‘L. F.’ was undoubtedly Sir Edward Lionel Fletcher, Liuba Hicks’ new husband. Fletcher was rather older than Liuba – a retired maritime engineer, member of a wealthy shipping family and naval reserve officer who had been manager of the White Star Line (it was probably through the late Will Hicks’ post with Cunard that Fletcher and Liuba had become acquainted). They had married in April 1936; Moura had been at the wedding, naturally, and at the huge reception given afterwards at 15 Wilton Crescent.6 Liuba was also incidentally a mutual friend of Air Vice Marshal Collier and Maurice Dayet.
A meeting was arranged between British intelligence and Maurice Dayet, who confirmed that what had been written in Collier’s letter was true; he added that Moura had been on the French security blacklist and that he believed her to be a ‘letter box’ acting for the Russians. Her role was to pass on snippets of information that she thought would interest them. However, Dayet did not believe her to be anti-English.
Despite all the whispers, there wasn’t enough hard evidence against Baroness Budberg to warrant an arrest. She remained under surveillance by both British and French security services.
Notes and reports accumulated in Moura’s file. A later Special Branch report stated that in 1936 and 1937 she had been observed having regular night-time meetings with an unknown man in the Suffolk seaside resort of Felixstowe.7 The town was rather fashionable at the time – in the autumn of 1936 Wallis Simpson rented a house there while waiting for the outcome of her divorce. The King frequently visited her by plane. She complained that the house was very small and the out of season town too quiet for her liking. Moura knew Wallis and Edward through Lockhart, so she might well have visited them while she was there. She might even have been gathering and passing on information about the development of Britain’s looming constitutional crisis. The town had a regular railway service so she would have found it quite easy to make the trip up from London.
There might have been a more banal reason for her visits. She was still conducting her affair with Constantine Benckendorff, who lived a few miles from Felixstowe, at Lime Kiln, Claydon.
Another fact about Moura came to light during the 1930s, when MI5 obtained a Russian document describing her activities in 1918 as a double agent for the Russian Bolsheviks and the Skoropadskyi regime in the Ukraine. The same source revealed that from 1927 to 1929 she had continued spying on the exiled members of the Hetmanate in Berlin, using her sister Assia’s husband as a source.8
As war in Europe loomed, MI5 believed they detected another German connection in Baroness Budberg’s activities. She had become acquainted with the ex-Nazi defector Ernst Hanfstaengl, an American-educated German businessman who had been foreign press officer for the Nazi Party and a long-time friend of Adolf Hitler. By 1937 his lack of steely commitment to the Nazi cause and his unguarded comments about Nazi leaders caused Hanfstaengl to fall out with Goebbels and lose Hitler’s confidence. His post was abolished and, sensing that the end was nigh, Hanfstaengl quickly defected to Britain in March 1937.
On 29 December that year, MI5 intercepted a letter from Louis P. Lochner, the American pacifist journalist, who was one of Moura’s many publishing contacts from her Berlin days (he was director of the Berlin bureau of the Associated Press and a colleague of Paul Scheffer). The letter was addressed to Hanfstaengl and suggested that he should make contact with Moura, describing her as a ‘very clever Russian’. He gave Hanfstaengl her London telephone number.9 A year later, in December 1938, Lochner wrote to Hanfstaengl again, mentioning that Moura had been to Estonia. He asked Hanfstaengl if he knew when ‘the grand show’ was due to start.
According to the MI5 summary, this letter also made reference to a visit that had been paid by Karl Bodenschatz, a Luftwaffe officer, to Hanfstaengl in London in spring 1937.10 According to Hanfstaengl’s own later account, Bodenschatz had been sent by Goering with a promise that he could resume his former post with his original staff. But with war looming, Hanfstaengl didn’t fancy the idea, and declined.11 The motive for Goering’s proposal was reported in the United States, but not apparently in Britain: when Hanfstaengl arrived in London it had been rumoured that he intended to write a memoir entitled ‘Why I Joined Hitler and Why I Left Him’. The Nazi leadership were desperate to stop him. He was invited by Bodenschatz to a meeting at the German Embassy in London, but ‘on the advice of his lawyer declined to attend,’ said one newspaper report. ‘Later it was learned that all preparations had been made to seize him and take him into Germany.’12
Hanfstaengl’s book, had it been published, would have been immensely powerful anti-Nazi propaganda. Paul Scheffer and Louis Lochner would have been keen to help it come about, and Moura would have the contacts to help it happen. But for reasons unknown, it didn’t surface.
