A Spy Named Orphan

by Roland Philipps

  *

  Maclean arrived at Trinity Hall for his first term in October 1931 to find Cambridge in the grip of this political ferment, which seemed to demonstrate, as Klugmann put it, “the total bankruptcy of the capitalist system” and evoked “a very strong feeling of doom, doom that was not very far off.” By contrast, Stalin’s Five-Year Plan seemed to be yielding more benefits for the lowest of Soviet citizens and building a society free of snobbery, at least to the credulous. Visitors to Russia were given carefully curated tours of model farms and factories. Malcolm Muggeridge, living in Moscow, thought “the delight” these admirers took “in all they saw and were told, and the expression they gave to this delight, constitute unquestionably one of the wonders of the age.”

  Klugmann already had strong connections to the political life of the university as his sister, five years older and a Girton pupil, had married Maurice Cornforth, himself a former student of the phi­losopher Ludwig Wittgenstein at Trinity. Wittgenstein rejected Marxism but was pro the Soviet Union and had a wide influence. Another disciple was David Haden Guest of Trinity, who moved very far left after spending a fortnight in a Nazi cell in Brunswick in 1931 as a consequence of joining a Communist demonstration. He was released only when he threatened to go on hunger strike—and on his return to Trinity he marched into college hall wearing a hammer-and-sickle emblem, telling of the horrors of Nazism and its anti-semitism and preaching that only Communists understood the real threat posed by the Nazis. Guest and Cornforth both joined the Communist Party in the summer of 1931, just before Maclean and Klugmann came up.

  Keynes’s “rosy prophecies” of continued growth in Western economies as they rebuilt in the decade after the First World War had collapsed with the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the triggering of the worldwide Depression. Unemployment was rocketing, and would reach a peak of three million in January 1933. In some communities it ran as high as 70 per cent, with huge gaps between rich and poor, and between north and south. Membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) continued to rise from its 1920 base of 2,500 to 6,000 in 1930; it would peak at 16,000 in 1939. Labour had won the first full election following universal suffrage in 1929, but without a majority of seats in the House of Commons could not survive in the crisis engulfing the capitalist world. On 24 August 1931, after a further general election, the first all-party coalition National Government was formed under Labour’s Ramsay MacDonald in an attempt to deal with the downward spiral. Labour was now the official opposition, despite achieving an all-time low of fifty-two seats. At last Sir Donald Maclean, representing the largely superannuated Liberals, reached the summit of his ambitions as he was appointed to the Cabinet as President of the Board of Education.

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  Cambridge University was made up of twenty-six colleges of varying size, opulence and architecture, ranging from the medieval to the high Victorian, with gated entrances managed by porters in bowler hats. All bar two of the colleges were male preserves, the undergraduates cycling between them and around the town in college scarves, tweed jackets and Oxford “bags” with turn-ups, regardless of social standing. Each college consisted of a series of quadrangles, known as “courts,” each with a manicured lawn and surrounded by a series of staircases leading to the rooms that housed the academic body of the college. To find a bathroom, one often had to walk around the edge of the court in East Anglia’s chilly climate; each staircase was looked after by a “bedder,” who cleaned and washed up after the young gentlemen.

  Maclean’s first choice of college had been Trinity, with Trinity Hall second, but it was the smaller college that offered him the exhibition, with its annual value of £40, that determined his decision. He was reading Modern Languages, his strong suit at Gresham’s and one which perhaps prefigured a potential profession on the world stage. Trinity Hall is one of the most intimate colleges in Cambridge, situated between the vast grandeur of Trinity and the soaring majesty of King’s College Chapel and with an annual intake in the 1930s of around a hundred undergraduates. Maclean’s rooms in his first two years were in Latham Court, close by the River Cam. The court had neatly tended borders of spring bulbs, delphiniums and foxgloves, and magnificent magnolia and purple beech trees. It was a peaceful setting, developed over six centuries, in which to cultivate his own future.

