Burgess’s father, who died in September 1924, had intended him for the Royal Navy. Three months after his father’s death he left Eton for Dartmouth Naval College, where he was to train as a naval officer. Dartmouth cadets in the 1920s endured martinet rules, constant shouting and perpetual menaces. Everything was done at top speed, by the clock, and in strict time with everyone else. Cadets were forbidden to address a cadet in a year above or below them. ‘Everyone was forced into a mould; there was a discipline of iron, and a requirement of absolute efficiency, which pardoned no faults and forgot no weaknesses,’ according to Masterman, who was a Dartmouth cadet some years before Burgess. Threats of violence ruled the place. There were savage beatings for minor infractions, such as talking after lights out.32
Although Burgess was an incorrigible scamp, he learnt at Dartmouth to accept discipline and to dissemble his feelings. His dependable punctuality, so essential for a spy keeping rendezvous and the one orderly element in his chaotic adulthood, may have been instilled by the naval college’s obsession with drill and timing. He began to learn how to lead colleagues. The Daily Mail’s claim in 1956 that he had been expelled for theft was an easy slur that the newspaper knew would be hard to disprove. The likeliest reason for Burgess leaving Dartmouth in 1927 is that he decided against a naval career, convinced his mother that he should leave and engineered his departure by persuading a medical officer that his eyesight was too weak for navigation.
He returned to Dobbs’s house at Eton, where he prospered. Some contemporaries remembered him as self-confident: others as insecure, and therefore too ingratiating. At Eton, if not Dartmouth, he will have enjoyed his first sexual experiences, which involved, in the phrase of his fellow Etonian Anthony Powell, ‘a lot of manual labour’. His name was linked with that of David Hedley, a tall, sturdy blond, who was a King’s Scholar, an able classicist, who won his colours playing rugby in the first XV, was a captain in the Eton Wall Game, a tennis champion and rower, edited the Eton College Chronicle and was elected a member of the most privileged and select of the Eton societies, Pop (from which Burgess had been excluded when he was proposed as a candidate). In addition to sexual tussles with Burgess, this sporting and academic prodigy had a romantic attachment to the young Citroën motor-car heir A. J. (‘Freddie’) Ayer; but when Hedley embraced Ayer and told him that he loved him, Ayer felt embarrassed and could not respond physically. Hedley had later importance in the development of the Cambridge spies: it seems that the hooligan ransacking of his undergraduate rooms in Cambridge by Hawks’ Club hearties was a factor in Maclean joining the CPGB.33
During Burgess’s last year at Eton, his widowed mother Evelyn (‘Eve’) Burgess married John Bassett, a lieutenant colonel in the Royal Berkshire Regiment, who had been awarded the Distinguished Service Order and Légion d’honneur during the European war. Bassett’s position as man-of-the-house at West Lodge was recognized with an entry in Who’s Who, which he retained when the Bassetts moved to Ascot in 1932. As further confirmation that Burgess’s background was notable, but not consequential, Bassett was deleted from Who’s Who after 1941 when, because of paper shortages, a quarter of the less significant entries were deaccessioned and never restored. The Bassetts had by then moved to a villa, Oakhurst, at East Woodhay in Berkshire.
