A History of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  32

  The Spies: Tom and Guy in Moscow

  Britain’s spy networks were far more effectively hidden by upper-class connections than by the homosexual inclinations of a few of Moscow’s men. The full story of the Cambridge spies does not belong here but to the thirties and the divided loyalties of the anti-fascists. The tale of how a cluster of rebellious former public schoolboys came to believe that the fight against poverty and Hitler required their allegiance to the bloodthirsty regime of Stalinist Russia, and then how they infiltrated the British intelligence and diplomatic services before and during the Second World War, is well known. The sons of a diplomat, a naval officer, an Anglican clergyman and a cabinet minister, they were about as traditionalist and patriotic in their upbringing as it was possible to be. They remained quintessentially English afterwards too. The Labour MP and journalist Tom Driberg visited one of them, Guy Burgess, a few years after he had dramatically defected with Donald Maclean. (And it was dramatic: Maclean’s pregnant wife had just cooked a special ham for dinner at their home near Churchill’s country house, when Burgess arrived and raced him off to Southampton for the overnight ferry to St Malo.) In Moscow, Driberg found Burgess outside a hotel, ‘his bird-bright ragamuffin face…tanned by the Caucasian sun’. Burgess explained his job involved trying to get the Russians to translate and publish the novels of E.M. Forster. In his flat Burgess strummed the Eton boating song on his piano and proudly showed that his suit still had a stitched badge reading ‘Messrs Tom Brown of Eton, High Street, Tailors’. The Moscow defectors would die there, mildly regretful but entirely unrepentant, while two further traitors, Sir Antony Blunt, who became Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, and the economist John Cairncross, privately confessed and were left unexposed and unpunished for much of their lives.

  Did they matter, really? They did. Between them British traitors helped the Soviet Union acquire nuclear weapons earlier than would otherwise have happened, passed huge amounts of information to Stalin’s secret police, were directly responsible for the deaths of scores of British and other Western agents at the hands of the KGB and, in Philby’s case, managed to stymie an American attempt to create an uprising in Albania, so keeping that wretched country under the heel of one of the most primitive tyrannies of modern times. Their story has been made ‘glamorous’ by the gilded associations of pre-war Cambridge, and the idealism of being anti-Nazi when part of the British Establishment were not. Films and countless books, some by the spies themselves, have romanticized them. Yet the consequences of their spying were squalid and dangerous. Nor were they actually the most successful spies – less ‘glamorous’ characters such as Alan Nunn May, a scientist, and Fuchs, were more important. It was the Dutch-born George Blake, who escaped from occupied Holland at the age of twenty, joined the Royal Navy, was recruited by MI6 and captured by the Communists in Korea, who probably caused most damage. He had been shocked, he later said, by the effects of American bombing of Korean villages and passed the names of 400 British-controlled agents in Germany to the Russians, with predictable consequences for many of them. Some think he was brainwashed. Blake was caught and in 1961 was given a prison sentence of forty-two years, which remains the longest sentence ever imposed by a British court. He, of course, was not a dapper and well-connected Old Etonian with friends to tip him off.

  What is it about the British and spying? Other Western nations had their post-war spying scandals, particularly the Americans and the West Germans. But nowhere was quite so gripped as Britain by the actions of Soviet agents. Class and sex are undeniably part of the answer. But there is another half-buried theme – British anti-Americanism. Philby claimed all his life that he was a British patriot who felt that the country was simply allied with the wrong side. Another student in the same Cambridge college as Philby at the same time (though they never knew one another) was Enoch Powell who came to much the same conclusion a few years later. This anti-Americanism was something which could bring together patriotic right-wingers and left-wingers in a common cause. Washington was constantly warning London about intelligence lapses and the possibility of traitors. But even when Russian defectors brought descriptions of Maclean and Philby to MI5, they were languidly dismissed; unless there were even more traitors, even higher in the system (and Philby was close to the top) then disdain and smugness must have been to blame for the grotesque failures of security.