  Klugmann, with his “birdlike head and manner,” went up at the same time to the grander neighbouring college of Trinity, where he joined Anthony Blunt on his staircase in New Court. Blunt’s erstwhile and future lover, Guy Burgess, was in the same college. Kim Philby was two years above Maclean and also at Trinity. The Cambridge Spy Ring, as they came to be known, was all but completed when Maclean arrived at the university, with only John Cairncross, yet another Trinity man, still to arrive.

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  Maclean did not pay much attention to his French and German studies in his first year. He was awarded a 2.2 in German and a 2.1 in French in the first part of his degree in the summer of 1932, and was given a sharp warning that if he was to keep his exhibition he would have to improve. He still muted any burgeoning political views, out of pride in and loyalty to his father and his ministerial post as well as out of fear of what the older man’s reaction might be to his developing godless creed. While Sir Donald was alive, being the model son and conforming was more important than standing out at a time when even the National Government, with its Conservative bias, was despised. Maclean “complained bitterly of the betrayal of the Labour rank and file through the perfidy of their leader,” but he did not disclose these feelings outside his Cambridge circle. That circle was coming to the view that more radical action was needed on the left, that “only the Soviet Union seemed to have all the answers.” As a result, an active branch of the Communist Party had recently been founded in the university.

  This Communist cell started in Trinity College. In June 1931, Clemens Palme Dutt, who had recently served in the Comintern in Paris and India and was a proselytising ideologue, paid a visit to Dobb. From that meeting, at which Guest and Cornforth were pres­ent, the cell sprang into being. The Comintern (an abbreviation for Communist International) was the organisation that advocated world Communism “by all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie” without directly serving the Soviet state. Guest assumed responsibility for the cell, which was a relief for Dobb and the other two dons present as it would compromise their positions as teaching fellows if they were openly fronting controversial organisations; undergraduates had licence to proselytise on the extremes by their very youth. Klugmann knew about the cell from his sister Kitty and her fiancé, and had discussed it with Maclean. Maclean acknowledged his schoolfriend and mentor’s political generosity: “Verily, James Klugmann, you are the universal provider.” He joined the CUSS, the replacement for the Labour Club, amid the disillusionment aroused by the MacDonald administration in his first year. He and Klugmann were soon on the committee, with the latter, employing his “easy wit and debonair manner” to influence and convert waverers, in charge of publicity. Maclean’s election to the committee took place at a rowdily excited meeting at which “members created a precedent in Cambridge by singing the Internationale and other songs vociferously.” The exuberant youth of Cambridge were riding their wave.

  By 1934 the CUSS had some 200 members, of whom about a quarter were also card-carrying members of the Communist Party. The meetings were held in rooms in Trinity with “little furniture and only a bare lightbulb,” the undergraduates puffing on pipes and sustained by “mugs of disgustingly strong tea and large hunks of bread and jam”; sometimes they gathered in cafés in the town on a Sunday afternoon. These were chaotic and passionate affairs. Members talked much of “the world situation . . . showing the increasing rottenness of the capitalist system,” without necessarily being able to do much about it. The society was active in getting up petitions and writing letters for its causes. It wrote to the Japanese government about its policies towards China; closer to ho
me it petitioned the Cambridge bus companies when employees’ wages were cut. It got cut-price admission to the university Film Society for left-wing screenings and raised funds for suitable causes. Its most successful activity was persuading students to attend marches in London: opposing cuts in education and most particularly supporting the hunger marches, when the unemployed of the north of England came to the capital to protest about their anguish.

  Maclean joined a march in the spring of 1932 which clashed with police near Hyde Park. “Helmets rolled” and inevitably the tall, blond Maclean stood out among the cloth-capped, shorter, older and shabbier marchers; he was taken to the nearest police station. His mother came to spring him and he was not charged. He was relieved to get back to Southwick Place, on the edge of the park, and find his father absent on Parliamentary business.