Burgess excelled in history, which was taught at Eton with stress on the personalities, powers and foibles of great men. He treated the subject as if it was a gigantic gossip column in which everyone was somehow related and many had sonorous names. Rebellious radicalism was combined with nostalgic Toryism. Knight errantry and squalor were opposing attractions for him. He later told Murray Gladstone, a camp Etonian employed in the duty-free department of Selfridge’s, to whom he sub-let his Old Bond Street flat in 1950, that when young he had faced a momentous decision: ‘whether to be a great Christian or a communist’.34
Anthony Blunt at Marlborough
Anthony Blunt was born in a Bournemouth vicarage in September 1907. The prevailing temper of his parents’ household was of puritanical piety, social duty, missionary zeal and good works. His father was a Church of England clergyman whose undoubtable intelligence was cramped by his narrow emotional outlook. His mother’s family had generations of service in the administration of India. At home her skimping made life unnecessarily spartan. Fires were kept low, lightbulbs had dim wattage, chairs were hard. She scolded her sons if they showed signs of softness. The eldest of the Blunt sons said that their family was ‘emotional, sentimental, gullible’.35
In 1912, when Blunt was aged four, his father was appointed chaplain of the Anglican community in Paris. St Michael’s Church stood a few yards from the British embassy, and the Ambassador Lord Bertie of Thame attended services, but Stanley Blunt was not adjunct to the embassy and ministered to a diverse group of English residents in the French capital and its suburbs. Like many clergy, he had a theatrical vanity, and played to the diplomats and smart visitors in his congregation, but the claims of some writers that Blunt’s family had moved in an exclusive Parisian set were fantasy. The family lacked the money, style and inclination for smartness. For two years Blunt attended a Paris day school, where he became proficient in French. In 1921 his parents returned to London, where his father was given the cure of souls in the parish of St John the Evangelist, Paddington. This was a small but prosperous parish, which included Southwick Place, where the Maclean family lived (although they were Presbyterians rather than members of the Church of England).36
Some months previously Blunt had gone as a prize scholar to Marlborough College. The school, which had been founded in 1843 to educate the sons of clergymen, was ‘not a rich man’s school’, said the old Marlburian Footman. Classrooms were icy cold. Beds were stiff. Boys were kept hungry, with stale bread, watery bread-and-milk and perhaps a small kipper or sausage for breakfast; the only warm meal was at lunchtime, when the food was scanty and foul. Footman suspected that the ‘low diet’ was intended to reduce the sexual libido of pupils. He listed two benefits from his four years at Marlborough. ‘My tendency to show off was quickly and drastically trimmed. It was good for me to have my self-confidence lopped: I could so easily have become over-pleased with myself.’ Marlborough also taught him to doubt the pompous pronouncements of higher authorities. For the rest of his life he was an ironist about leadership. Like other Marlburians, Footman left the school still a ‘muddled adolescent with little sense of purpose, little capacity for sustained effort, little self-confidence and a bundle of inhibitions’.37
Marlborough’s headmaster Cyril Norwood was a profuse writer on English boarding school management. He insisted that caning was not felt to be a degradation by his pupils, and provided a quick, effective way for prefects and house captains to quash ‘uppishness’ and insubordination. He was blind to senior boys’ abuse of their powers to thrash other pupils. The shrill anxiety expressed in Norwood’s writings about adolescent sexuality was as unpleasant as that of the clergyman in Maugham’s story ‘Rain’. Footman found that his Marlborough masters were divisible into two categories: ‘potential enemies, to be evaded and outwitted, and potential figures of fun, to be warily exploited’. One housemaster’s idea of sex education was to tell pupils: ‘You might find some white matter exuding from your private parts. Don’t worry about it. It’s only a sort of disease like measles.’38
Blunt did not have a hot bath for five years, which may explain his adult need to take two hot baths a day. Instead, he had to wash in a ‘tolly’, the school name for a hip-bath. A school custom required that pupils had to upend and pour the dirty water over their heads when they had finished washing. The sight of Blunt’s white skin and skinny body reminded boys of a candle: hence his school nickname ‘the Taper’. Until the age of sixteen Marlburians spent their days, when not toiling in classrooms or competing on sports fields, in a vast barbarous barn known as Upper School. It had a hoodlum culture overseen by six prefects chosen for their sporting prowess and armed with canes which they swished on the b
