A Very Private Celebrity

by Hugh Purcell

  During the war years the strongest patriots could be communists because the common enemy was fascism. A number of New Statesman staff worked secretly for the Political Warfare Executive (PWE) writing propaganda for dissemination into Nazi-occupied countries. Prominent among them was Richard Crossman, who was dubbed ‘a master of psychological warfare’, and Aylmer Vallance’s job was to ensure they did not give away military secrets. But during the Cold War that followed, the enemy was the Soviet Union and its communist satellites in eastern Europe, so allegiances were severely tested. On which side of the street did Vallance walk between 1945 and 1955? The jury is still out. Evidence that it was on the west: he kept his military rank of lieutenant colonel in his passport until his death, which must have provided some sort of cover, and he travelled behind the Iron Curtain frequently using a travel agency in north London, Gateway Tours, that was rumoured to be money-laundered by MI6. Evidence that it was on the east: he was a huge admirer of Yugoslavia in particular, named his son ‘Tito’, and several of his articles had a pro-communist bias. C. H. Rolf, who shared a New Statesman office with him and happened also to work part-time for the police, offers this verdict:

  It seems likely enough that he was playing a fairly devious game, using the New Statesman with the knowledge of the Intelligence Department to plant useful items of pro-allied propaganda, but also planting, under cover of the two-way prestige this gave him, ‘fellow travelling’ material about war theatres like Yugoslavia. This was a source of constant friction; and the commonly-heard accusation that the New Statesman was a fellow-travelling paper was due not only to Kingsley’s ambivalence about Russia, but also to Aylmer’s stealthy insistence on putting in, deliberately too late for censorship or amendment, extreme statements about eastern Europe.19

  After Vallance’s death in 1955, John Freeman wrote to his son ‘Tito’ (real name Philip): ‘My own friendship with him [Aylmer] was close and very rewarding. And yet, looking back forty years and more, I realise that I never really knew who he was or what he believed in.’ About this time, when Philip introduced himself in a London club the response was: ‘Not Aylmer’s son? He was a damned fine intelligence agent.’

  Vallance’s shady past life must have appealed to Freeman. It could have fitted into John Buchan’s Greenmantle spy story. A neat, spry man with a goatee beard beneath a long face and glasses, he normally faded quietly into the background as those with something to hide normally do. Yet he had led an extraordinary life. He had joined the intelligence services in 1915 and played the ‘great game’ across the Himalayas. The ‘game’ included fighting a duel in the jungle and walking, disguised as a Sikh, from Karachi to Singapore.

  In the 1930s he had become editor of the News Chronicle but had been sacked for a sex scandal that involved the female motoring correspondent, the editor’s table and a surprise visit from the prudish chairman, Lord Cadbury. He had joined the staff of the New Statesman in 1937. A consummate journalist he turned out well-informed copy on finance, fisheries and food, filling any gap necessary at short notice where a few hundred words were required. He was a quick and calm editor, working at the printers with a hand poised over the copy ready for a last-minute change, or, for that matter, a last-minute addition.

  Although a lifetime socialist, he spent many a weekend at a Scottish castle fly fishing, drinking heavily with his house party and then driving back to London for a Monday editorial. He looked like a Scottish laird and behaved more like a bon vivant than an earnest socialist. He loved European travel and had European wives: the first a White Russian émigré who deserted her family to be with him; the second, Helen Gosse, a member of the Communist Party and granddaughter of the distinguished literary polymath Sir Edmund Gosse; the third a destitute German refugee, Oertie Christina Fischinger. Vallance was more than a friend for Freeman: he was a mentor and even, perhaps subconsciously, a role model.

  On his deathbed in 1955, Aylmer summoned his young daughter Margaret, asking her to open the drawer of his desk. Inside was a long-barrelled revolver. She left it where it was:

  I was taken off to live in John Freeman’s house with John and Mima and Lizi. She was thirteen and I was fourteen. Mima was very tall and beautiful and really kind to me. John was aloof – quite strict too. It was quite a big flat they had near Hampstead Heath. One day Oertie arrived and I saw at once from her expression that my father was dead. So I was fourteen and an orphan.20

  Three years later Mima died, also from cancer.