While suspicions darkened in Whitehall and war approached, Moura’s personal life carried on as it had for years.
She was now living semi-permanently in London. She and H. G. had settled into their relationship, having both accepted their respective roles. He accepted (reluctantly) that she would never marry him and never be his permanent companion, and she accepted (quite contentedly) his intermittent sideshows with other women.
In 1937, after a holiday with both Moura and Constance Coolidge, Wells went to the South of France to stay with Somerset Maugham. He was suffering from neuritis in his right arm, possibly caused by his diabetes, which had been giving him a great deal of pain.
The emotional pain that Moura had caused him (or rather that he had inflicted on himself through her) seemed to have subsided at last. H. G. commented that ‘Moura remains what she is; rather stouter, rather greyer, sometimes tiresome, oftener charming and close and dear’. By 1938 he was noting that ‘Moura is Moura as ever; human, faulty, wise, silly, and I love her’.13
She continued to see Lockhart. He was now a single man. In 1937 Jean had finally reached the end of her tolerance; she left him and began divorce proceedings. Her lawyers combed Lockhart’s published memoirs, taking note of all the references to his romance with Moura. Lockhart discussed it with her over lunch, though Moura had heard the gossip already. She was more interested in the fact that the writer Aleksei Tolstoy, who had arrived in London for the National Congress of Peace and Friendship with the USSR (an event sponsored by Britain’s left-leaning writers and politicians), was in a constant state of terror, accompanied everywhere he went by a ‘Cheka man’.14
Lockhart’s career path had changed again. He had been writing the regular ‘Atticus’ column in the Sunday Times, but had been persuaded to return to the Foreign Office after an absence of more than twelve years. With the start of the war he joined the Political Warfare Executive, and soon became its head. He was responsible for radio broadcasts, leaflet drops, postcards and documents designed to lift the morale of people in German-occupied countries and lower morale of the Germans.
If Moura still harboured hopes that Lockhart, free of his wife, might finally give himself to her completely, she didn’t show it. They continued to dine regularly, often consuming too much food and alcohol. Moura passed him titbits of information for use in his gossip column and later in his propaganda work, for Moura still had strong and regular links to the Baltic and to Russia. But by late 1937, when she returned from a trip to Estonia, Lockhart realised that since Gorky’s death and the arrest of Yagoda, she had been ‘cut off’ by the Bolsheviks. She was concerned about the show trials, which were sweeping up people she knew who were still in the country, and feared that Lockhart’s old acquaintance Maxim Litvinov might be the next to fall.15 Everyone was watching their back. Perhaps that was the reason for Aleksei Tolstoy’s terror during his visit to London. (If so, he had no need to fear – his star was rising, with appointment to the newly created Supreme Soviet.)
Wells too was concerned about what was going on in Russia. His friends Beatrice and Sidney Webb had written a book, Soviet Communism, in which they gave their view that the ultimate result of the Moscow trials would be a better civilisati
on in Russia. Many left-wing writers in Britain shared this opinion. Wells, who had seen Stalin in the flesh, was not so optimistic. He wrote to Beatrice, saying that although both he and Moura largely agreed with Beatrice’s assessment of the situation, they felt she was underestimating the personal power of Stalin. What everyone agreed on at the time was that Stalin’s reconstructed Soviet Union was a new and better order, which needed to be preserved at almost any cost.
In 1938 the Moscow trials intensified. Kriuchkov, Gorky’s secretary and former member of the Kronverksky commune, was tried for his alleged role in Gorky’s death, and was executed by firing squad in March. The file on Kriuchkov included a list of eight people who had been compromised by him.
Moura’s name was on the list.