acksides of smaller boys. ‘The only law was a jungle law of force,’ recalled one victim, ‘and the special sufferers were the individualists.’ For three years Blunt lived in fear that he would have to undergo the ordeal of ‘basketing’ in Upper School, although it appears that he never did. This involved an unpopular boy being stripped almost naked, having ink and treacle poured over his head, being shoved into a big wicker basket heaped with filthy rubbish and then hoisted with ropes to the ceiling beams. The master-in-charge was always forewarned of an imminent basketing so that he did not commit the solecism of inadvertently interrupting the fun.39
Blunt, who was hopeless at sports, had two miserable years at Marlborough before he began to devise avocations and find affinities. Another clergyman’s son, with whom he shared a study, recalled: ‘I don’t think he was physically beaten up, but certainly he was made to feel a misfit, a pansy, and so on.’ His housemaster Hugh Guillebaud mistrusted boys who preferred books and ideas to sports and actions, and deplored the reproductions of paintings by Matisse and Rouault hanging in Blunt’s study as indecent. He liked it even less when, in 1924, Blunt and two other pupils founded the Marlburian magazine The Heretick. In it they railed against the patriotic teaching of history, competitive games, the OTC and philistinism.40
Just as Maclean forged a defensive pact with Klugmann, so Blunt was allied in an entente cordiale with Louis MacNeice (the son of a bishop). Both youths rejected military heroics, colonial pioneers and the ‘divine mission’ of the British Empire. They decried Kipling and Elgar. They tried to be subversive in every way, Blunt recalled, ‘but we were rebels within the law, and we were careful enough and clever enough to carry out our crusade without ever infringing the rules of the school’. This taught him lessons of subterfuge for the future. MacNeice in his memoirs described Blunt as ‘the dominant intellectual’ of Guillebaud’s boarding-house, with ‘a precocious knowledge of art and habitual contempt for conservative authorities. He was very tall and very thin and drooping, with deadly sharp elbows and the ribs of a famished saint; he had cold blue eyes, a cutaway mouth and a wave of soft brown hair falling over his forehead …’ He preferred objects to people. He thought it low to talk politics.41
The two friends spent interminable hours in Socratic disputes, gossip and ribaldry. They parroted the fashionable highbrow idiom, such as ‘too devastatingly baroque’, and aped the camping of Oxford aesthetes by bowling a hoop around the school, and playing catch with a huge painted rubber ball on the hallowed playing-fields. During their last term in the summer of 1926, they cavorted on the Wiltshire downs, with a blue silk handkerchief floating from the strap of Blunt’s wrist-watch, and returned to school with their arms full of stolen azaleas to eat an iced walnut cake or bananas and cream in their study. On hotter afternoons they lazed away afternoons lying naked on the grassy banks of the school’s bathing place, eating strawberries and cherries and reciting Latin poetry.42
The regimes at Gresham’s, Marlborough and other boarding schools taught pupils a smooth-mannered duplicity. Boys prospered by giving outward deference to teachers and housemasters for whom they felt inward scorn. They learnt to give pleasant smiles while seeming to conform to rules which they intended to break. Institutional life, not parental influence, made Blunt, Burgess, Maclean and Philby what they were. They disliked the bullying, discomfort, injustice and surveillance of their schooling. Like their contemporary Kenneth Clark at Winchester they accepted these hardships as ‘the invariable condition of growing up’ rather than as personal attacks upon themselves. Boarding school life honed their cunning. It imbued each of them with a dislike of small-islander tribalism. Like Clark, they were emphatically not upper class in their backgrounds, allegiances, ambitions or habits. Kilburn and Paddington, or West Hampstead and Hyde Park as their families preferred to say, were not top-floor places any more than they were basement. The Cambridge spies came from the mezzanine class.43
CHAPTER 8
The Cambridge Cell
Undergraduates in the 1920s
‘Our Secret Service reports of course do not deal with the better classes,’ the Prime Minister Lloyd George was told in 1919 at a time when trade union militancy and egalitarian fervour seemed to threaten civil unrest. His Cabinet nevertheless received a few warnings of well-bred trouble to come. In 1920 the Home Office’s Directorate of Intelligence reported in its weekly intelligence summary that letters had been intercepted in which communists urged that government offices, the army, postal and telegraph services, radio broadcasting and journalism should be infiltrated. An intelligence summary in 1921 reported that an Oxford university undergraduate, Arthur Reade, hoped to organize ‘a Communist nucleus among the Varsity men, who will be going out as schoolmasters, scientific workers, literary men and professional and “intellectual” workers’. A further warning that Moscow sought to penetrate institutions with communist converts from the universities reached the Cabinet in 1922.1
