The death of Sir Donald enabled his son to be “cheerfully open about his unreserved allegiance to the Communist cause.” He returned to Cambridge in October a man unleashed, liberated from the oppressive presence of his father into full-throated political engagement (and probably sexual experimentation). His father’s absence made him an immediately different figure. Jocelyn Simon, a family friend who used to play cricket and skate with the Maclean boys in Holland Park, was at Trinity Hall two years above Donald. Simon remembered the younger man as “a perfectly normal undergraduate” who played cricket in the college side in his first year and who became its secretary in his second. When Simon came back to visit, Maclean had resigned the secretaryship, “had ceased to be a normal undergraduate and become a Communist,” a conversion that “was based on genuine humanitarian interest in the underdog.” Maclean had “identified himself so much with the masses that he had sold all his clothes and was wearing clothes bought second-hand and going about in a generally scruffy way, especially as regards his fingernails.” The unhygienic state of Guy Burgess’s fingernails was much remarked upon throughout his life (as was the stench of garlic which accompanied him from breakfast onwards as he often stirred it into his porridge); there seem to be no other references to Maclean’s cuticles, a metaphor perhaps for one man to keep himself hidden, the other to announce himself all too grubbily.
Maclean’s new openness meant that he became much more visible, and at times vociferous. His newfound freedom came at the cost of moderation. It was a foretaste of the volatility that was to shake him at moments of stress in the years to come.
*
World events gathered pace in Maclean’s second and third years, increasing CUSS attendance to a record of ninety in December 1933, and the commitment of its members. After the Nazi Party had come to power Hitler swiftly introduced the Enabling Act which meant he could constitutionally exercise dictatorial power: the subsequent witch-hunt in pursuit of the once-powerful German communists (including a young scientist named Klaus Fuchs) at last precipitated Maclean into joining the Communist Party that spring; Klugmann did so too. Guy Burgess followed suit in the winter, according to Anthony Blunt. Blunt was a fellow of Trinity, bonded to Burgess not only through their having slept together but also through their membership of the elite conversation society, the Apostles, whose members included at the time the historian G. M. Trevelyan, the novelist E. M. Forster, the economist John Maynard Keynes, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Victor Rothschild and another of Blunt’s lovers, Julian Bell.
One of the demonstrations the CUSS helped organise became significant in the steady emergence of Maclean as a political figure. In the week that the issue of Granta was published in which Cecil, Jack and Fred came into public view, there were clashes between the Cambridge undergraduate left and the more traditionalist hearties. The first involved the socialists walking out of a showing at the Tivoli cinema of Our Fighting Navy which they deemed full of “militaristic propaganda.” A crowd of “patriotic” students waited outside to “rag the cads” as they emerged, “complete with Union Jacks and a brass band.” In the ensuing free-for-all, had both sides not been dressed indistinguishably there would have been far more injuries than the wounded pride suffered by a left-winger who was debagged. Finally “the band struck up and ‘tough’ Cambridge, having dealt with the cranks in time-worn manner, marched back.” The Tivoli management withdrew the film.
The scuffle encouraged the left to turn out in greater numbers a few days later for the anti-war march on Armistice Day, 11 November. The march was organised by the CUSS and the Student Christian Movement as a protest against the growing militarism of the Cenotaph celebrations in London. The CUSS put an inscription on their wreath to be laid at the town’s war memorial that read: “To the victims of the Great War, from those who are determined to prevent similar crimes of imperialism.”
When it was known that the pacifists, under the slogan “Against War and Imperialism,” were to march to the memorial near the station—the “town” rather than “gown” end of the city—the hearties of the Tivoli punch-up rallied their friends from rugger and boat clubs across the university and intercepted the march on Parker’s Piece, the patch of parkland between the memorial and the university. The police had to draw their batons in the ensuing running battles, in which both Julian Bell and Guy Burgess played a prominent part: they used Bell’s beaten-up Morris, armoured with mattresses, as a battering-ram to break through a barricade outside Peterhouse. The hearties pelted them with tomatoes, eggs and flour, but the left’s wreath was eventually laid after Bell had driven around the back of the mêlée to reach the war memorial from the other direction.