  Was Freeman a communist sympathiser, even a fellow traveller? In his more extreme ‘leftist’ period from Oxford through the war he no doubt admired Lenin and the revolutionary ideals of Trotsky: he was not called ‘Trotsky Freeman’ for nothing. But he was never in the Communist Party and, according to Edward Hyams, who knew him well on the New Statesman, he was never taken in by ‘Uncle Joe’ Stalin. He always considered him a tyrant and villain: ‘The villainy of which he held Stalin guilty was the perversion of socialism so as to make a lie of what Freeman believes to be essentially true.’

  In the summer of 1956, Freeman travelled for six weeks through the so-called ‘People’s Democracies’ of Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. It was a formative experience. He wrote a long piece for the New Statesman on his return – ‘A Profile of People’s Democracy’ – and spoke about his impressions several times on BBC radio. The timing of his visit was significant. It was after Khrushchev’s revelations at the 20th Party Congress in February of that year but before the Russian invasion of Hungary in November, a brief period when Soviet communism appeared to be showing a human face. Yet his article was severely critical of the very basics of Soviet communism:

  To define the beginning of error as the Soviet decision to enforce collectivisation overlooks the fact that defects must have already existed in the Leninist system of democratic centralism, which amounted to betrayal of first principles. So that, even for the Russians, the claim that a return to Leninism is a sufficient blueprint for future legality is a hollow one.

  Freeman wrote that the ‘Peoples’ Democracies’ were fundamentally different from the Soviet Union because Poles, Czechs and Hungarians knew that they had until recently belonged within the mainstream of European social democracy. Yet their form of socialism was ‘here to stay’ and in 1956 that was a reasonable assumption. As a socialist he saw evidence for optimism: ‘Despite the cruelties and the bungling that have characterised the People’s Republics hitherto, social attitudes and the economic pattern are gradually evolving, which bear some relation to what any socialist must recognise as being his aim.’

  Nevertheless, the over-centralisation, bureaucracy and interference from Russia was blighting individual initiative, and underneath that suffocation was something worse:

  When all the achievements have been listed and all the allowances made, the fact remains that the Peoples’ Democracies do not yet offer the generality of their citizens the chance of a decent life, free of fear, free of want – or even free of graft. But the central failure is that a disregard for freedom has corrupted individuals.21

  This is not the essay of a starry-eyed communist sympathiser, many of whom were members of the Labour Party at this time; still less of the hard-line, Russia-right-or-wrong ideologue, who were the fellow travellers and party members of the 1950s. It is obviously a perceptive analysis by an independently minded journalist within the democratic-socialist context. That was Freeman. To gossip that he may have been a spy is completely ridiculous.

  Any doubts where Freeman stood on nuclear disarmament, a subject on which pro-Soviet sympathies quickly showed themselves, should have been dispelled the next year, 1957. Once again, as in the ’30s and ’40s, the New Statesman set an agenda and moulded public opinion. On 2 November, it published the most seminal article in its 100-year history: ‘Britain and the Nuclear Bomb’ by J. B. Priestley. Goaded by Aneurin Bevan’s crushing of unilateralism at the recent Labour Party conference (‘it is not statesmanship – it is an emotional spasm’) and u
sing his father-of-the-nation style that had served him so well in his BBC Home Service Postscripts of 1940, Priestley ended:

  The British of these times, so frequently hiding behind masks of sour, cheap cynicism, often seem to be waiting for something … great and noble that would make them feel good again. And this might well be a declaration to the world that after a certain date one power able to engage in nuclear warfare will reject the evil thing for ever.