  Once traitors were discovered there was then a national case for not making too much of it because of the angry reaction from the American intelligence services, on whom Britain relied very heavily. Politicians were obliged to explain or failed to explain, the defections and the rising suspicions of third and fourth and then fifth men still uncovered. Macmillan, as Foreign Secretary in 1955, was obliged to knock down the idea that Philby might be a Russian spy who had tipped off Burgess and Maclean four years earlier (he was, of course, and had). Later, after yet more spies had been uncovered, Macmillan was told by an excited Sir Roger Hollis of MI5 that the organization had arrested Vassall. Macmillan seemed dejected at the news and when Hollis said he didn’t seem very pleased, replied: ‘No, I’m not pleased at all. When my gamekeeper shoots a fox, he doesn’t go and hang it up outside the Master of Foxhounds’ drawing room; he buries it out of sight.’ Macmillan, by now Prime Minister, lamented that there would be a great public trial, the security services would be blamed, and ‘there will be a debate in the House of Commons and the Government will probably fall. Why the devil did you “catch” him?’ More concerned about harassing the press, Macmillan got two scalps when journalists refused to give their sources for allegations concerning Vassall and were briefly imprisoned. It was not surprising that people suspected an Establishment cover-up by chaps who belonged to the same clubs and did not like their dirty washing flapping in public.

  33

  Public Laughter

  Had anyone been asked to define British humour in the aftermath of the war, they would probably have come up with the genteel, meticulous cartoonists of Punch whose neatly cross-hatched ink world stretched from Westminster and the Home Counties to the more remote areas of the Scottish Highlands but included little in between. They might have mentioned the rude postcards of the seaside tradition, fat overhanging bosoms and little Willies. There were some rather lame newspaper comic-strips; the radio surrealism of It’s That Man Again; the exuberance of Flanders and Swann; and on film, the warm, ultimately optimistic humour of George Formby and the Ealing comedies. From the late thirties to the mid-forties the world had been harsh enough perhaps, without harsh laughter too.

  What Britain had had, above all, was music hall. Even in the fifties musical reviews were still being widely performed, weaving a little light innuendo among the songs. Few of the hundreds of once-famous double acts, singers, comedians, slapstick artists, clowns and acrobats from the Victorian and Edwardian heyday of music hall had been recorded, though they provided the main form of mass entertainment for half a century. This was a powerful culture which required skilled, physically tough and consistent artistes who could sing, dance and tell jokes, the original ‘variety acts’. Some of the fun can still be glimpsed in modern Christmas pantos and seaside summer shows, though these must be a pale shadow of that lost, garish gaiety. After the war there was a surge of one-way traffic as music hall acts were taken up by the BBC Light Programme and when, in the fifties, television began to take off a final generation of people who had learned their trade in small seaside and provincial theatres, would arrive to hoof it, clown and sing for the cameras. Bruce Forsyth, Jimmy Tarbuck, Ken Dodd, Eric Morecambe, Ernie Wise and their rivals were the last products of the old musical theatre and its relentless demand for all-singing, all-dancing comic talent. In its way, music hall is as important to the smell and colour of twentieth-century Britishness as rock music. It has just had less effective PR.

  Below the surface, new kinds of comedy were slouching unsteadily towards those microphones, cameras and footlights. One could write a useful contem
porary history by simply asking of any particular time: what made people laugh? To be British now became bound up with a string of radio and television shows, their catchphrases, lateral logic and increasingly rude jokes. The harder tone of new British comedy came most obviously from two sources. One was the absurdity of many people’s army experiences during and after the war. The other, with the later satire boom, was the absurdities of private boarding schools. No democracy had mobilized a greater proportion of its people in the world war. No country sent more of the children of its elite to boarding schools with strange rules. What followed from these two incontrovertible facts was very funny indeed. It meant elongated, grotesque faces; weird nasal voices; nonsense words that could send apparently normal people into hysterics – a private British world created some of the most chippy, eloquent people on the planet in the sixth decade of the twentieth century. One of the most idiosyncratic and energetic aspects of British culture could be called popular surrealism. It was not the surrealism of experimental film-makers or painters, but of Max Wall, Goons and eventually Pythons as well.

