Enemies Within

by Richard Davenport-Hines

English Christianity after 1918 had the spiritual equivalent of a vitamin deficiency: parishioners were numbed in their reflexes, and enfeebled in belief. Ninety thousand people panting for the kick-off at the Wembley cup final might sing ‘I need Thy presence every passing hour’, but they did not mean it. Churchgoing declined. There were 28 million baptized, 8 million confirmed and 2.75 million communicant members of the Church of England in 1927. Baldwin was the only inter-war Prime Minister with conventional religious faith. Lloyd George and Bonar Law were agnostics, Chamberlain was a Unitarian and MacDonald belonged to the Union of Ethical Societies. ‘As we move away from the War, we are able to see its real magnitude,’ reflected Hensley Henson, the Bishop of Durham, on Armistice Day of 1922. ‘What a full-flowing spring of malediction it was! All our present perplexities seem to run back to it. We are at our wit’s end [sic] to know how to regain the positions from which it swept us … the War has given the coup de grâce to the Church of England.’18

  Fewer people found the Incarnation and the Resurrection credible. ‘We shall never get over Christianity, yet not two in a hundred of my acquaintances thought a future life worth discussing,’ Vansittart recalled of ‘the early post-Christian era’ of the 1920s. Polite agnosticism characterized the decade as much as muscular Christianity or evangelicalism had been the orthodoxy of previous generations. ‘Sin’ became a joke-word for many. Hell and theories of eternal punishment were dismissed as inventions to frighten people into behaving well. Prophecies and miracles were treated as if they were fungoid hallucinations. ‘Our Lord Jesus Christ’ became merely the supreme example of a good man. This change in attitude was as momentous as any event in English history since the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity. It resulted from the convergence of several influences: eighteenth-century scepticism; nineteenth-century Darwinism; disbelief in the verbal inspiration of the Bible; a new materialism which discredited ideals of personal service; and the bellicosity of many clerics during the 1914–18 war which seemed to deny the gospel of the Prince of Peace.19

  Equal to all these influences was the blatancy of Christian sexual hypocrisy. How else can one explain the success of two bestsellers of 1921, Robert Keable’s novel Simon Called Peter and Somerset Maugham’s story ‘Rain’? Keable was a Cambridge graduate who had resigned holy orders to write his autobiographical novel. It describes a prudish army chaplain who loses his faith in the carnage of trench warfare, visits a brothel and eventually goes to bed with a nurse who gives renewed meaning to his life. The book sold 600,000 copies during the 1920s, and had over sixty reprints. Arthur Winnington-Ingram, the peevish Bishop of London, prevented its dramatization on stage in 1925. The novel ‘scandalised the clergy’ by depicting a fornicating parson questioning his faith, and devalued ‘all we have ever taught about self-control [and] chastity’, the Bishop complained to the theatrical censors. He imagined taking friends to see a production: ‘any nice girl would, I think, be sick at seeing any man and a woman emerge from the bedroom where they had spent the night, in their night-dresses’. Comparably, Maugham’s ‘Rain’ offers an unforgiving picture of what was to become a stock type, a sexually repressed, punitive Protestant clergyman. In this case, a self-deluding vicar cuts his own throat after raping the prostitute whom he has been persecuting with callous moralizing. The story resonated with readers, for it inspired three Hollywood film versions between 1928 and 1953, with Gloria Swanson, Joan Crawford and Rita Hayworth cast as Sadie Thompson.20

  If clergy in the pulpit had preached against cant, national pride, social injustice, economic disparity and backward thinking they would have done their duty better than in urging submission to the status quo. They fussed about ‘necking’ in shadowy ‘cinema palaces’ or fulminated over mixed swimming in the Serpentine, but from the great issues of the time they fled. The puritans ensured that Sunday in every town and city, even London, resembled a neat and hushed cemetery, in which one met only flitting ghosts. The prudery was such that Wollheim was threatened with expulsion from Westminster after he had painted the naked breasts of women in watercolours for an art competition: the trigger for righteous rebuke was the ink dots at the centre of the breasts; these scant acknowledgements of nipples could only excite hateful salacity, groused the headmaster. The efforts at sex education of the muscular Christian who in 1929 succeeded Luce as housemaster of the King’s Scholars were touchingly inept. ‘I say, fellows,’ he would say after evening prayers, ‘are you troubled by dirty thoughts?’ Hearty public school chaplains keeping a straight bat in the pulpit bored dull pupils and infuriated the clever boys. ‘Religion played little part in our lives, and the average sermon in chapel was stuff for ribald comment,’ recalled David Footman. In 1936 he published a novel about a soldier with the Victoria Cross who becomes a confidence trickster because of the post-war spiritual dearth: the tragedy of bishops and schoolmasters, Footman felt, was that they lacked the moral courage to give a better lead.21