  After this, the birth of CND was just a matter of time. The editor that week was John Freeman. He agreed to sign off the article although, wrote C. H. Rolf, ‘he was himself in sympathy with Bevan and the party’s decision’.22

  Later that month a meeting of opinion shapers was held in Kingsley Martin’s flat. Bertrand Russell was there, J. B. Priestley and his wife Jacquetta Hawkes, the former American ambassador to the Soviet Union, George Kennan, whose recent Reith Lecture series ‘Russia, the Atom and the West’ had stoked up anxiety about nuclear warfare, and the Labour MP Denis Healey, a specialist in defence. The new New Statesman leader-writer Paul Johnson watched it get off to a bad start:

  Someone spoke advocating a unilateralist line and Denis Healey replied, ‘Yes, yes, that’s all very well, but what we’ve got to do is to be responsible about this.’ Whereupon Priestley exploded, ‘RESPONSIBLE! RESPONSIBLE!! How many times have I heard that dreadful word?! It has led to two world wars and the prospect of a third.’ I noticed that Bertie Russell was cackling. He thought that was very funny because if anybody knew how to be irresponsible then he did! I knew then that this was going to be a lot of trouble.23

  That was the beginning of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

  Over the next few months the New Statesman became a global forum where world leaders protested their commitment to world peace. Bertrand Russell began the exchange in November 1957 with ‘An Open Letter to Eisenhower and Khrushchev’. It came down to the exhortation ‘to agree to disagree’ (this being the mantra first coined in the New Statesman by Richard Crossman): ‘It is not necessary that either side should abandon belief in its own creed. It is only necessary that [East and West] should abandon the attempt to spread its creed by force of arms.’

  Khrushchev himself replied a month later, in an article written in Russian and accompanied by a personal letter to the editor. When the package arrived from the Soviet embassy, Kingsley Martin suspected it to be a hoax. The Soviet premier endorsed Bertrand Russell’s hopes for a sunlit future for mankind and condemned ‘the criminal policy of militarism’. With that scoop the sales of the New Statesman went up by 2,000 to well over 70,000, then an all-time high.

  The uplifting tone was soured by the eventual reply of the implicit villain of the piece, US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. He pointed out (February 1958) that the Soviet Union had never renounced the use of force to solve international affairs, as its invasion of Hungary in 1956 had proved. It was left to Spike Milligan, appropriately, to poke fun at the Dr Strangelove concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). He was one of hundreds who joined in the New Statesman debate:

  Let me be the first to say it. Mr Krushchev’s letter in reply to Bertrand Russell is all a fiendish plot. It is a deliberate attempt to rob us of the promised American bases on our soil. We must arm, arm, arm, arm, arm. For the Russians must be taught that the only way to end war is to have it.24

  During this period Freeman was often in the editor’s chair. J. B. Priestley said: ‘John Freeman was against us, but editorially he behaved superbly.’25 Freeman’s view was that distinguished writers of the left were perfectly entitled to write polemical ‘ban the bomb’ articles, but the New Statesman should not identify formally with a pacifist pressure group, particularly one that would require Britain to leave NATO. So he reinforced Kingsley Martin’s indecision, so to speak. Paul Johnson told me: ‘Barbara [Castle], John and I would not let him [Kingsley Martin] take what we considered a pacifist line. Kingsley referred to us as the ‘red-headed league’ [they all had red hair] and thought we were ganging up on him.’ Tony Howard amplified this:

  Freeman remained an unrepentant believer not only in adequate national defence but also in the eighteenth-century notion of the advantages of a ‘balance of terror’. Week in, week out he battled, with the help of his colleagues, to prevent Kingsley Martin from committing the paper to the Aldermaston marchers.26

  It is surely significant that Major John Freeman had been a soldier with four years of defending Britain by force of arms behind him.

  The New Statesman cartoonist Vicky shows Kingsley Martin handing over to John Freeman.

  Notes

  1 John Freeman’s ‘Introduction’ to The New Statesman, The History of the First Fifty Years 1913–1963 by Edward Hyams, Longmans, London, 1963, p. x