Maclean, who did not play quite as conspicuous a part in the day as Bell or Burgess, expressed his feelings in a savage poem in the Trinity Hall magazine Silver Crescent.
Dare Doggerel. Nov. 11
Rugger toughs and boat club guys
In little brown coats and old school ties.
Tempers be up and fore-arms bared
Down in the gutter with those who’ve dared.
Dared to think war-causes out,
Dared to know what they’re shouting about,
Dared to leave a herd they hate,
Dared to question the church and state;
Dared to ask what poppies are for,
Dared to say we’ll fight no more,
Unless it be for a cause we know
And not for the sake of status quo.
Not for the sake of Armstrong Vickers,
Not for the sake of khaki knickers,
But for the sake of the class which bled,
But for the sake of daily bread.
Rugger toughs and boat club guys
Panic-herd with frightened eyes,
Sodden straws on a rising tide,
They know they’ve chosen the losing side.
The anger of the poem contrasts sharply in style with the “bespectacled, soft-voiced” and demurely witty Klugmann, living his “monastic existence” and quietly laying out his persuasive philosophy. The change in a few months from the withdrawn son of the minister to public scourge of the hearties is dramatic.
Maclean’s next appearance in print was in Cambridge Left, a magazine that began publishing in the summer of 1933, catching the new political voices. His only contribution to the journal was a review of R. D. Charques’s Contemporary Literature and Social Revolution, where he unleashes another passionate diatribe, revealing the almost indiscriminate range of the fury he was now experiencing in his new freedom after a lifetime of keeping his emotions in check. “The economic situation, the unemployed, vulgarity in the cinema, rubbish on the bookstalls, the public school, snobbery in the suburbs, more battleships, lower wages” were all intolerable and the “cracked-brained economic mess” would soon collapse. In more measured but equally sweeping tones he then dismisses the work of Galsworthy, Huxley, Eliot, Waugh, Joyce and Woolf, denigrating even the great modern authors who do not fit his politics, while lamenting the non-inclusion in Charques’s book of the politically admirable Auden and Dos Passos. He finds some hope in the sexual liberation of D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and E. M. Forster’s Passage to India and praises Charques for hinting at “a Marxian conception of literature” and for saying that literature has “become the unconscious propaganda of ruling-class culture.” The magazine did not outlast Maclean’s time at Cambridge; its timing exactly caught the wave which determined his political future.
In the Lent term of 1934, in his final year, Maclean was editor of Silver Crescent, and he wrote an editorial stemming from what had become known as “the Armistice Day Riots” on “The whole question of the student’s relations to the outside world and to the authorities.” His call was for undergraduates, with the capitalist world mired in Depression, to take a full and active part in politics: “the student finds that his College bill is too large . . . that good jobs are difficult to find, that his lectures are meaningless, that he is faced with t
he prospect of being killed in a new Imperialist war . . . [Those who say students should not get involved] are totally out of touch with the real position of the student during the present stage of capitalist decline, characterised as it is by ‘new rounds of revolutions and wars.’ ” The same issue carried a snippet on its jokey gossip page, “Cambridge Goes Red,” which included the unyielding image of “The Tomb of Donald Maclenin in red Bakelite in Market Square.” Maclean’s Communism was briefly on display for everyone to see. Later in this hectic term with Finals and decisions about a career looming, he started to rein himself in and wrote a carefully reasoned, politically sound letter to Granta on behalf of the CUSS setting out the need for a student council. His ten “specific and immediate demands for Cambridge” included “Complete freedom of thought and action,” “The right to have public discussion on lectures” and “A share in the control of tutorial fees.” The left-wing man of reason appeared to be replacing the firebrand as Maclean endeavoured—for the time being—to conform to the role of being his father’s privileged, cleverest son.
