John le Carré

by Adam Sisman

  Frank Cornwell was a small man, with a drooping moustache that matched his heavy eyebrows. On Remembrance Day he would take part in the wreath-laying ceremony in Poole Park, looking very grand in his alderman’s robes. He was an active Baptist, superintendent of the York Road Mission and Sunday School (a small tin chapel) and an enthusiastic lay pastor at the Baptist church in nearby Swanage. The daughter of family friends remembered him driving them to Swanage, his arms outstretched to clutch the wheel; he would suddenly start singing a hymn, his favourites being ‘We’re Marching to Zion’ and ‘Standing on the Promises of God’. The car was always beautifully kept, Bible-black and shiny, swooping into the drive of the Cornwells’ house in Mount Road and scattering the gravel.5 Later Frank became secretary of the much more substantial Parkstone Tabernacle, where after his death his widow would pay for a handsome wooden screen to be erected in his memory, still there to be admired today. In 1936 he would be elected president of the Southern Baptists, an association which embraced around eighty churches across the south of England.

  The Cornwells were strict nonconformists. Their religion preached steadfastness and self-denial in this world, in the comfort and consolation of eternal life in the hereafter. Every Sunday they sang hymns at home, as one of their three daughters thumped away at the harmonium. No newspapers were allowed in their house on the Sabbath. ‘God is watching you,’ the boys were warned. Frank’s wife Elizabeth, generally known as Bessie, was a kindly woman who still spoke with the Irish lilt of her girlhood. She presided at midweek mothers’ meetings of the York Road Mission. The congregation consisted mainly of very poor women, laden with shopping baskets, hoping for better things to come. After Sunday school there would be charabanc outings to the outlying villages of Lytchett Matravers or Corfe Mullen, or ‘magic lantern’ slide shows and tea parties if it rained. One of the children who attended regularly later recalled Mr Cornwell summoning them outside, carrying a big jar: he would scoop out a handful of boiled sweets and hurl them down the hill, where they would scramble to pick them up.6

  In the narrow nonconformist community of the south coast, religion, commerce and local politics were intertwined. The highest standards were expected in each of these three branches of life. The slightest hint of impropriety in business was taken very seriously – much more seriously than any sexual transgression. Anyone guilty of improper commercial activity faced the threat of being ostracised. In his acceptance speech as mayor of Poole, Frank Cornwell declared his intent to rely on ‘the Supreme Ruler of all Councils’ for the necessary wisdom and strength to carry out his duties. ‘It has been said’, he added, ‘that when standing on a high position it is wise to look upward for safety.’ To general applause, Frank paid tribute to his wife, who was such a great help to him in his public, social and religious duties. He was proud to see her present that morning, and also his son. A week later Ronnie organised an event with a nautical theme, to celebrate his father’s role as mayor of a borough intimately connected with the sea. The speaker who proposed a vote of thanks afterwards expressed his hope that the mayor’s son might ‘follow in his father’s footsteps to the Mayoralty’.7

  Later it would be said that Ronnie had been given too much too early. He was the only son of the family, and everybody’s favourite. His mother doted on him, as did his three sisters. They took a lenient attitude towards his scrapes. Ronnie learned early to expect women to love him and to give him whatever he wanted. His gingery hair was kept immaculately combed with sweet-smelling hair-oil. In later life women were always telling him what lovely hands he had; he was forever grooming them with nail-clippers, which he kept in his jacket pocket. He was equally proud of his large head, which he was said to have mortgaged for fifty pounds, cash in advance, the goods not to be delivered until his death. As a boy David fantasised about killing his father by chopping it off, and studied Ronnie’s broad neck, speculating about the best point to aim his axe.8 There was a story, perhaps apocryphal, that when Ronnie was born the doctor had commented on his remarkably large cranium. ‘This boy’, the doctor is supposed to have said, ‘will be either a master criminal or a very successful businessman’ – innocently assuming a distinction between the two. For Ronnie there was no such boundary; in fact there were no boundaries at all. By his own reckoning he was a moral man, yet his behaviour was unscrupulous. He would stop at nothing to satisfy his greedy appetites, even groping his own children. As well as taking advantage of institutions such as friendly societies and benevolent funds, he persuaded a succession of trusting widows, pensioners and other vulnerable people to invest their savings with him; few would ever see their money again. Ronnie’s apparent sincerity, indeed his air of injured sanctity, was one of his strengths.9 To deceive others he had first to deceive himself. Even as he swindled his friends and relations, he remained confident that he was doing them a favour. There was an element of theatre in all his performances. As his son Tony (who himself would become one of Ronnie’s victims) wrote many years later, ‘He could put a hand on your shoulder and the other in your pocket and both gestures would be equally sincere. He could rob you and love you at the same time.’10

