A diminutive child
Then steps out to speak
On the strike. And he talks
Of the TUC’s cheek
In calling a strike—
Mr Baldwin he says,
Is only the Prime Minister.
He is not sinister.
But Ramsay MacDonald
He never would like.
Baldwin was the Conservative Prime Minister, MacDonald the Labour leader. The Klugmann family were leading Jewish Hampstead liberals: James’s father Samuel had been born in Bavaria and now ran Klugmann & Co., Rope and Twine Merchants, in the City of London. In common with Sir Donald’s, “his liberalism was rooted in the idea of self-improvement and individual responsibility . . . it was a liberalism which sought a wider civic duty, to use the advantages of privilege to aid the common good.” James was a natural candidate for Gresham’s, which he entered on a scholarship. Even at the age of thirteen he was showing many of the characteristics that brought him to Moscow’s attention as a potential recruit. He was “quiet and thoughtful, modest, conscientious, industrious and serious.” Above all, “he exercises great influence over people,” and through his quiet persuasiveness was later called upon when a good turn-out was needed from the Cambridge socialists at demonstrations and marches. He was certainly to influence Donald Maclean’s intellectual and political development profoundly: the latter, an outwardly unformed boy hidden under the weight of family beliefs and the Honour System, was ready to go into his adolescent cocoon and emerge fully formed.
*
The Svengali-like teacher of the questing, conscientious young minds of Gresham’s was a young French master, Frank McEachran. Maclean and Klugmann were his best students at the time. Auden “looked up to him . . . as a father figure,” and McEachran encouraged each new pupil to arrive at the “basic literary and philosophical framework of his lifetime’s enquiry while still at Gresham’s.” He ranged far beyond his own subject across literature, history, philosophy and poetry, a thrilling and inspirational combination to a thirsty young mind.* He believed passionately in the unity of Europe and its peoples, brought about through common culture, and wrote two books in response to the darkening situation in the wake of the economic collapse of the Depression and the growing fascist sentiment in Germany. He warned in 1932 that “the fever of nationalism which now rages around the world has not only shattered into fragments what little common feeling it once possessed but has also nearly destroyed the unity of Europe, the focus in modern times of human civilisation.”
Klugmann credited McEachran with the ability to open his “eyes to new horizons of ideas, new excitements, to rouse imagination in books and theories and liberalism and languages.” Although not a Marxist himself, McEachran urged Maclean and Klugmann to read Marx, and imbibe “the core ideas on the state, class struggle and historical materialism.” Both boys served on the school’s library committee and spoke regularly at the Debating Society, itself founded by McEachran in 1930. In February 1931, Maclean opposed the motion that “This House condemns Socialism both in theory and practice.” In words that picked up on his own unacknowledged tug of moralities, he “deplored the distinction between public and private morality. Socialism would carry into a wider sphere the domestic virtues of service, liberty and justice.” The motion was narrowly defeated.
Another McEachran innovation at the school, from 1929, was The Grasshopper magazine, for which Maclean wrote a strikingly dreamlike short story in 1931. “The Sandwichmen” are shuffling through the West End of London, “a bedraggled lot, with their ramshackle bowlers, their greeny-black overcoats all worn at the shoulders, their sagging, muddy trousers and then their boots that oozed mud as they slumped along the gutter. Their faces were studies in abject misery; dirty hair hung over their coat collars.” Shades of the General Strike and the early hunger marchers. In their degraded state the Sandwichmen are not even worthy of names. “Number Seven” looks up at a house in Wimpole Street “with a vague sort of interest.” We then cut to an operating theatre being prepared for an emergency night-time operation on a “famous society hostess.” The surgeon who is driven up for the surgery is “a very popular young man in town, for he had a rare charm of manner and a quick smile that made him many friends; but more than just being popular, he stood high on the esteem of the whole medical world, not only for his undisputed brilliance, but for his unstinting generosity with his talents.” He has come from “Lady Marsham’s reception” and “his face was flushed, his eyes bright and his manner slightly aggressive.” His blade slips, the patient’s blood wells up into the fatal wound, “the fumes left his fuddled brain, and he could see all too clearly now.” The surgeon flees into the night and the final sentence takes us back to the Sandwichmen as they leave Wimpole Street with “Number Seven.” The fall from brilliant young man to Sandwichman is painful, as Maclean imagines the narrow divide between fame and success. There is the background guilt associated with the ruinous effects of drink which he had absorbed from his Temperance Society father and the sermons both religious and secular at home; there is also a tension between desire and duty that was to run throughout the teenage author’s life, and the painful awareness of class differences and the dispossessed poor. The detail employed in the description of the men contrasts with the almost callous brittleness in the prose evoking the upper-crust society and the bright cleanliness of the operating theatre.