  After his London furlough year of 1924, St John Philby settled at the port of Jeddah, where he held the local sales agencies for Marconi, Unilever and the Ford motor company. In 1930 he converted to Islam as a way of ingratiating himself as an unofficial adviser to the king, Ibn Saud. His real religion, judged Reader Bullard, was ‘a simple dualism in which the spirit of darkness is represented by His Majesty’s Government’. By 1940 Ibn Saud recognized that the scorn which Philby heaped on British war efforts against Hitler was ‘mentally deranged’. Lord Lloyd told Harker that Philby was ‘a brilliant lunatic’, Sir Alexander Cadogan thought him ‘a crank’, and Guy Liddell, having been advised by a diplomat that Philby was ‘a nasty piece of work’, summarized the FO view as: ‘in Mr Philby’s world there is only Mr Philby. Loyalty and disloyalty are only words to him.’22

  An otherwise helpful biography published in 1973 opens with the declaration: ‘Kim Philby grew up in a climate of moral arrogance which armour-plated him for life against the assaults of doubts.’ Its authors claim that his every major adult decision ‘betrays the imprint of the father’. St John’s rumbustiousness overshadowed ‘the childhood of his gentle-natured son, and it is questionable whether Kim ever fully emerged from it’. The months in 1924 between twelve-year-old Kim’s departure from his Eastbourne school and his arrival at Westminster were ‘a summer of intense indoctrination’, they wrote. ‘St John took this promising child and pumped him full of his special brand of self-righteousness,’ which was the making of a traitor.23

  These assertions are wrong. Any paternal influence was spasmodic and remote. The spiritual vacuum of the 1920s influenced Philby’s mentality more than the rowdy nonconformity of his father. He was not a pliable character who could be stamped with someone else’s impression. As an adult he enjoyed deceit. A successful betrayal gratified him. He liked covert work, arcane influence and equivocation. In all this he was the opposite of his father, who never shied away from truth-telling in its most aggressive, open, implacable and arrogant forms. The older man relished publicity, courted controversy and sprang headlong into confrontation. The younger man’s undercover life was the antithesis.

  Donald Maclean at Gresham’s

  The second of the Cambridge spies, Donald Maclean, was born in May 1913. He was the third of four sons of Donald Maclean, a Cardiff solicitor who had been secretary of the city’s Chamber of Commerce before his election as a Liberal MP in 1906. The records of the Registrar General provide social statistics to place – in general and limited terms – the Philby, Maclean and other families of the Cambridge spies. The sealed files of the Inland Revenue yield none of the more significant data on their money. The distinctions of attitudes and prospects between the hereditary ruling orders, the gentry, the official and officer classes, the learned classes of lawyers and clergy, the expanding professional classes, and the varieties of business families were sharp and at variance with one another. It is bad enough to blur them, but worse to forget that these semi-defunct conventions were a less vital force than family income, which was w
hat kept both individuals and families alive. To give total attention to class stratification when assessing the Cambridge spies is like trying to understand foxes by studying a dead mask and brush hung on a wall as a trophy. To understand the living creatures one must go to a fox’s den and spy on the vixen sheltering, feeding and frolicking at home with her cubs.

  Maclean’s boyhood home was at 6 Southwick Place close to Paddington station. It was a better address than Acol Road, but unfashionably north of Hyde Park. ‘Paddington wasn’t smart, but the street had an independent air,’ the youngest Maclean son, Alan, recalled. The father served temporarily as leader of the parliamentary Liberal party in 1919–20, after a general election in which most of its frontbench leaders had lost their parliamentary seats. There was not a single ex-Cabinet minister available to take the post, which went by default to Sir Donald Maclean. He could neither dominate nor inspire colleagues, but he kept liberalism alive in parliament during the hectic illiberal opportunism of the Lloyd George premiership. Opponents recognized that he was dutiful and plucky: his manners were unassuming but a trifle smug. Robert Vansittart called him ‘prosaic’. He died of a heart attack, induced by overwork as Minister of Education in the National Government, in 1932. The newly widowed Lady Maclean opened a jolly little shop called the Bee in Church Walk, a winding alley off Kensington High Street. There she sold pretty and comfortable wool garments made by amateur knitters, and stylish straw hats, and had a hundred different jigsaw puzzles which customers could borrow like books from a lending library. Donald Maclean helped to scrub and redecorate the Bee before its opening.24