*
Throughout his life, Maclean was able to show a rigorous intellectual focus and an immense capacity for hard work, which left little time for human relations outside politics and his studies. His friend Christopher Gillie, son of the Marylebone Presbyterian minister whose sermons Maclean had sat through so often, describes him at the end of his time in Cambridge as not only playing a lot of cricket and tennis, but pacing himself “to a nicety” in his revision to “romp home with the expected First.” Gillie took in Maclean’s essential solitariness and shyness, particularly around women, that could be covered up by the certainties of political discourse. “I have no recollections of his having any girl friends at all . . . He did show me a postcard once inviting one or two Newnham or Girton undergraduates to a Party meeting. The card mentioned the date and the place, followed by the quotation [from Shakespeare’s Othello]: ‘It is the cause! Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars, it is the cause!’ ”
Maclean’s rooms in his last year were decorated with “large red banners with slogans in one corner of the room and a lot of Marxist books and tracts.” Perhaps it is hardly surprising that his political obsession meant that Donald, never known for the gift of small talk when there were so many weighty matters to consider, had few real friends of either sex to communicate with on a non-political level. His tutor picked up on the guarded young man’s lack of intimacy, and noticed he had “no friends, although he had many acquaintances.” He “could recall none of them as being of any particular significance.” An addictive life and the need to have a hidden life often march together. Maclean’s widowed mother also observed her prodigiously talented son’s essential private solitariness: “He is completely ungregarious and has never enjoyed social activities.” As his time at Cambridge approached its end, the outspoken undergraduate had retreated into himself. Cecil and Jack, the aesthete and the hearty, had gone, leaving a gap that would need filling by someone who fitted more comfortably into Maclean’s interior gallery.
*
Donald Maclean, Bachelor of Arts (with Honours), left Cambridge in early June 1934 with a first-class degree in French and German and a burning certainty that socialism was the only way to combat the capitalism that was now moving Europe towards another crisis, this time an avoidable one. Beatrice and Sidney Webb’s last major work, Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation?, dropped its question mark for its second edition in a telling symbol of the moment. Maclean had spent his last Christmas vacation at Hawarden Castle in North Wales with the Gladstone family, descendants of the greatest Victorian Liberal, both Chancellor of the Exchequer and Prime Minister four times. At the family seat Maclean had been reading Mikhail Pokrovsky’s Brief History of Russia, with its congratulatory foreword from Lenin. He underlined a passage and initialled and dated it in the margin “Hawarden Dec. 25, 1933” as a memento of a notable moment in his political journey:
For we repeat that, like the bourgeoisie, the intelligentsia lived on the surplus product that was extracted by force from the peasant and the workman. A Communist Revolution would mean that it would have to give up all its advantages, renounce all its privileges and join the ranks of manual labour. And this prospect could be accepted by only a small number of the most sincere and devoted revolutionaries of the intelligentsia.
Maclean, a prime exemplar of the bourgeois intelligentsia, was planning to live in Russia after his graduation and to work as a teacher of English, the closest thing to “manual labour” available to him as he renounced his British “privileges.” He was sure that “world revolution will be accomplished in English,” so “the Russians must know the English language.” His mother, who saw that at Cambridge he had got “mixed up in a set who came to the conclusion that there was perhaps something in Communism,” was puzzled but outwardly accepting of his decision, which would not have been contemplated had his father, with his spur to public service and strength of personality, lived. Alongside teaching in Russia, Maclean was also toying with the idea of embarking on a PhD. His subject was a Marxist analysis of John Calvin and the rise of the bourgeoisie, a rich yoking of his political views and his religiously strict upbringing.