  Maclean kept himself withdrawn from public political expression in his first year and flexed his debating muscles at the Union only once. The motion in May 1932 was that “This house sees more hope in Moscow than in Detroit,” the latter being the heart of American industrialisation and capitalism, home of its now Depression-scarred motor industry. Dobb spoke for the motion, presenting America as “a land of despair, with no hope and no faith in the future; its chief enemies being robotization, gangsterism and over-production.” Russia, on the other hand, was not in decline; it had “no share in the world’s crisis, no unemployment and increasing production.” Culture and internationalism were spreading, “embracing different races and tongues.” Russia had “a new faith, a new spiritual hope.” Maclean spoke from the floor, saying that “bloodshed was inevitable, either by an imperialist war or by a communist revolution.” He believed “the only ultimate solution was the victory of the propertyless classes.” Unlike Dobb, Maclean had turned his back on the language of “faith” and “spiritual hope” that was such a feature of his boyhood and was airing what was to become a lifelong theme, central to some of his later actions: the desire to avoid war at all costs. Communism was the only vehicle for peace. Maclean’s intellectual questing and need for a cause had brought him to that realisation in the vanguard of his fellow undergraduates. Granta, reviewing the debate (the motion was carried), suggested that “Mr McLean [sic] should speak more often.” He did not, but by the time he left Cambridge two years later, his political views were formed and entrenched and available for all to see.

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  Through the CUSS, Maclean was to meet the man who was to dictate the course of his life at its two most critical and most secret turning-points, as well as the man with whom his name was ever after to be linked.

  H. A. R. Philby, fittingly known from his birth in India as Kim after Kipling’s character in the eponymous novel about the Great Game between Britain and Russia in Asia, was a Trinity economist studying under and profoundly influenced by Dobb. Kim was the son of St John Philby, a noted Arabist and tough explorer who rarely saw his son owing to his travels (and to his eventual decision to live in the Middle East). He was such an authoritarian that he kept the birch twigs until his death which he had used to flog small boys during his time as head boy of Westminster School. St John, like his son, was a divided figure: he railed all his life “against the perfidy, deceit and moral decline” of Britain, abandoned Christianity to become a Muslim and took a Saudi slave-girl to become his second wife; yet he remained a member of the Athenaeum Club in Pall Mall, tried never to miss a Test Match and stood twice for Parliament. Kim himself was handsome, charming, worldly and cynical, his soft blue eyes belying a ruthlessly calculating mind. He was as self-contained, watchful and heterosexual as his colourful Trinity friend Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess was socially reckless and homosexual. What they shared, and in this they differed from Maclean, was a total lack of morality.

  Burgess was “outrageous, loud, talkative, irreverent, overtly rebellious,” Maclean’s opposite in every respect when they first met. Cherubic-featured, manically beguiling, conversationally gifted where Maclean was more shy in his charm, Burgess had been educated at Dartmouth Naval College and Eton and was about to get his first-class degree in history. In his charm and energy, he seemed at first sight to have been favoured by the gods. Even drinking—and alcohol was starting to become a recreational pastime for both of them—was more flamboyantly indulged in by Burgess. He “drank . . . like some Rabelaisian bottle-swiper whose thirst was unquenchable.” By comparison, Maclean was “introverted and diffident, an idealist and a dreamer given to sudden outbursts of aggression.” He was less sure of himself than the Trinity man, drowning his uncertainties in his “feckless undergraduate” binge-drinking. Another way in which the two men differed was in their sexuality.