“The Sandwichmen” is eerily prophetic of many of Maclean’s own experiences in life. He rehearses the gaps between what we seem to be and what we are, between society life where conformity is important and “real” life. He subconsciously offers some of the key themes of his maturity, including the effects of drink and its potential for damage as instilled into him by his father, in fictional form.
Maclean and Klugmann saw each other in London during the holidays. While Maclean was a welcome guest in the free-speaking openness of the Klugmann household, he was careful to keep the self-styled “clever oddity” out of Southwick Place for fear of Sir Donald finding out about his burgeoning political philosophy. They went instead to socialist or avant-garde films or met in pubs. The school careers of the two boys in many ways mirrored their subsequent outward revelation of themselves to the world. Klugmann, who happily called himself “The Communist” while still at Gresham’s and went on to become one of the most overt and active members of the British Party, was “chubby, bespectacled and hopeless at games.” He hated the very idea of the Officer Training Corps, and did not become a prefect. Maclean, by contrast, excelled in these areas and had now become a good-looking young man, although his full lips and smooth face beneath his high cheekbones, combined with his rather mincing walk and naturally high-pitched voice, gave him an effeminate demeanour until he was well into his twenties. By that time his politics were completely covert.
*
When Sir Donald came to the school in November 1930, his son’s last year, to give a talk about the League of Nations, he was shortly to attain Cabinet office. The rise from crofter-shoemaker’s son to public figure was a triumph of hard work, faith in God and standing by his principles. He had chosen to send his first three sons to Gresham’s for the school’s liberal thinking and ethos, upholding the attributes that had served him so well. But his most brilliant and successful child shared Auden’s open loathing of the school’s “Fascist state” as created by the Honour System,† “a recipe for grief and anger,” for betraying pointless rules rather than adhering to any true morality—and in Maclean’s case, duplicity to hide that grief and anger. A few weeks before his father’s visit, young Donald spoke in a school debate to say that “man was at last beginning to ‘know himself’ . . . and to realise that true liberty was to be found in social service.” The model schoolboy, moulded by Presbyterianism and his school’s codes, needed to find the expression of “true liberty” that could satisfy his upbringing and the inner cravings that it engendered. He had come through a morally challenging childhood and adolesce
nce without a stain on his character; he was the pride of his parents and teachers.
Above all, he had learned the spy’s most essential art of keeping himself hidden while remaining a model of conformity in plain sight. He was the right man in the right times, and about to go to the right university.
* McEachran was to be the model for Hector, the eccentric teacher who instils excitingly varied knowledge into his pupils rather than slavishly following the curriculum, in Alan Bennett’s play about a class preparing for Oxbridge entrance, The History Boys.
† The poet’s final rejection of the Gresham’s oath comes in his 1936 poem “Last Will and Testament,” written with Louis MacNeice: MacNeice’s school bequest is “To Marlborough College I leave a lavatory / With chromium gadgets and a Parthenon frieze,” and Auden bleakly completes the stanza with an abstract bequest: “And Holt three broken promises from me.”
