Open Secret

by Stella Rimington

  I had lived in some inhospitable places while I was at Edinburgh, but my room in 17 Canning Street, Liverpool, was as bad as any. The house, a once-elegant Georgian building, was at that time divided into flats. I had a room in a flat at the top of the building, let to me by a lady who lived there on her own, who seemed to resent my presence. She occasionally locked me out by putting the bolt on the door if she disapproved of the man I had gone out with, or thought I was out too late. The house was dominated by cats. Hundreds of them, it seemed, lived in the basement and garden and ten at a time would appear outside my bedroom window, sitting sunning themselves on the flat roof of an extension. There was another dominating animal presence too. From my window I could see into the yard of a meat factory across the road in which a guard dog was left chained up every night and all weekend. The dog, an Alsatian, was fastened by a fairly short rope to a line, which ran along the wall of the yard. It would run up and down the line, barking hysterically all weekend and waking me up early every Saturday and Sunday, when I wanted to stay in bed. But even if it had not been there, I would have been woken by the bells of Liverpool Anglican cathedral, which was just down the hill. The cathedral was surrounded by rows of empty, semi-derelict bomb-damaged houses which had not been touched since the war. One of them had a fading Union Jack painted on and the slogan ‘Welcome Home Mick’, a memento of some hero’s return.

  I did not much enjoy my time at Liverpool. The course was interesting and enjoyable enough but we were a small group of only five or six and, as a postgraduate, I was out of the main stream of the university. All my friends were still in Edinburgh and whenever I could afford to I went back there for weekends. However, I was moving inexorably towards earning my own living and towards the end of my year at Liverpool, I applied for a job as an Assistant Archivist in the Worcestershire County Record Office in Worcester. I went off for an interview to the Shirehall in Worcester and was interviewed by the Chief Clerk and the County Archivist. I must have impressed them more than I impressed the British Council, as I got the job and, much to my father’s relief, I am sure, started work in July 1959 at a salary of £610 per annum, my formal education finally over.

  4

  THE TWENTY-FOUR-YEAR-OLD GIRL who turned up for the interview at the Shirehall in Worcester in 1959 cannot have been particularly impressive. I was a thin-faced, rather anxious looking young woman, diffident and quietly spoken, with a slight Scottish accent, which mingled rather oddly with my short Midlands vowels. I had big eyes, a fringe which hung down into them and long hair in a ponytail, and I slouched. One of the panel must have commented on my posture during the first part of the interview, because before I went in for the second part, the County Archivist, who had obviously decided that he wanted me to get the job, advised me firmly to ‘sit up’. I was not socially at ease, except with my own friends, I had no small talk and I found meeting new people difficult and embarrassing. But, once I got started in that first job and realised that I could cope with it perfectly well, I loved everything about it. And at twenty-four I felt really free and independent for the first time in my life. I lived in a charming double-fronted Georgian house in Chestnut Walk, just a stone’s throw away from the Shirehall, which was my main place of employment. The house was owned by Miss Clarke, who was taking a degree at Oxford as a mature student and was away a good deal of the time. I shared the house with a young woman who taught at the Alice Otley Girls’ School in Worcester, who was also a lodger, and we each had our own little flat. No-one was using the garden, so one year I grew potatoes and broad beans. Worcester was a delightful town to live and work in.

  The County Record Office had two premises, one in the Shirehall, where the County Archivist, E.H. Sargeant, had his office up a cast-iron spiral stair above the entrance, and the other in a disused church, St Helen’s, at the other end of the High Street. I could walk to one and the other was just a bicycle ride away. That meant that although we started work at 8.30, I did not need to get up till 8. I could go home for lunch if I wanted to and I was home in the evenings by 5.30. The Record Office Staff consisted of Mr Sargeant and his Deputy, Miss Henderson, a very sensible down-to-earth lady, who wore flat brown sandals and cycled everywhere, and two Assistant Archivists, myself and Brenda. Brenda and her husband had been among the first undergraduates at Keele University. They lived a rather hippie lifestyle with their baby, whom the husband looked after during the day while Brenda was at work – a sufficiently unusual arrangement in those days to cause raised eyebrows. Mr Sargeant, who had been a sergeant in the Army in the war, regarded their lifestyle as beyond the pale, and was always exhorting Brenda to ‘smarten up’, advice which she happily ignored. There was also a group of young clerks, all addressed as Mr This and Miss That – the use of Christian names was frowned on by Mr Sargeant to whom good order and discipline were very important. He ran that office like an army camp. He had rigged up a series of electric buzzers to communicate from his office to other parts of the Shirehall where members of his staff might be working. The archives were stored in a series of muniment rooms in the basement of the building and we had a subsidiary office in the Judge’s Lodgings, where members of the public who came in to consult the archives could read them.