It said that she had been a ‘participant in an anti-soviet Rightist organisation’.16 A reference to her relationship with Scheffer, perhaps, and his alleged anti-Soviet work for the Nazis. Of the eight people on the list, seven were arrested and put to death. Moura was the only survivor. She was also the only one living in London, but that needn’t have been sufficient protection. Two years later, the NKVD went all the way to Mexico to assassinate Trotsky. And Moura was a frequent traveller; it would have been quite simple to arrest or kill her in Estonia. And yet nothing was done. There may be many explanations, not least the fact that some of Gorky’s archive was still in her keeping. Or perhaps, as in 1918 and 1921, the Soviet regime concluded that her value outweighed her alleged crimes.
On 21 February 1940 The Times carried a small notice in its Forthcoming Marriages column:
MR B. G. ALEXANDER AND MISS T. BENCKENDORFF
The engagement is announced between Bernard G. Alexander . . . and Tatiana von Benckendorff, daughter of Baroness Marie Budberg, 11, Ennismore Gardens, London, S.W., and the late Johan von Benckendorff, Jendel, Estonia.17
Moura hadn’t liked the look of Bernard Alexander when Tania introduced him to her. ‘He is intelligent,’ Moura admitted, ‘but he is not for you. He has a cold analytical lawyer’s mind and a temperament too different from yours.’18 Bernard was a newly qualified barrister, the son of a textile tycoon. Smitten by Tania in London, he had pursued her to Tallinn and holidayed with her at Kallijärv. Tania hadn’t liked him at first; he was politically right-wing, a strict Roman Catholic, reserved, and, as Moura observed, a cold, dispassionate thinker.19 Tania’s friends didn’t like him either. But he intrigued her at the same time as he infuriated her, and he had hidden romantic depths. Showing the same unwisdom as her mother, Tania fell in love.20
H. G. had long since abandoned any hope that Moura would marry or even consider living with him. Indeed, it had become a private jest between them. When he went on his one and only trip to Australia in the English winter of 1938/39, he wrote to her, ‘Dear Moura, darling Moura. Don’t forget you belong to me’.21 He told her that the Australians were not at all as he had expected – no billy cans, kangaroos or wallabies were in evidence. The people rose early, around 6.30 am, and went to bed at half past ten: ‘No place for Moura,’ he commented. ‘Are you being a good Moura goodasme? And is your weight falling and falling?’22 The answer to both his questions was quite likely an emphatic no.
Moura spent that last summer of peace at Kallijärv with Paul and Tania. It had been here, in the bliss of Yendel, that she had spent that other golden summer twenty-two years earlier, swimming and sporting with Meriel, Cromie and Garstino and all the rest while Petrograd boiled and threatened revolution. Everything was different now. The children were grown up, Tania was being wooed by Bernard, Moura was deep into middle age. And Micky was no longer with them. Moura’s oldest and dearest friend, her second and best-loved mother, had fallen ill and died earlier that year. In the last twenty years, Micky had grown to be Yendel in the children’s minds – the focus of their visits. But when she died they were all in London, unable to be with her – ‘on the day she died,’ Tania would recall, ‘my mother and I hung on to the phone to Estonia and wept’.23
This would be their last ever visit to Yendel. Estonia was enjoying its last year of independence; it was about to fall under the darkest shadow in all its troubled history. The Wehrmacht was driving into the west of Poland, and soon the eastern states would fall to the Soviet Union.
From Estonia Moura flew to Stockholm, where she was due to meet H. G. at a PEN conference. They were there on 3 September when the United Kingdom and its allies declared war on Germany. Moura and H. G. had some difficulty finding a plane to take them to Amsterdam, where they were stuck for another week until they managed to get a passage on the last boat to leave for England.
23
‘Secretly Working for the Russians’
1939–1946
H. G. was seventy-four, but neither age nor war could curtail his travelling habit. In September 1940, with the Battle of Britain at its height and the Blitz about to start, he sailed from Liverpool aboard the Cunard ship Scythia, bound for one of his regular speaking tours of the United States. The North Atlantic was U-boat territory; the Scythia was delayed in port, waiting for a place in a convoy, and was caught in an air raid on the docks. Fortunately, she was unharmed, and sailed on without mishap.
