and with some passion and impressed the boys . . . ”
But what really set Gresham’s apart from its competitors, other than geography, was the “Honour System.” The headmaster spoke to new pupils “of truth, and frankness, and honour; of purity in thought, and word, and deed; of the value and importance of hard work and honest work.” Each boy then took a private oath to him and separately to his housemaster by which he promised:
1. Always to avoid impurity.
2. Always to confess the truth to the Headmaster.
3. Always to refrain from smoking.
“Impurity” in this context meant “dirty talk or masturbation,” impracticable in the extreme in a school of teenage boys, particularly those brought up in a rigid environment focused on the suppression of “vices” such as alcohol and tobacco. To help promote purity in deed, all the boys’ trouser pockets were sewn up; purity in thought was a different matter altogether. The notion behind the system was “liberty based on loyalty or freedom founded upon trust,” but the most troubling rider to the oath encouraged anything but loyalty and trust: if you didn’t turn yourself in, or couldn’t be persuaded to do so by your schoolfellows, one of them could do it for you.
Gresham’s was proud of its Honour System. Bullying and homosexuality (and presumably swearing, smoking and smut) were rarer than in other public schools as a result of the system’s strictures, but the consequences of its imposition are psychologically troubling, as Auden made clear—not least in encouraging the betrayal of one’s schoolmates. The gap between the rules and the way boys actually are meant that the official morality was unworkable. It led to a high rate of anxiety and often breakdown among the pupils, to an obsession with secrecy, to the burying of true and open selves and to the repression of emotions. For a boy who kept himself to himself as much as young Donald did, a third son with two brothers to draw the heat, able to keep his head below the parapet, the system was a continuation of his home life under Sir Donald: he could adhere to strict codes without subscribing to them himself, and hide any duplicity and resentment behind successful conformity. He made the transition to boarding school effortlessly.
Even in those earliest days of psychological study, the consequences of the repression of sexual exploration inculcated through such a process of tale-telling as the Honour System, particularly for those coming at an impressionable age to such an unnatural school environment from more old-fashioned homes, were disregarded. Such shame and confusion as Maclean may later in his life have felt in his attitudes to sex and to the secrecy surrounding his drinking are as deeply embedded in his schooldays as in his home life.
Eric Berthoud was at Gresham’s before Maclean. As Sir Eric, a distinguished ambassador, he wrote from his posting to highlight the danger of the Honour System for boys emerging into adulthood. Berthoud claimed that he had always “felt that the psychological background for Maclean’s ultimate mental disequilibrium,” as his actions were seen by the fearful, incredulous establishment of the 1950s, “should be sought in his school background . . . It might be worth someone discussing Maclean’s evolution at the school with J. R. Eccles . . . a bachelor of very rigid views.” Berthoud described how he had been beaten in front of the whole school for an unspecified “breach of trust and honour” and carried the scars throughout his outwardly successful life. An earlier alumnus than Berthoud, John Reith, said that the system “upset his relations with women for years afterwards.” Keeping oneself hidden, learning to bury one’s natural urges, could only have repercussions in later life.
*
The galvanic political event of Maclean’s schooldays was the General Strike of 1926, with its accompanying excitement and hope for the left, and fear of revolution for the right. Mine owners’ proposals to reduce miners’ pay (which had almost halved in the previous seven years) and impose longer hours of work led to protracted negotiations between the government and the unions; final talks broke down when the printers of the Daily Mail refused to print an editorial condemning the strike as “a revolutionary movement intended to inflict suffering upon the great mass of innocent persons in the community and thereby to put forcible constraint upon the Government.” The Trades Union Congress, in support of the miners, called a General Strike. For nine days there was no transport and no press; local committees of trade unionists controlled the distribution of food and power. The army was patrolling the streets, with armoured cars in London’s main shopping artery, Oxford Street. Upper-class volunteers registered for work at their Mayfair clubs, manned soup kitchens, enlisted as special constables and helped out in the docks. Some members of this “thug militia of St James’s Street,” comprising “bands of young, steel-helmeted clubmen,” went on to have Damascene conversions to socialism as their eyes were opened for the first time to the conditions in which most of their countrymen worked. These included the artist Wogan Philipps, who was moved towards Communism by the plight of the strikers he met while working as a special mounted constable in the London docks. Sir Donald, a strong advocate for freedom of both thought and trade, spoke strenuously against the strike in the House of Commons, just as he consistently voted against loans for Soviet Russia. His two eldest sons, both still at Gresham’s, volunteered: Ian Maclean took a job as a railway porter, Andrew as a delivery boy.
The Communist Party saw the strike as “the greatest revolutionary advance in Britain since the days of Chartism, and the sure prelude to a new revolutionary era,” although ultimately it did little more than preserve the status quo and banish the spectre of a Bolshevik revolution in Britain. But the sight of the strikers, the alarming news coverage of the parts of the country that came to a standstill and the divisions between workers and masters all impressed themselves upon the minds of the young and inquisitive. It prepared the way for Communism to flourish in the radical political decade to come and, for a boy searching for a banner to follow, signalled the first notes of the call to arms.
*
Maclean’s closest friendship during his time at the school was not based on his games prowess or mutual sexual attraction but on academic compatibility. Above all, he was searching for the peg on which to fix his conscience, formed larg
ely by his father, for he sensed that the Honour System had no workable morality. He was not easily given to making friends at any stage in his life, but at the age of twelve, the cat that was already walking alone, he was gangly and awkward, and had not yet developed his polished good looks. His height and shyness sometimes made him appear “supercilious and reserved” to others. His school friendship with James Klugmann, his first exposure to an ideologically kindred spirit, was the most formative of his life, even though it would last less than a decade.
Norman John (known as James from his teens) Klugmann was in his last term at the Hall School in Hampstead at the time of the strike, heading for Gresham’s the following September. He wrote a poem, “On the Lower Fourth Debating Society,” which satirised those who spoke against the unions:
A Spy Named Orphan Page 2