  The name ‘Goon’, picked up from Popeye cartoons, seems to have begun with Spike Milligan. In the opening stages of the war, Milligan had played childish boredom-repelling games with fellow gunners around their battery in Bexhill. Milligan was a working-class child of the British Empire. His father was Irish, and had performed in music halls as a youth, alongside another boy called Charlie Chaplin who then disappeared off abroad. He had then joined the British Army, like his father before him, so that Spike was born in India and brought up there and in Burma. It seems to have been a golden time before his father lost his army job in pre-war defence cuts and the family had to return, settling in Catford, south London. Poorly educated, Spike got a job as a clerk until he was sacked for stealing cigarettes. He taught himself to play the trumpet and dabbled in politics – joining the Young Communists and according to one report, flirting with Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts too. Then in 1939, as he recalled later, an envelope arrived containing ‘a cunningly worded invitation to participate in World War II’. Army service bored and frightened Milligan but it was the making of him.

  Tens of thousands of soldiers found that the fear of death, nutty regulations, stupid officers and the incompetence of the war machine, required a more raucous, sardonic humour than they had been used to at home. Spike was sent as a signaller to North Africa, where he was duly shelled, lost friends and was injured, always playing jokes and making up games to pass the boring times. As the fighting moved north through Italy, he saw another gunner take part in one of the Army variety shows put on to amuse the troops. This was Harry Secombe, a commercial traveller’s son from Swansea, who, like Spike, had been a clerk before the war. The two were soon working together, part of a loose association of military comedians and musicians who would eventually tickle the nation when they returned (Dick Emery, Benny Hill, Frankie Howerd and Tommy Cooper among them). Meanwhile in India, Peter Sellers, a young half-Jewish impressionist was busy impersonating Sikh officers and RAF commanders. Michael Bentine, an Old Etonian intelligence officer and actor, would later complete the quartet, the most influential act of British comedy surrealism in the fifties, and one of the most important ever. Almost all of them had some music-hall connections – Sellers’s mother and grandmother had been singers and dancers, and Secombe’s family was saturated in music-hall culture. But they had all added a new twist, the result of those transforming army years.

  The Goon Show was subversive without being party political, or even conventionally political at all. Spike Milligan described it as ‘against bureaucracy…its starting-point is one man shouting gibberish in the face of authority.’ Of one of the Goons’ classic villains, Milligan said that it was ‘a chance to knock people who my father, and I as a boy, had to call “sir”. Colonels, chaps like Grytpype-Thynne with educated voices, who were really bloody scoundrels. They’d con and marry old ladies; they were cowards charging around with guns.’ And one of his producers, Peter Eton, said later: ‘We were trying to undermine the standing order. We were anti-Commonwealth, anti-Empire, anti-bureaucrat, anti-armed forces.’ Milligan, Secombe, Bentine and Sellers were demobilized into the rationed, bureaucrat-dominated Britain of the forties so it is hardly surprising that their humour was aimed at unthinking patriotism and official bungling. It was exactly what people wanted and needed, however nervous the BBC felt when the show began broadcasting in 1951. Older listeners found it alarming and baffling, but millions were quickly mimicking the silly voices, appalling puns and nonsense words of Goonery. Milligan remained prickly about being working class, and was political enough to support the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament away from the microphones. His comedy was meant to sting. Yet there was a warmth about the Goons that drew some of that sting: had it been otherwise it is unlikely that the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales would have been quite such enthusiastic fans.

  34

  All Fall Down: Suez

  Some sense of the popularity of the Tories’ crown prince throughout Churchill’s sluggish and frustrating last government, Anthony Eden, can be gauged from his reception in the 1955 election when Churchill had at last retired. Most of the time he travelled in his own car, declaring that ‘if I cannot travel in my own country without an armed guard, I would rather retire from politics.’ But when he went by train, women arrived at the windows at each stop with huge bouquets of flowers. Here was the man who had stood up to Hitler, decently waited for Churchill to retire and was now a great architect of post-war global peace. Shortly after the election, Eden invited the new Soviet leader Khrushchev to London. (Despite a completely drunk translator, the visit had gone well, though at one point Khrushchev was introduced to the huntin’-and-shootin’ Tory politician, Lord Lambton, as ‘a shooting peer’. The Soviet leader solemnly and sympathetically shook hands with Lambton, assuming that this meant he was under sentence of death and shortly to be shot.) Eden was at root an intensely patriotic man, who thought Britain’s Commonwealth links far more important than deeper entanglements with Europe. Among his weaknesses were his inherited foul temper and a racist disdain for Arabs. But for most people in 1956 Eden seemed an almost beau ideal, the man for the moment.