  2 Quoted in The Life, Letters and Diaries of Kingsley Martin by C. H. Rolph, Victor Gollancz, London, 1973, p. 335

  3 Norman MacKenzie interview with author, 2012

  4 Freeman in Hyams, op. cit., p. x

  5 New Statesman (centenary edition), 19 April 2013

  6 Rolph, op. cit., p. 316

  7 Ibid.

  8 Crossman: The Pursuit of Power by Anthony Howard, Jonathan Cape, London, 1990, p. 191

  9 Ibid., p. 192

  10 Ibid., pp. 192–3

  11 Rolph, op. cit., p. 328

  12 Enlightening Letters 1946–1960 by Isaiah Berlin, Random House, 2011, pp. 176-7

  13 Rolph, op. cit., pp. 334–5

  14 ‘Tell Me Again on Sunday, Agent X’ by Anthony Howard, The Times, 1996

  15 New Statesman, 19 October 1962

  16 ‘Spies Like Us’ by Hugh Purcell, New Statesman, 24 May 2013

  17 Ibid.

  18 The Journey Not The Arrival Matters, Leonard Woolf, Hogarth Press, London, 1969, p. 139

  19 Rolph, op. cit., pp. 232–4

  20 Margaret Vallance interview with the author, 2014

  21 New Statesman, 21 August 1956

  22 Rolph, op. cit., p. 323 (see also: ‘Learning to Love the Bomb’ by Hugh Purcell, New Statesman, 21 March 2014)

  23 Paul Johnson interview with the author, 2014

  24 Hyams, op. cit., p. 291

  25 Rolph, op. cit., p. 324

  26 The Scotsman, June 1961

  Chapter 8

  New Statesman editor

  WHEN FREEMAN BECAME editor of the New Statesman in January 1961 he did not intend to stay long:

  The task I set myself, on becoming editor, was to tidy things up, modernise the paper a bit, and then hand over to someone else who should preferably be of a younger generation. I did think that what had been a marvellous operation until the mid-’50s had sadly deteriorated, and that what was needed was a short incumbency by a non-genius to see if a certain amount of order could be put back into it.1

  There speaks Freeman as chief of staff. But there was a more fundamental issue beneath the surface, which Edward Hyams identified in his History of the First Fifty Years (of the New Statesman) – an issue endorsed by Freeman in his introduction to the book.

  For the first twenty years or so of Kingsley Martin’s editorship, the paper and most of its readers believed in the implementation of socialism. Martin was a preacher who believed in socialism just as his Nonconformist minister father had believed in Christianity. To deny socialism was almost wicked and during the ’30s and ’40s its advent could be preached with revolutionary zeal. After that time, however, the identification of socialism with Soviet communism and the iniquities thereof, together with an aggressive American capitalism, meant that democratic socialist parties in the West were on the defensive. In Britain the socialist hopes of the 1945 generation, fully endorsed by John Freeman, had turned into the Butskellism of the 1950s. Freeman wrote in his introduction:

  The political and social course of the ’30s and ’40s had been mapped out in advance with astonishing accuracy by the socialist thinkers of the inter-war years and the prophets of that generation were confident that they knew the answers.

&
nbsp; In the face of the problems of the ’50s and ’60s there is no certainty. British socialist practice and precept has, so to speak, come to the end of the homework done by the early new statesmen and a period of intense disputation and inquiry is now needed to relate socialist morality to the modern world.2

  Edward Hyams put it more graphically: ‘The New Statesman’s cry of dissent will be sustained, but it will not cry, “You are wicked!” but, rather, “You are mistaken!” John Freeman’s New Statesman is more likely to be more “grown-up”, more rational, penetrating and enquiring.’3

  Tony Howard said much the same thing: ‘Soft-heartedness went out and hard-headedness came in, with adjectives like “well-balanced” and “judicious” replacing familiar epithets such as “outrageous” or “unforgivable”.’4

  Anthony Howard was one of Freeman’s first appointments. He came from The Guardian and was the first professional parliamentary correspondent the New Statesman employed. He had no preconceived view and had access to information from all sides. The second was Karl Meyer as Washington correspondent. John Kennedy was now President and Freeman was determined that the New Statesman’s anti-American bias of the Cold War should be replaced by a recognition that the centre of power in the western world must lie in Washington. The third appointment was Karl Miller as literary editor. Having poached him from The Spectator, Freeman let him get on with the job of professionalising the literary criticism in the back half of the paper. At editorial meetings he occasionally offered suggestions for the music coverage, music being his first artistic love (his favourite composers were Ravel, Mahler and Shostakovitch), but otherwise he left well alone. ‘Culturally I am a complete conservative,’ he said.5