Touring the States, from the snows of New York to the heat of Florida, by way of Dallas, Detroit, Birmingham and San Francisco, Wells was periodically asked by acquaintances where Moura was, and he wrote a bitter letter telling her that he had to make the usual excuses for her non-appearance at his side. (She had come to Liverpool to wave him off, but that was the limit of her wish to travel with him.) He met his friend Charlie Chaplin and ‘everybody in New York’, and probably managed to see some lady friends. He had ongoing friendships with Margaret Sanger, the leader of the birth control movement, and Martha Gellhorn. He also spent a good deal of time with his tour agent, Harold Peat, who organised celebrity lecture tours through his company, Management of Distinguished Personalities (on Wells’ recommendation, Winston Churchill had undertaken lucrative speaking tours with Mr Peat). Wells was pleased to note that Peat attracted young women to his side, and he managed to enjoy a ‘last flare of cheerful sensuality’.1
Back in England Moura often stayed away from London, where the air raids kept her awake. She spent time with Paul on his farm at Crayke in Yorkshire, which he rented from a family friend. She also stayed with Tania, who was living in Oxfordshire. She had married Bernard in spite of Moura’s objections, and moved to Great Haseley. By the end of 1940 she was pregnant and Bernard was in the Ox and Bucks Light Infantry. Tania took in evacuees, and by 1943 she had a son and daughter of her own.
Despite the raids, Moura still spent time in London. After Liuba’s marriage, Moura had moved from Cadogan Square and began sharing a flat in Ennismore Gardens, Kensington, with another old friend, Molly Cliff, whose son Tony owned the farm in Yorkshire that Paul rented. Molly, who was a part-time air raid warden, had the upper floor of the house, and Moura the ground floor.2 Ennismore Gardens would be her home for the next two decades – first at number 11, later at number 68. Wherever Moura lived, her domestic environment was always the same; her sitting room resembled a rather down-at-heel salon, where she received her evening guests, and her bedroom, where she did the bulk of her work from her single bed, resembled the back office of a busy publishing house, shelves crammed with books and papers, every surface bearing a tower of dog-eared manuscripts.
At the start of the war, Moura’s old friend (and H. G.’s nemesis) Hilda Matheson contacted her. Hilda had left the BBC and spent several years compiling a survey of Africa. During Chamberlain’s period of appeasement, it had been realised that it would be helpful if pro-British propaganda could be sent out to friendly nations as well as potential enemies. At the beginning of 1939 Hilda had been approached by Section D of the SIS (or MI6, to give it its new wartime codename) and asked to run a secret propaganda organisation, the Joint Broadcasting Committee. She jumped at the chance to return to broadcasting.
During the lead-up to the war, the JB
C spread positive information illustrating Britain’s strength and resources. The plan was to display British life, its culture and war activities, depicting a country that didn’t necessarily want war but was prepared for it should it come.3 Time was bought on various European radio stations and the programmes were styled as travelogues, highlighting the wonders of Britain. Hilda built up a roster of foreign émigrés who had a good command of languages and knowledge of Europe. Moura joined the team in September 1939. Hilda neglected to have MI5 vet her employees; had she done so, Moura would undoubtedly have been barred from working with the JBC.
She wasn’t the only person of doubtful loyalties taken on by Hilda. Guy Burgess, who had been a member of the BBC Talks department since 1936, was also invited to join. He was already working for the Soviet Union as a Comintern agent. Working inside the British propaganda machine was an ideal opportunity for him.
Ways and means of reaching as large an audience as possible were thought up. As Hilda commented, there were no problems with accessing countries such as Sweden, Spain and Portugal, Turkey was reached by cable, Cairo by diplomatic bags and recordings were sent to both South and North America by ship and plane. By ingenious means most countries were soon being sent regular messages. They included Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Greece, Bulgaria, the Middle East, parts of Africa, Ceylon, the West Indies and even Germany itself. About one hundred and fifty discs were recorded each month from which around three and a half thousand pressings were made. Subjects ranged from innocuous frippery to serious military matters – ‘Kew Gardens’, ‘George Eliot’, ‘London’s Dress Collection’, ‘Girls of the London Blitz’ and ‘Britain’s Allies in the Air’.4
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