‘Bolshevism’, declared a future Conservative MP Edward Marjoribanks in an Oxford Union debate of 1919, ‘is non-representative, destructive of education, subversive of property, anarchical in legislation, a check upon industry, a scandal in food-distribution and the epitome of arbitrary cruelty.’ This reflected the view of the vast majority of Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates during the 1920s: the intelligence services were right to focus their limited resources on monitoring working-class unrest rather than middle-class renegades. Only the tiniest sect of undergraduates would have agreed with Maurice Dobb, who joined the CPGB in 1922, that bourgeois culture and capitalist societies were ‘decadent and sterile’, that revolutionary communism would dwarf the Renaissance, that ‘non-Marxists [were] as silly as pre-Darwinian biologists; & anyone who teaches a defence of capitalism [is] wicked & dangerous’. University communism made little headway in the 1920s when, as Cyril Connolly expressed it in ‘Where Engels Fears to Tread’, undergraduates parroted monosyllables, ‘words like Freud, Death, War, Peace, Love, Sex, Glands, and above all, Damn, Damn, Damn!’ It was only after the financial crisis of 1931 and the formation of the coalition National Government that, in a new mood of earnest salvationism, undergraduates began to chant big, new polysyllables such as ‘The Workers’ Revolution for the Classless Society through the Dictatorship of the Proletariat!’ A tetchy young communist of the 1930s complained that sex had been the ‘all-absorbing topic’ of his elders in the previous decade: ‘Weakness sought compensation in subjective self-assertion; Bloomsbury warmed its sterile soul in the artificial rays of aesthetic snobbery.’ W. H. Auden agreed: the young intelligentsia of the 1920s were obsessed with the Freudian Bed and those of the 1930s with the Marxist Board, so he said in 1944.2
Valéry believed that young people learn best to form judgements when they are in ‘an elegant, superficial, fickle and futile milieu’. Lady Maclean explained to MI5 that her son’s undergraduate curiosity about ‘this newish creed, Communism’ was merely a phase of intellectual experiment: ‘he was at a university for the purpose of finding his own mind’; Marxism had been a transient interest of his. ‘The most valuable thing about college life is the infection of ideas which takes place,’ according to Kenneth Clark, whose Oxford undergraduate years began in 1922. ‘It is like a rapid series of inoculations. People who have not been to college catch ideas late in life, and are made ill by them.’3
In the process of inoculation and recovery, Arthur Reade was a pathbreaker. Born in 1902, he was educated at Eton before spending seven months at the University of Strasbourg and matriculating at Oxford in 1920. He had his own carefully chosen furniture in his rooms at Worcester College, together with portraits of Marx and Lenin. It was mob vandalism by Worcester rugby hearties, who ransacked his rooms and broke the furniture and pictures by defenestrating them, that embittered him. ‘Oxford’s lovely city is defiled by the presence of the horde of social parasites from Mayfair, and paragons of bourgeois smugness from the provinces,’ Reade complained in Eights Week of 1921: ‘they bow down before the alt
ar of the false gods of athleticism and salmon mayonnaise.’4
Reade began publishing a student magazine, which was entitled Free Oxford rather than Red Oxford because it favoured ‘free love’ as much as any political creed: mixed nude bathing was one of its early causes. Lewis Farnell, the university’s Vice-Chancellor, was shocked that such ‘obscene licentiousness’ was being ‘pushed into the hands of ladies coming out of church’. After publishing an editorial declaring ‘By TERROR we shall destroy the domination of the bourgeoisie – by TERROR we shall establish the rule of the workers,’ Reade was expelled from the university in December 1921. Farnell condemned Free Oxford for preaching ‘extreme theories of Russian Bolshevism, the “Red Terror” … and the bitterest class-hatred: gross insults against all authorities were scattered through the pages. There was nothing of boyish fooling in it.’ He suspected that the magazine had Soviet money behind it. ‘No university where any discipline remained could’, Farnell said, ‘allow such filth to be flung in its face by its own students.’5
There were reports that Reade had visited army camps distributing pamphlets which were said to suborn military discipline. His membership of the CPGB was confirmed by an MI5 informant in Oxford. Political work in Greece and Albania disillusioned him with Bolshevism during 1924–5. In 1930, writing in an intercepted letter to Ewer, Reade deplored ‘the transformation of Marxist thought into a religious faith complete with saint in the mummified person of Lenin – horribly reminiscent of the Patron Saint of Corfu whose embalmed body is paraded round the town in a Sedan chair’. He loathed the hunting and punishment of doctrinal heretics. ‘The whole philosophy of the C.P. leaves no room for personal friendship – only loyalty to the Church. Independence – individualism – opportunism – desertion – renegacy – Siberia. The logic is perfect and intolerable.’6
Enemies Within Page 26