  The first thing any new member of his staff had to do was learn the Morse code, so that when he buzzed the Morse letter T on the buzzer you knew it was tea time. I was regarded very favourably, because I had already learned it tapping on our air raid shelter during the war. We were expected to assemble in his room at the top of the spiral stairs for morning and afternoon tea breaks and briefing. We each had our call sign, and if he wanted any of us in his office or there was a telephone call for us when we were working in one of the muniment rooms, he would buzz our call sign on the buzzer, and we would be expected to come running. He used to time how long it took us to get there, and if it was too long we were firmly told to do better next time. It is a wonder none of us ever broke our neck on the spiral stairs.

  One of his favourite tricks, which he liked to play on new arrivals in the office, was to ask them, with no warning, to address the assembled group on a subject of their choosing for five minutes. It caused great anguish for the victim, but once you had done it successfully, addressing the Women’s Institute or the local school sixth forms, which was a regular part of the job of the archivists, did not seem quite such a daunting experience. Mr Sargeant made no distinction between the archivists and the clerks in the way he treated us. My first job on arriving in the Record Office with my Honours degree and my postgraduate diploma was to make the tea. He thought no one could be of any use in that office unless they knew how to make tea to his satisfaction. He bullied us all, but it was meant well and was taken by us in that spirit. The atmosphere in the office was friendly and cooperative and we all enjoyed it. In his eccentric way he was in fact an excellent trainer of staff.

  The Archives were split between the two buildings. In the Shirehall were all the modern records of the County Council, all except those in current use were the responsibility of the Archives Department, and in St Helen’s church were the ancient records of the County and Diocese of Worcester, including those of the cathedral and many of the parish records. In St Helen’s too were the ‘private collections’, the archives of some of the local families, such as the Beauchamps of Madresfield Court which had been placed with the Record Office on so-called ‘permanent loan’, for safekeeping and so they could be used by researchers. In St Helen’s too was the Worcestershire Photographic Record, which Mr Sargeant had started and for which he had recruited a band of enthusiastic local photographers to photograph all the old buildings in Worcestershire. We were on the verge of the 1960s. Much that was ancient and interesting had fallen into disrepair. New buildings were being put up, motorways were being built and Mr Sargeant could already sense that much of Worcestershire’s history was in danger of destruction. It was his intention that at least it should be recorded photographically before it disappeared.

 
The Worcester Record Office contained a fine collection and was much used by everyone from County Council officials to historians, authors and schoolchildren. Our job was very varied. One of the first things I was given to do was to create a new filing system for the Highways and Bridges Department’s staff to use for their current papers. This was not the sort of thing I had imagined doing when I had been studying mediaeval Latin and 14th-century handwriting at Liverpool. But when I had completed that job to Mr Sargeant’s satisfaction, I was allowed to escape to St Helen’s. There our oldest document was a charter from the reign of King Stephen and we had a fine collection of early Bishops’ Registers and a set of the records of the Archdeacons’ Court, which went back for centuries. Some of our most frequent customers were the Mormons and their representatives. They were researching the ancestors of fellow Mormons, by searching for names, usually in the parish records. My understanding was that if the ancestors could be identified their names would be written down and they would be posthumously baptised so that their spirits would pass from wherever they were into the Mormon heaven. I was rather uneasy about this particular activity. It occurred to me that the ancestors might not wish suddenly to be moved about, particularly without being given an opportunity to express an opinion.

  I loved working in St Helen’s church, and not only because one was away from the boss’s eagle eye and his buzzer. The church itself, down at the bottom of the High Street and close by the cathedral, was an office full of atmosphere, and working there, surrounded by the history of the county and the diocese, gave me much satisfaction. It was not all academic peace and quiet though. We had many visitors with a wide variety of questions and research projects, all of whom needed our help and from time to time the peace was punctuated by the sound of china breaking, as the Worcester Porcelain factory next door smashed up its rejects in the yard.

  I was at my happiest when I was asked to go out in the little grey office van to visit a vicar in his parish, or a stately home owner or families who had interesting historical papers. It was my job to catalogue what they had and ultimately to try to persuade them to deposit their documents in the Record Office on permanent loan. My pet hate at that time was the lampshade makers. It was fashionable at that period to have lampshades made out of real old parchment deeds and the manufacturers’ agents were going around offering people money for such things. I thought it quite scandalous that our history was being destroyed in this way. In my effort to beat the lampshade makers, I developed my powers of persuasion, ruthlessly using my charm to persuade people that their social duty lay in giving me their old records for safekeeping in the Record Office rather than making money by selling them to the lampshade makers. It was these same powers of persuasion, which came in very useful years later, when in MI5 I had to try to persuade people to do much more unlikely and sometimes dangerous things on behalf of their country. You could say that I cut my teeth on those vicars.

  At weekends John, who had by then finished Cambridge and started work in London as an Assistant Principal in the Board of Trade, used to come up by train from London whenever he could afford it. We would walk the county, visiting the churches and villages and in the evenings I would practise my cooking on him, a skill which was still at a fairly early stage of development. When he was not there, the two young articled clerks in the Clerk’s Department, just down from university, kept me company. When there was nobody around, I used to cycle around the county, making rubbings of the memorial brasses in some of the churches. Later, I acquired a Heinkel bubble car, and I went everywhere in that. I was a fairly new driver and I and anyone who travelled with me must have been at considerable risk. With my university friend Isolyn, I even took it to France on the car ferry aeroplane which used to fly from Lydd to Le Touquet, and we drove to the Black Forest. I can remember looking up through the bubble top at the huge lorries bearing down on us menacingly on the French motorways. Looking back on that whole period, in the light of everything that has happened since, I remember it as a carefree idyll.