  If his shenanigans were exposed, Ronnie would show no shame. He would not dwell on his past misdeeds; on the contrary, he lived in a state of permanent amnesia about them.

  In later life, at least in his kinder moods, David would come to think of his father as a version of P. G. Wodehouse’s Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge, a man who will do anything for money – except work. A creative opportunist, Ukridge ensures that no kindness shown to him, however small, goes unexploited for financial gain. He always has a scheme to make his fortune, lacking only the capital to carry it out; in repeatedly sponging on his friends and family he exhorts them to have ‘vision’.

  A man of extraordinary energy, warmth and vitality, Ronnie exuded optimism. From an early age he lived far beyond his means, confident that something would turn up to avert disaster. He smoked large cigars, drank brandy and whisky by the quart, ate at the best restaurants, stayed at the finest hotels, entertained generously and dispensed extravagant presents. He seldom settled an account unless pressed to do so, and often not even then. All debts, he considered, were negotiable. Towards women he radiated an unstinting and inexhaustible virility, with unfailing results.11 Yet menace lurked beneath the charm. There was a glint of violence in his eye. His hugs were a demonstration of ownership as much as of affection. When he came home sozzled Ronnie would sometimes climb on to David’s bed, pawing and fondling him, while David feigned sleep.*

  He believed himself to be a good father. ‘Son,’ he would say, ‘there’s Somebody up there looking down on us, and when it comes to my turn to be judged – as judged we all must be – He’s going to judge me on how I treated you boys.’ Indeed he tended to suggest that his misdeeds had been committed for their sake. Like everybody else, David found Ronnie hard to resist. Again and again Ronnie would ask the question, ‘Love your old man?’ – and whatever he may have felt in his heart, David would never be strong enough to say no. Ronnie was histrionic, able to cry at will if it served his purposes. ‘He would weep until he got you weeping too,’ David would write later, ‘while you hugged him and forgot whatever it was you were trying to confront him with.’

  He was immensely proud of his sons, though he dominated them as he did everyone else, to the extent that it would become necessary to escape. ‘How I got out from under Ronnie, if I ever did,’ David would write many years later, ‘is the story of my life.’12

  Ronnie’s dynamism made him the centre of any gathering. He was a natural leader, who soon attracted a following: a former schoolmaster, a part-time chauffeur, a speculative builder, a crooked lawyer and a dodgy accountant. These were his loyal footsoldiers, ever ready to meet his summons, to support his schemes and to help implement them, to enjoy his hospitality, to laugh at his jokes and, if necessary, to take the rap for him. David’s private term for them was ‘the Court’. Ronnie demanded faith fro
m his subjects, as he did from his creditors; doubters, if there were any, were forced to recant. To express doubt was to be a cynic, and cynics were among the worst creatures in Ronnie’s bestiary, alongside flunkies (civil servants), airy-fairies (intellectuals) and twerps (unbelievers).13

  Ronnie inherited from his father an oratorical style and an evangelical vocabulary, both of which he adapted for commercial purposes. He was a fluent and entertaining speaker, able to make an audience laugh and to move them with his apparent conviction. As the years passed, he shed the West Country accent of his boyhood, becoming ‘well spoken’, though he would lapse into a Dorset burr when angered. Conscious that he lacked polish, he was receptive to guidance on etiquette from his young bride. She taught him the correct way to use a knife and fork, for example. He was always sensitive to a slight, Olive said, especially at times of stress. David came to believe that his mother dwelt on Ronnie’s social inferiority as a figleaf of dignity to cover her own helpless subservience to him. ‘Olive never forgave Ronnie for marrying above himself … By keeping open the wounds that Ronnie’s low breeding had inflicted on her, by deriding his vulgarities of speech and lapses of delicacy, she was able to blame him for everything and herself for nothing, except her stupid acquiescence.’14

  Ronnie would strive to ensure that his boys were free of the social shortcomings which he believed had impeded his own progress, by sending them to expensive private schools. Each of them should become the gentleman that he never quite succeeded in becoming himself. This set up a social distance between father and sons; the nearer they approached the objective that he had set for them, the further they left him behind.