2
Dared to Question
Donald Maclean gave voice to the radically different selves that both brought him to establishment pre-eminence and nearly destroyed him. In the first month of his last year at Cambridge, October 1933, the student magazine Granta started a new column, “The Undergraduate in the Witness Box,” a question-and-answer format which explored the beliefs and personalities of its subjects. First up was Roualeyn Cumming-Bruce, who is clear and open about his politics: “I am a Communist . . . when I left the Labour Party and took up my stand with the Communists it was after as complete an examination as possible of the theory.” Cumming-Bruce, who ended a distinguished legal career as a Lord Justice of Appeal unaffected by his earlier political affiliations, takes all the questions put to him head-on. The witnesses in the following issues of Granta are similarly frank: the next talks about his controversial views on art, the third about mathematics, in which she is much more interested than in being one of the few woman undergraduates of the time.
The fourth undergraduate “in the box” was Maclean, and the tone of the series shifts dramatically. On being asked by “Q” (for “Questioner”) whether he would be embarrassed if his “undergraduate personality” was examined, Maclean replies, “Not a bit. But which one? I have three dear little fellows. Here comes Cecil. Perhaps you would like to begin with him.” Cecil, a camp aesthete, is somewhat startled to be called upon, as he “was just slipping into my velvet trousers when I heard you call . . . You must come to my next party. I am going to have real Passion flowers, and everybody is going to dress up as a Poem of Today.” He would be better suited to the Oxford of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, with Anthony Blanche reciting poetry through a megaphone from his window while less privileged undergraduates are ducked in college fountains, than to the more austere and high-minded world of 1930s Cambridge, the university of choice for the next generation of the intellectually modern Bloomsbury Group.
Maclean takes over asking the questions as well as introducing alter egos to answer them. He dismisses Cecil (“Now run along and get on with your tapestry work”) and produces the hearty Jack: “I just crack around. Buy a few club ties here and smash up a flick there. Bloody marvellous.” Jack is sent off to “oil his rugger boots” (Maclean had played the game for his college the previous year) and Fred, the swot, appears. “Everybody ought to work. That’s what I am here for. I want to get on. Take Shakespeare or Henry Ford—they knew what was what.” Fred belongs to “eleven societies and three lunch clubs,” and has read “a paper on Lessing’s Laokoon (in German, of course)” to one of the societies. He hopes to leave the university the following year with a first-class degree, as Maclean was to do.
Maclean is striving to mediate between his uncomfortably competing selves as he becomes adult. Even the voices that do not ring as true as others, Jack and to an extent Cecil, are an effective blurring device, a tidy evasion. However, towards the end of the piece the fun, the campness and the heartiness disappear. Instead, we have a direct, slightly peeved, slightly pompous appeal for the parts to be allowed to coexist, a plea for the three characters to be seen as a whole: “I like them all equally. I see no standard against which to set them, no hierarchy in which to put them—they are all of the same value to me . . . Cambridge expects one to be either Cecil, or Jack, or Fred. If one isn’t, Cambridge is annoyed.” Although he was already becoming more outspoken, often violently so, in his socialism—by that time he was serving on the committee of the Cambridge University Socialist Society (CUSS)—Maclean avoids being seen intimately as he throws his characters up in the air. He was publicly announcing a pattern that was to continue throughout his life: he was the outsider who sought roles and poses that are at odds with his upright social and professional standing, all the while concealing his most cherished beliefs.
Yet very shortly after leaving university he had worked out how to combine his different selves into what felt to him and looked to others like a confident, integrated man. Cambridge was to be his personal and political proving ground.
*
Maclean was at Cambridge at the key moment. Historically non-conformist and anti-establishment from the time of Oliver Cromwell, the university in the 1920s had shown few signs of being a political Petri dish and was firmly conservative. Britain had recognised the Soviet Union diplomatically only in 1924 (ten years before the United States opened an embassy there) and undergraduates’ “main political enthusiasms [in the 1920s] were hostility to Bolshevism, suspicion of the motives of trade unions and Labour politicians and a belief in the continuing utility and virtues of the British Empire.” Cambridge men had helped break the General Strike, with over half the undergraduate body taking up emergency positions on trains, trams, buses and soup kitchens rather than side with the strikers. In the same year, the Bishop of Nyasaland, the Right Reverend T. C. Fisher, preached a sermon in the University Church in which he told his audience (who were presumably quite startled even then) that “some years previously a writer had been a good deal criticised for saying he wished to try to train the African native as he trained his dog, but that he himself [the Right Reverend] did not feel inclined to criticise the sentence so sharply as he knew both the writer and the dog.” The students who came up after the “war to end all wars” were clinging to this old order, and the Union debates and student politics of the time reflected that.