  Burgess “conducted a very active, very promiscuous, and somewhat sordid sexual life” as his close friend Goronwy Rees put it. “He was very attractive to his own sex and had none of the kind of inhibitions which usually afflict young men of his own age and upbringing,” inhibitions which certainly affected Maclean. Burgess went to bed “with any man who was willing to do so and was not positively repulsive and by doing so he released them from many of their frustrations and inhibitions.” He broadcast his seductions throughout his life and one of his boasts at Cambridge was that he had seduced Maclean; he certainly told Rees that he had done so. Later, expediently, he would deny the deed, saying that the thought of touching Maclean’s “large, flabby, white, whale-like body” nauseated him. Maclean was then un­­­deniably plump; but he was also, with his rather feminine good looks and shy intensity, undeniably attractive. With their polit­ical views in common it seems that Burgess rose to the challenge and succeeded in the conquest of Maclean, who was finding the last steps into adulthood difficult and confusing. Cecil jostled with Jack and Maclean seemed to find certainty only with the simpler Fred, who just had to work hard without giving himself away. Maclean’s sexuality was to remain a point of confusion for him, one of the most complex aspects of his personality that he struggled to pull into line with his conformist side. The date of Maclean’s seduction is unknown, and possibly coincided with his wholehearted political commitment. But whether or not it occurred in his first year at Cambridge, at the end of that year a momentous change in his life played the largest part in allowing his inhibitions to be released.

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  At the start of the first Long Vacation in May 1932 Parliament was sitting, and the National Government, made up as it was mainly of “hard-faced Tories and a few renegade Socialists,” was not a congenial environment for an uncompromisingly principled Liberal such as Sir Donald. The economy was still in the doldrums, and the Cabinet was split over whether to pursue free trade or impose tariffs. The Commonwealth Conference in Ottawa, set up to resolve these matters, would take place in September and that would decide whether Sir Donald, “old and grey with worry and overwork,” would stay in government or resign. An “impenitent Free Trader,” he was prepared to sacrifice his career and standing for something his son thought “tawdry and meaningless.” Perhaps later in life Maclean reflected on the matters of conscience that were so agitating his father. At the time, as always, he kept his views from the hard-working and important minister: clan loyalty and the need not to upset a man he both admired and in many ways feared triumphed over frankness and honesty.

  In the end, the dilemma resolved itself and young Donald was freed from the rigidity of the old man’s presence when after a brief period of illness Sir Donald suffered a fatal heart attack on 15 June, at the age of sixty-eight. He was buried at Penn following a near-farcical funeral in which the family accidentally shut themselves in the dining-room of the London house after closing its door in order not to see or hear the coffin bumping down the narrow staircase. They had to be rescued by the London Fire Brigade before the cortège could move off to the Chilterns.

  Dr Gillie spoke at the funeral and described a time when in his youth Sir Donald had suffered a crisis of faith:

  He locked himself in his study, and spent a whole night at his desk, wrestling with the
doubts that crowded his mind. At one point he got up and paced the room, after drawing an imaginary line down the centre: “On this side,” he told himself, “I walk with Christ. One step across that line, and I shall turn away for ever from him.” The pacing continued, on the right side of the line, until daylight. He did not falter or stumble again, once that anguished night lay behind him, but clung tenaciously to the truth as he saw it.

  It is possible that Donald the younger picked up a reference to Calvin’s inner turmoil exactly 400 years before. Certainly as a man well down the road towards cementing his own secular faith outside church or chapel, he would have been responsive to Gillie’s words. Tenacity of belief, remaining true to his value systems and not being seen to allow doubt to creep in whatever the provocations were bred in the bone. So too were other qualities which served him well throughout his official life—reasonableness, conscientiousness, an extraordinary capacity for hard work and attention to detail. He was now free to go further, with less guilt and distracted loyalty, into his own causes and philosophy.

  Stanley Baldwin’s tribute in the House of Commons echoed Gillie’s eulogy. He said that he saw in Sir Donald “a courage and a love of justice” and “a soul that could not be deflected from the straight course.” The ability to stick to a straight course ran deep in the family. Whatever guilt young Donald may have felt over rejecting his father’s religion could now be eased by his open adherence to the conscience of socialism.