  My job was interesting, I met some eccentric and amusing people and at the end of the day it did not much matter if it was not particularly well-paid or leading anywhere. I was sure I would get married one day; I would probably stop work before long and live on my husband’s income, so I might just as well do whatever I fancied. Worcestershire was a beautiful county, full of charming villages with wonderful half-timbered houses. Because I learned all about the county through my work, and worked at the heart of its administration, I felt very much at home there.

  Of course it had its unhappy moments, and there were some things about it which would raise the hackles of my modern-day equivalents. For one thing, women did not have equal pay. If there had been a male Assistant Archivist in that office, he would have been earning more than I was for doing the same work. That was something women took for granted in those days, though I think if there had been a man there, which mercifully there was not, and I had been confronted with the inequality at close quarters, even in those days I would have found such unfairness hard to swallow.

  There were other things that were taken for granted too, like the office party. The Record Office was part of the Clerk’s Department of the County Council and the Christmas party was for the whole department. Mr Sargeant tried to warn me against going, without actually directly telling me not to and I realised why, when at a certain stage of the evening things started to hot up and a series of pairing games began. In one I remember particularly, the women were expected to throw one of their shoes into a heap in the middle of the room and the men each chose one. The paired-off couple would then go into one of the offices for whatever purpose occurred to them when they got there. My partner, who was a singularly unattractive clerk in the Finance Department, did not get very far with me, once I realised what the game was all about. Nowadays, I think a few charges of sexual harassment might have resulted from that evening, but in those days women were expected to look after themselves.

  Towards the end of 1961, the idyll was over and I was beginning to feel that it was time to move on. I felt thoroughly unsettled. My relationship with John had gone into what appeared to be its terminal decline, and I seemed to have done everything there was to do in Worcester. I have found throughout my career that, after about three or four years in any job, I have begun to get bored and started to look round for the next one. I applied for a number of jobs in record offices in other parts of the country, including one as Archivist at St Andrews University, which seemed to me at that time about the right distance away from both London and Worcester. Mercifully I did not get the job because, shortly after that, John and I made it up and decided to get married. From then on I was interested only in jobs in the capital. I applied unsuccessfully to the British Museum, and shortly afterwards I was appointed to a post in the European Manuscripts Department of the India Office Library (which at the time was part of the Commonwealth Relations Office) and I moved to London.

  5

  THAT MOVE TO London firmly put an end to any idyllic quality my life might have had up to then. In those early-60s days London was still a rather grim place to live. The last of the great smogs was in progress as I arrived and I saw everything through a thick yellow haze which left my eyes sore and watering and a line of grime round my nose where I had breathed in the filthy air. There were still huge bomb craters in the City of London, full of buddleia bushes and campion in the summer, but they were rapidly being filled in with great shoe-box buildings, which seemed ugly and out of proportion even in those days. Millbank Tower was being built and a huge crane with ‘Mowlem’ picked out in lights towered over Millbank and Pimlico where John lived. Swinging London had not happened, and our idea of an evening out was to take ourselves, very occasionally, to what we thought of as a posh restaurant. It was usually Au Père de Nico in Chelsea, where we could dine for less than £4 if we were careful. One evening, celebrating John’s first promotion, we went to Leoni’s in Soho and found ourselves sitting at the n
ext table to Dr Beeching, who was at the time responsible for closing down half the country’s railway system. We watched with awe as he and his companion ate their way through what seemed to us an immensely lavish meal. He demolished his food very quickly with the same avidity with which he was dismembering the railways.

  All the problems experienced by anyone coming to live and work in London began for me at that time. The first, of course, was where I was to live. John was sharing a flat in St George’s Square in Pimlico and there was no room for me. In any case, my parents would not have approved of my sharing accommodation with him before we were married. At the beginning of the 1960s that was still regarded by people from my sort of background as rather risqué. So I had to find something else, and my first recourse was to the YWCA in Tottenham Court Road, where I stayed for a few weeks. Meanwhile, I trawled the flat agencies of Kensington and Westminster, and was shown some places which to me, straight from my double-fronted Georgian house in its large garden in Worcester, seemed totally unfit for human habitation. I went round with an agent recommended by the Commonwealth Relations Office and became quite depressed by the seemingly endless supply of squalid rooms, described as ‘one room flats’, made out of badly partitioned floors of decrepit houses in Victoria and Pimlico. Some had people in bed in them, who were clearly not meant to be there. Some of these were obviously prostitutes. To me, the provincial girl come to town, it was all quite a shock. Over the years I have watched most of those same houses being gentrified to be lived in in something like the style for which they were originally built. The squalid rooms still exist of course, but now they are mostly further out of the centre of the town.