The poet and Bloomsbury scion Julian Bell, soon to die for his left-wing convictions, wrote that when he first came to know Cambridge in 1930 “the central subject of ordinary intelligent conversation was poetry. As far as I can remember we hardly ever talked or thought about politics. For one thing, we almost all of us had implicit confidence in Maynard Keynes’s rosy prophecies of increasing capitalist prosperity.” As the world changed, by the end of 1933 “almost the only subject of discussion is contemporary politics, in which a very large majority of the more intelligent undergraduates are Communists, or almost Communists.”
Anthony Blunt, then a languid and elegant research fellow at Trinity, was aware of the same moment of change: “Quite suddenly, in the autumn term of 1933, Marxism hit Cambridge . . . I had sabbatical leave for that term, and when I came back in January, I found that almost all my younger friends had become Marxist and joined the Party; and Cambridge was literally transformed overnight.”
A political metamorphosis was the only solution to the despair of the times. David Bensusan-Butt was a year younger than Maclean at Gresham’s and Cambridge, where he was a disciple of Keynes. He found the early 1930s “blackly depressing . . . It was not merely that there were millions of unemployed whose festering boredom and misery were all around . . . it was not only that for ten to fifteen years governments had been continuously impotent and silly.” Worse, “the foundations of ordered society in Europe, the ordinary decencies of peaceful civilisation seemed to be breaking up.” The only hope was “of some new treatment for the multiplying diseases of a dying capitalism in the shortening list of countries still civilised.”
The Cambridge Review of January 1934 noted that “the Russian experimen
t has aroused very great interest . . . It is felt to be bold and constructive, and youth, which is always impatient of the cautious delays and obstruction of its elders, is disposed to regard sympathetically . . . this attempt to found a new social and political order.” Communism, and its more acceptable sibling socialism, was a clear rallying point for those desperate for change from the Victorians who had landed their generation with the war, the Depression, mass unemployment and poverty, thereby enabling the rise of fascism in Europe. Hitler had become Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, a development which tightened Mussolini’s fascist grip on Italy, and a move to the left was the only way out for level-headed people. John Strachey, nephew of Lytton, exaggeratedly summed up the view of many when he characterised Communism, from the point of view of the young people of Britain, as having mutated from something barbaric to representing “the eternal course of human culture, of science and of civilisation.”
The most notable Communist don was Maurice Dobb of Trinity, a pupil of Maynard Keynes. Dobb was a decade older than Maclean, had joined the Communist Party on its foundation in 1920 and became a member of its central committee. With his “fair hair, bright red face and infectious, warm personality,” he shared a Presbyterian upbringing with Maclean. He had become a fervent Marxist as an undergraduate shortly after the war, as a result suffering frequent dunkings in the River Cam at the hands of the conservative, mostly less intellectual, hearties, the more sporty men from the private schools who were not as reliant on scholarships (nor as keen on attending lectures). He had a “unique ability to portray the inconsistencies of communism as consistent and to make unfathomable Marxist mysteries appear logical.” He visited Moscow from time to time and paraded his opinions openly at the Union, the public crucible for political debate; in November 1925 he claimed there that “an aristocracy of intellect was more likely to rule in Russia than any other country and that science and art were prospering [there] as never before.” This intellectual consistency enabled him to defend himself against criticism of his views, as when King George V, after simmering as usual over Scotland Yard’s annual reports about subversion in Britain, wrote to the Chancellor of the university in 1925 demanding to know why such a well-known Marxist was permitted to indoctrinate undergraduates. It was not until 1938 that there was even a lecture on Marxist theories.
A Spy Named Orphan Page 3