  In 1926 Maclean went as a pupil to Gresham’s School at Holt, on the Norfolk coast. This was a school with rare liberal credentials. Science had priority on the curriculum; Greek was ignored; there was minimal fagging and beating; there were neither privileges for senior boys nor colourful caps to distinguish successful games-players; few bounds were set on pupils roaming outside the school grounds. Gresham’s headmaster James Eccles was a prude who bustled about the school in a pompous way carrying an armful of books. He interviewed every pupil after his arrival, adjured each of them to promise to avoid indecency or swearing, and to report any other boy who transgressed. Pupils resented this system of informants and developed an easy facility in evading surveillance.

  What was the public school code which nature’s rebels strove to defy or subvert? Governors, headmasters and housemasters saw the task of these boarding schools as preparing boys for the hierarchies of adult life. Pupils were trained to obey rules without complaint. Sir John Masterman, a crucial figure in MI5 during the 1940s, recalled of his Edwardian boyhood: ‘My own school-days were not mournful, for I shunned eccentricities – indeed I was almost obsessively anxious to conform to expected standards and to do the right thing.’ A housemaster at Eton, writing a reference in 1919 for his pupil Arthur Reade, whose adult life was to be dogged by the suspicions of MI5, gave him ‘a perfectly honest testimonial of moral character’ but warned of unamenable opinions. ‘Here he was not popular among his fellows, for he was undoubtedly a prig, crude in his views and more than crude in his readiness to air them. And they were not the views that recommended themselves to conservative schoolboys. He thought it his business and privilege to be a “free-thinker” in the midst of a society that thought, if at all, in fetters.’25

  If loyal conformity to school rules conduced to group satisfaction, individual self-assertion did not. The imaginative vitality of a few inspirational schoolmasters enriched their pupils’ lives, but the majority were sententious men who kept anxious control of their pupils by virtue of a regime based on mindless regulations and violence. Few boys were fools, especially about the pointless school ideal of manliness isolated from sexual activity. Pupils could look solemn, and mock inwardly, at schoolmasters whose idea of sex education was to tell pupils: ‘If a man takes a man into a corner of the room and talks to a man, a man shouldn’t listen.’26

  Maclean’s clan chief at Gresham’s was a pupil called James Klugmann. His father was a London merchant dealing in rope and twine, who had been born in Bavaria and had married the daughter of an importer of tea and coffee named Rosenheim. ‘Kluggers’, a year older than Maclean, was chubby, bespectacled and bookish; he won school prizes, but was a dud at games; his tone was quiet, observant and amusing. He felt isolated at Gresham’s as ‘the clever oddity’, and provoked the school authorities by calling himself communist. He had scant notion of what communists believed or did, but started reading texts so as to be convincing in his new role.27

  Klugmann and Maclean thrived in earnest, intense schoolboy discussions about the purpose of life, and contributed argumentative pieces to school magazines. Maclean’s family creed respected penance and martyrdom, and deprecated the indulgence of personal pleasures and desires; but under Eccles’s insipid, fretful preaching the boy lost all reverence for biblical teachings. He left the school primed by Klugmann to accept new doctrinal authority. It is unlikely that, outside school, the two friends saw much of one another. The benefits of compartmentalizing what is important, and keeping it remote from home life, was a valuable lesson of boarding school existence. To reveal one’s closest friends to one’s family, like confiding one’s secret ambitions, was to court the possibility of humiliation. Neither boy exposed at home what mattered to him most. Despite the distance kept between them outside Gresham’s, the ideas which were swapped there shaped Maclean’s political direction.