  Outwardly Ronnie was a success. He always dressed smartly. ‘Son,’ he would tell David, ‘all you really need in life is a clean shirt and a good suit.’ Ronnie favoured double-breasted pinstripes, a neatly folded silk handkerchief projecting from his breast pocket. Looking the part was half the battle in getting people to do what he wanted. He was impatient with the pettifogging restrictions imposed by small-minded bureaucrats or bank managers. (‘Who says no? Who did you speak to? Get him on the blower. Let me speak to him.’)15

  When he married Olive at the age of twenty-two Ronnie was already a member of the local Chamber of Commerce, and active in the Poole Rotary Club. A month after their wedding, he had organised the local Rotary Club’s annual ‘Ladies’ Evening’ in the splendid new ballroom of the Haven Hotel. As mayor of Poole, Frank Cornwell gave a short address, and the new ‘Mrs Ronald Cornwell’ responded to the toast to ‘The Ladies’ in a lively spirit, providing a riposte to every crack made at their expense.16

  In 1929 Ronnie would be elected the first president of the newly formed Poole Round Table. The Round Table movement was a fast-growing network of local clubs in which younger businessmen could exchange ideas, learn from the experiences of their colleagues and together contribute to civic life. It had been founded only a couple of years before, drawing its inspiration from a speech that the Prince of Wales had made in 1927 to the British Industries Fair. Records show that ‘Tabler Cornwell’ played an extremely active part in Round Table affairs during his year of office. He attended the first National Conference of Round Tables, where he proposed the adoption of a set of rules and a constitution for the movement.17 At a joint meeting of the Poole Rotary Club and Round Table, Ronnie expressed the junior body’s debt to the Club, which had ‘in a large measure started it upon its journey’. Responding to the main speaker’s talk on ‘Personality’, he argued that ‘expressive personality was particularly needed in these present days of keen competition. It had been said the business was 10% knowledge and 90% bluff, but was not that 90% really personality?’18

  Like his father, Ronnie was a freemason. In the future, whenever Ronnie moved to a new area, he would always seek out the local masonic temple. And though he would hardly ever attend a religious service of any kind, he would invariably contact the Baptist minister, which his mother found reassuring.

  Ronnie was active too in the Liberal Party. In the summer of 1930, for example, he spoke in support of his brother-in-law at a fund-raising garden party in a Bournemouth suburb. He attacked the town’s Conservative MP, Sir Henry Page Croft, mocking his equivocal stance towards the Empire Free Trade ‘Crusade’, launched by the Beaverbrook press as a new political party. ‘He reminds me of the young man who endeavoured to keep two young ladies on the go,’ Ronnie joked: ‘he sent his best wishes to one, and his love to the other.’19 Such humour was perhaps a little risqué for such an audience, but Ronnie could carry it off. His political views were unsophisticated. Like most of his fellow countrymen at the time, he took British superiority to be self-evident. Did not the King of England rule over the largest empire ever known, ‘the empire on which the sun never sets’? The ubiquitous maps on school walls, showing one-quarter of the globe’s surface in pale red, reinforced such complacency. Ronnie liked to quote from the great imperial writer Rudyard Kipling, especially his best-known poem ‘If’ which articulated his own philosophy of life: ‘If you can meet with triumph and disaster …’

  Early in 1931 he was adopted as the prospective Liberal candidate for South Dorset, a constituency won by the Liberals in the 1906 landslide, but held by the Conservatives at subsequent elections. Still only in his mid-twenties, Ronnie seemed to have a future in politics – but his political debut would be curtailed by dramatic events at Westminster. Later that summer the Labour Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald, facing a rebellion within his own Cabinet, invited ‘men of all parties’ to join him in a National Government. A coalition of MPs drawn from all three major parties was formed, with only the rump of the Labour Party and a few Liberals in opposition. The new National Government sought a mandate from the people by calling a general election. This parliamentary realignment permeated down to a local level. In the run-up to the election Frank Cornwell wrote an open letter to Alec Glassey, published in the Poole and East Dorset Herald. Though a Conservative, he declared his ‘whole-hearted support’ for Glassey, as one of those men ‘who have proved themselves to have put the nation before party politics’. Whether Glassey was grateful for this endorsement is not recorded.