In July 1934 Tony Blake rented a small house at Saint Jacut, on the northern French coast. Blake was a former secretary of the CUSS, and he asked Maclean and Cumming-Bruce, the self-professed Communist of the first Granta “Undergraduate in the Witness Box,” to join him. Lady Maclean’s hopes of a more conventional career for her favourite son were raised when he “took [her] fully into his confidence” to say he was going on holiday with some left-wing friends to “talk themselves into an understanding as to what their attitude would be to his newish creed, Communism.” She hoped that he would “resolve his difficulties,” as she saw left-wing politics, “for it had always been intended that he should enter the Diplomatic Service.”
However, as Blake later reported, there was no political talk on the holiday, in spite of the three men being bound by their ideology; rather, “they merely played cricket on the sands and lazed, generally taking what they believed to be a well-earned holiday.” Cumming-Bruce was to give a much less discreet account. Maclean had fallen for a local, married woman called Marie, whose husband was away with the Garde Mobile. Cumming-Bruce, meantime, was frolicking with her sister Francine. For Cumming-Bruce it was “a holiday diversion,” but Maclean, who throughout his life threw himself full-heartedly into his few relationships and almost certainly lost his heterosexual virginity to Marie, “was seriously in love with the married sister.”
Cumming-Bruce remembered the daytime’s activities in much the same way as Blake, with the addition of a visit to their girlfriends and a lot to drink at lunchtime. Like Blake, Cumming-Bruce did not recall any “animated discussions” about politics, maybe not surprisingly with all this to occupy them. There was also the added distraction of Francine and Marie’s “imbecile” brother, whom the girls used to “carry everywhere”; he would “frequently lapse into an epileptic fit, sometimes at the most embarrassing moments, but the girls would say, ‘Pay no heed, he’s always doing that.’ ” In the early evening there would be more drinking, and when the villagers went off fishing for lobsters and crabs the holidaymakers would join them. Once they had reached the rocks where the fishing took place, Donald and Marie would disappear behind one rock and Cumming-Bruce with Francine would find somewhere else to make love. Unfortunately Marie’s husband got word of his wife’s dalliance and was coming home “seeking explanations and possibly satisfaction,” so the Englishmen cut the holiday short and crossed the Channel back to safety. It was Maclean’s first sensation of needing to get away before he was caught in a betrayal.
*
At some point between graduation and August, perhaps in the immediate afterglow of his sybaritic holiday, faced with the prospect of forgoing the comforts of home that enabled so many university socialists to revert to type after graduation, Maclean decided that he w
as neither going to Russia nor returning to Cambridge to research his thesis on Calvinism and Marxism. He was going to apply to the Foreign Office. He wrote with the news that he was abandoning his PhD to Owen Wansbrough-Jones, Fellow of Trinity Hall and himself a former Gresham’s pupil, who replied that he thought the decision “a wise one. It may seem a little dull at first sight, but from what I have seen of people who went into the Foreign Office I gather that they have a very interesting time, and I am not sure that you will not find you have considerable talents in that direction.”
Maclean’s mother, who had moved to a smaller house in Kensington and opened a knitwear shop called The Bee after her family nickname, was delighted when he returned from France to confirm that he was going into the conventional, familiar public service that his father would have wished for him. Her aspirations were now centred on Donald, the most brilliant of her children, the one most like his late father. As she later recounted, he “came to her somewhat pink-faced to admit that he had changed his mind, and suggested that she would accuse him of failing to know his own mind.” Her response was that the whole point of university was to “find one’s own mind.” Donald had wrestled with his beliefs in Brittany just as her husband had in his Welsh study and had achieved a similar resolution. When she ventured to ask whether his now lapsed Communist views might be an issue for his Foreign Office application, he replied, “You must think I turn like a weathercock; but the fact is I’ve rather gone off all that lately.” Far from turning like a weathercock, Maclean was now very single-minded about his future. Whether or not espionage was in his mind, if he succeeded in his application he was going to have a “very interesting time” indeed in the Foreign Office, right from the start, as he continued his fight for peace in a turbulent world.
A Spy Named Orphan Page 5