  Another early influence on Maclean, Burgess and Blunt proved as formative of their temperament as Marxist writings. From early manhood Maclean had a favourite book: Wilfrid Scawen Blunt’s Diaries 1888–1914. His wife described it as his ‘bible’, and took a volume in her luggage during her clandestine flight to join him in Russia in 1953. Burgess, too, as an adolescent was smitten by the diaries and inspired by the diarist’s riotous path to perdition. Anthony Blunt was a first cousin twice removed of Scawen Blunt (not, as is often repeated, his great-nephew). He was attracted by the avant-garde dissidence of which his parents disapproved.28

  Wilfrid Scawen Blunt was a landowner, poetaster, philanderer and self-obsessed hedonist. He championed anti-colonialism, loathed industrial capitalism and wrote in a retort to Rudyard Kipling that the white man’s burden was the burden of his cash. His hostility to the British military occupation of India, Ireland and Egypt led to his short-term imprisonment. He impressed Burgess and Blunt, and inspired Maclean, by repudiating the sham-history that assumed the uniqueness and even genius of the British Empire. Patriots averred that this empire had distinctive origins, nobler purposes and a superior destiny to those of the European imperial forerunners, Spain and Portugal. They discounted the way that English colonialism had emulated the sixteenth-century conquistadors and seventeenth-century Dutch licensed trading companies in their administrative methods and repressive rule. They treated English expeditions to the East Indies, to the Caribbean and South America as heroic and beneficent rather than as, in twenty-first-century terms, the forays of neo-liberal bio-prospectors using slavery and violence to seize precious resources from indigenous peoples. Scawen Blunt’s writings and actions made Maclean, Blunt and Burgess into insurrectionary adolescent anti-colonialists years before undergraduate study-groups drew them in early manhood to communism. The trio tended, in their rejection of English nationalism and exceptionalism, towards the conclusion of Kenneth Andrews, the great historian of maritime trade and exploration, that ‘the involvement of England in the process of European overseas expansion was a natural consequence of her integral role in the commercial, political and cultural life of Europe’.29

  In the first quarter of the twentieth century the public schoolboys’ code, instilled by their masters, became petrified as sacred tribal custom: ostracism became the penalty for the slightest deviation in voice, manner, clothes or ideas. Maclean’s outward respect for the cult leaders was convincing. ‘He was a boy of the best type, and his moral character and conduct were exceptionally go
od,’ reported Gresham’s acting headmaster when asked by the Foreign Office Selection Board for a character reference. ‘I always found him entirely trustworthy, reliable and thoroughly sound.’ After eleven years of boarding school, Maclean was camouflaged in amenability.30

  Guy Burgess at Eton and Dartmouth

  Guy Burgess was the most privileged of the Cambridge spies. He was born in April 1911 at Devonport, where his naval officer father was stationed. There was money on his mother’s side from a small family bank in Portsmouth, and from investments in the utility companies that supplied gas and water to that naval port. Burgess was the only one of the Cambridge ring of five to have a rural childhood, for in 1922 his family settled at West Lodge, in the pretty Hampshire village of West Meon. West Lodge was the home of rentiers, not gentry. It was a low, square Georgian villa with five bedrooms and eight acres of pleasances – flowerbeds, shrubberies, a walled kitchen garden, paddocks and woodland. There were neither hunters in the stables nor shooting-parties in the coveys. The Burgesses were not the people for county committees or the magistrates’ bench.

  Burgess started as a pupil at Eton in 1924. His housemaster, Frank Dobbs, was cryptic in speech, but tolerant and cultivated: he went to the trouble of resuming contact with his most notorious pupil after Burgess had re-emerged in Russia in 1956, and sent terse, sympathetic letters for the solace of an exile. Other Eton housemasters, too, created enclaves of spacious civilized inquiry; but generally the school’s inmates, like most people, exaggerated the importance of whatever was local or national. Modern European history was considered a hopeless subject for schools, with the result that nothing was taught about Europe except for patriotic accounts of wars with France and Spain, and of the struggle to protect other liberties from the influence of the Bishop of Rome. The demotion of modern European ideas is conveyed by an Etonian’s remark that French language and literature were so meanly valued in the school that their teaching was entrusted to Frenchmen. Popularity was the chief ambition of boys at any boarding school. To achieve this, so Cyril Connolly argued in his memoir of Eton, they needed nonchalance, charm, fortitude and moral cowardice, and to hide their intelligence as ‘a good tailor hides a paunch or a hump’. Deceptive powers were requisite for popularity. While conforming to the assumptions of their little clan, uttering its war-cries and skirmishing with its enemies, boys like Burgess mastered the craft of silent dissent from the group voice.31