  Only a week before the vote, in a dramatic speech to a crowded meeting at the Grand Theatre, Swanage, Ronnie announced that he was standing down to allow the sitting Conservative MP, Lord Cranborne, a clear run against the socialist candidate. ‘Adversity makes strange bedfellows,’ declared Ronnie, ‘but when the existence of the country is at stake I stand shoulder to shoulder with the National Government.’ He ended with a fine peroration: ‘I do not love my party less, but I love my country more.’20

  ‘God in Heaven, Wiggly, why can’t you get a move on for once?’ In his imaginary reconstruction of his own birth, as his mother struggled to bring him into the world, David depicted Ronnie as impatient for the process to be finished – as well he may have been, because his Swanage speech was delivered that same evening.

  Olive soon found that she had exchanged a life of dependency and dullness for one of exhilarating insecurity. Ronnie spent other people’s money with generous freedom, leaving behind him a trail of bounced cheques, unpaid bills and broken promises. His great hero, according to Olive, was Clarence Hatry, the flamboyant financier who had built a swimming pool on the roof of his Mayfair mansion, and once owned the largest yacht in British waters. Hatry had begun as an insurance clerk. He made his first fortune by profiteering during the First World War, and in the 1920s he built a business empire, always emerging richer despite three successive bankruptcies. The collapse of the Hatry Group in September 1929 is said to have triggered the Wall Street Crash. Hatry himself was imprisoned for forgery and fraud.

  Soon after they were married Olive began to sense that Ronnie was in financial trouble. She was flummoxed when tradesmen turned up at the house demanding to be paid; this was something quite outside her experience. In fact Ronnie had ventured into very deep water. Some years earlier he had diversified into prope
rty dealing, following the successful example of his father. He began to buy houses, generally providing about 10 per cent of the purchase price from his own funds and raising the remainder by mortgages. Quite quickly he accumulated a stock of about thirty-five properties. But this was during the Great Depression, a period when rental values slumped, and soon the income from the rents was insufficient to meet the outgoings. Mortgagees began to foreclose. By 1932 he estimated his losses from property speculation at £5,000. Moreover he had suffered an even larger loss from the failure of another venture. Ronnie had believed that the regulation of local coach services, introduced by the Labour Minister of Transport Herbert Morrison as part of the Road Traffic Act 1930, provided a golden opportunity. Until then coach services in Britain had operated in a kind of free-for-all; now local licences were being introduced, which would grant their holders the exclusive right to run services in that area. Ronnie speculated that these licences would be very valuable, and that they were likely to be awarded to those companies which already controlled most or all of the existing coach services. For some years he had been buying up local coach companies, with the aim of amalgamating them and eventually selling them on at a profit to a larger concern. He was well placed to do so, because the local proprietors were all existing clients of F. Cornwell & Son for insurance purposes. To raise the necessary cash he borrowed money from friends. Unfortunately most of the coaches had been obtained on hire purchase, and Ronnie found himself short of capital to make the repayments. Eventually the vehicles were reclaimed, and the business collapsed, with losses estimated at £6,000.21

  By May 1932, Ronnie was so seriously in debt that his father felt obliged to come to his aid. An agreement was reached by which Frank and one of his associates took charge of all Ronnie’s assets, including Ambleside, the house in which David had been born. Ronnie relinquished his interest in F. Cornwell & Son and bound himself not to enter into further transactions without consulting Frank. This caused, in Ronnie’s words, ‘a tremendous amount of friction’ between father and son, and Ronnie decided to leave the area, unwilling to accept any further curb on his activities.