  Suez is often seen as a very short era of bad judgement, a crisis whose origins are obscure and whose consequences are hard to discern. This sells it short. Suez was about Britain’s colonial history. It had begun as something very personal, a duel between an English politician of the old school and an Arab nationalist leader of the new post-war world. Anthony Eden and what he represented for the Britain of the mid-fifties are worth dwelling on. Through most of Eden’s life he had been a glittering and glamorous figure, hugely admired across the political spectrum, a global peacemaker and statesman. Remembered by one colleague as ‘half mad baronet, half beautiful woman’, Eden had come from a landed, if sometimes eccentric family. During the Suez crisis he was seen in Washington as the epitome of alien English snobbishness. In fact one of his forebears, a baronet of Maryland, had been a great friend of George Washington and supporter of the American Declaration of Independence. Another had written a pioneering study of the poor, warmly praised by Karl Marx. Eden was never absolutely sure of his paternity – his mother was vivacious – but it was probably the wild, spendthrift, artistic Sir William Eden. He was a baronet out of the pages of a satirical novel, much given to hurling joints of roast lamb out of windows and, when riding to hounds, jumping closed level-crossing gates without waiting for oncoming trains. He had a terrible temper and used language so bad that, when he was presiding over local police courts, Durham miners would come simply for the pleasure of hearing him swear.

  The boy Eden, a beautiful casket seething with unstable genes, went on to Eton. He fought bravely in the First World War, during which his oldest brother was killed in the trenches and his much-loved younger brother was killed at sea, days after his sixteenth birthday. A liberal-minded Tory MP from 1923 onwards, Eden rose to becom
e the Foreign Office minister who had face-to-face negotiations in the thirties with Mussolini, Hitler – the two men discovered they had fought opposite one another in the trenches, and drew maps of their respective positions – and Stalin, whom Eden thought was a kind of oriental despot. After becoming Foreign Secretary and helping form the pre-war system of alliances and League of Nations agreements, he dramatically resigned in 1938 in protest at the appeasement of Nazi Germany, finally returning to serve Churchill, again as Foreign Secretary, from 1940 to 1945. A brilliant linguist, highly cultured and with a deep love of modern art, a lover of many women, a genuine diplomatist, he was familiar by the mid-fifties with most of the world’s leaders. In 1954 at Geneva he had arranged a key conference to try to keep peace in the new Cold War world, a summit seen then as a last throw to prevent the Third World War.

  So what of Nasser? If Eden was the model of a kind of Englishness, Colonel Gamel Abdel Nasser was the original of the anti-colonialist autocrat who would become familiar over the decades to come – charismatic, patriotic, ruthless, opportunistic. Driving the British from Egypt was the cause that burned in him from his teenage years, and not surprisingly. Egypt, though nominally independent under its own king, had been regarded as virtually British until the end of the Second World War. It had been the centre of the fight against Rommel’s Afrika Corps, and the pivot around which Britain’s domination of the Middle East revolved. The oil fields of Iran and Iraq which kept Britain working, the Suez Canal through which a quarter of British imports and two-thirds of Europe’s oil arrived, the airfields which refuelled planes bound for India and Australia – all this made Egypt a hub; a pivot; Britain’s Mediterranean naval. Most British families contained someone who had served in Egypt at some time. What was less special was the casual contempt British people tended to reserve for the Egyptians themselves, or ‘wogs’ as they were more commonly known. Churchill had reacted to one moment of earlier Egyptian insubordination by shouting that if they didn’t look out ‘we will set the Jews on them and drive them into the gutter’.