Papa Spy

by Jimmy Burns

  By 1939 Richey was looking for a job in the wider world, quite where and what he had no idea after the unique if occasionally unsettling experience of working with Gill.

  Burns convinced Richey that the best way to reconcile his pacifism with his sense of patriotic duty was to join the navy, serving on a minesweeper as an ordinary seaman. As he told Richey, ‘This seemed to me an admirable way of confronting things, as when you sweep mines you are destroying instruments of destruction though you are liable to be blown up yourself.’

  Burns for his part made an effortless entry into government service, the outbreak of the war marking his transition from a public figure to an agent of the state playing multiple parts. The BBC’s Grisewood and Lord Howard of Penrith were among those who brought to the attention of the higher echelons of Whitehall Burns’s background as a leading Catholic publisher and his experience as a consummate communicator and social networker.

  Shortly before war broke out he received instructions to report to the Ministry of Information (MoI), and was told he was to be in charge of ‘Roman Catholic affairs’.

  The Ministry of Information, while officially functional from 4 September 1939, the day after the UK declared war on Germany, had been secretly planned since 1935 by an internal Whitehall committee. Secrecy had been maintained because the government did not want to admit to the inevitability of war.

  Senior UK officials claimed to have learnt the lessons of the First World War, when propaganda was the responsibility of various government agencies except for a brief period when there had been a Department of Information (1917) and an earlier version of the MoI (1918) which was subsequently disbanded.

  Plans for the new MoI, with overarching responsibility for publicity and propaganda in the Second World War, had been accelerated in response to the well-oiled Nazi propaganda machinery under Dr Goebbels. The MoI’s initial functions were threefold: news and press censorship; ‘home publicity’; and overseas publicity in Allied and neutral countries. In early 1939, UK government officials predicted a ‘war of nerves’ involving the civilian population and warned ministers they would have to go further than ever before in ‘coordinating and utilising’ every propaganda tool at their disposal in order to counter the Nazi threat. Burns was given a broad brief, from encouraging contacts with dissident Germans to liaising with the Vatican, and developing links with Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Portugal, as well as with influential Catholics in the United States.

  Burns moved into the Ministry of Information’s offices in the University of London’s headquarters at Senate House in early 1940, about the time his friend the future poet laureate, John Betjeman, was recruited into the Films Division by Kenneth Clark.

  Employees of the Ministry were instructed to keep their duties secret from the outside world and worked to a rolling eight-hour shift pattern to ensure 24-hour coverage. And yet for all the semblance of a functioning and efficient government department, the early months proved particularly shambolic as the MoI struggled to define a clear role for itself and to make efficient use of a mixed bag of recruits drawn somewhat haphazardly from a wide variety of professions. One of the MoI’s senior recruits, Kenneth Grubb, recalled the initial confusion its creation brought to the machinery of government: ‘The permanent civil servants who inevitably handle the higher arrangements of a new ministry were themselves frequently at a loss to perceive the next step, although war presupposes quick decisions. Many different types of personalities and experiences were needed. Someone had to find the scholarly approach on some remote but key territory, the journalist with the right touch, the broadcaster, the advertiser, and many others from the publicity profession. Most of us indulged in an unscrupulous and crazy scramble to secure the best available people before they were snapped up, since everyone knew that war was bound to create a shortage of capable management types.’

  In the early stages of the war, the MoI’s operations were hampered by the lack of cooperation from other agencies of government, namely the War Office, the Air Ministry and the Admiralty, and the intelligence services that resented what they saw as a weakening of their ability to control and manipulate the flow of information to the public on military plans and movements. Similarly, the MoI’s involvement in propaganda in enemy-occupied and neutral countries led to tensions with the BBC and other Whitehall departments such as the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Economic Warfare.

  In its attempts to impose itself on government policy, the MoI was further disadvantaged by frequent changes of senior personnel. Between 4 September 1939 and 20 July 1941, the department changed ministers three times – Lord Hugh Macmillan, Sir John Reith, and Alfred ‘Duff’ Cooper paving the way for a more continuous and successful leadership under Brendan Bracken. There were also mixed blessings in the fact that civil servants outnumbered public relations and advertising experts, with many tasks being left in the hands of writers, publishers and artists with no experience of government, still less of taking on an enemy expert in the art of spin and deception.

  In Evelyn Waugh’s 1942 novel Put Out More Flags, it is the MoI in the early months of the war that bears the brunt of Waugh’s acerbic satire as the author tries to capture the mood of a nation changing from frivolity to a deep sense of foreboding, and as the ageing generation of bright young things contemplates division, death and destruction.

  The main character, Basil Seal, finds himself at the outbreak of war a man without a job, despite his firm belief in himself as the kind of person who ‘if English life had run as it did in the books of adventure’ should at this turn in world affairs have been sent for by the secret intelligence services. But hard as he tries to exploit his social ‘old boy networks’, Basil cannot penetrate the world of propaganda and secrets. The nearest he gets to initial employment is an interview at the MoI, a Ministry also visited by his friend, the camp aesthete Ambrose Silk, who ends up peating bogs in a friar’s garb. Ambrose’s invitation to visit the MoI is facilitated by his publisher, Geoffrey Bentley, who is working there at the head of some newly formed department. In his introduction to the Penguin edition of Put Out More Flags, Nigel Spivey notes, rightly, that Basil Seal falls short of being quite the mirror image of his creator, Waugh – ‘too tall, too handsome, too well-born’ – but the book is a brilliant satire on the administrative chaos and improvisation that characterised Whitehall, and the MoI in particular, in the first months of the phoney war. It is hard not to see Basil’s alter ego Bentley as a thinly veiled if partial portrait of Waugh’s friend Burns, who in real life continued to commission books from his literary contacts, while branching out into a world of intrigue and secrets for which he had no formal training.

  In the autumn of 1938, Burns approached Waugh himself to write another book, a history of the Jesuits. He also commissioned the eccentric and controversial Hilaire Belloc, whose blend of humour and bellicosity came to be much admired by Catholics of Waugh’s generation, not least Evelyn himself.

  Burns asked Belloc to write a preface to a book by his old friend J. B. Morton – ‘Beachcomber’. Belloc’s agreement was conveyed in a letter addressed to Burns care of the Reform, one of several London clubs the publisher used for nurturing his friends and clients.

  ‘Dear Burns … I shall be delighted to do such a preface as you propose. I don’t mind the terms so five guineas will do as well as anything else, but I shall begin it with the words, “My dear Morton” because I think beginning with the name under which I usually write to him, “My dear Johnnie”, would be too familiar for public print.’ After Chamberlain’s declaration of war, Burns enlisted the help of his friend and political ally Douglas Jerrold to get Belloc to write 10,000 words of pro-government propaganda, entitled ‘The Case for the Present War, from the Catholic Angle’.

  During the 1930s the fear of Communism had produced ground in which sympathy for fascism had grown among some Catholic intellectuals as well as the members of the British upper classes – hence the support for the Italians in Ethiopia
and the Nationalists in Spain, even if this has been described by church historian Adrian Hastings as ‘individualistic and idiosyncratic’ and ‘carrying little weight outside the upper-class Roman Catholic community’. But if Belloc, one of Burns’s enduring influences, had made enemies on the left by his support for right-wing French Catholics and his alleged anti-Semitism, his mind about Nazism had been made up once war had been declared, and he was against it.

  Belloc grew to despair of the newly elected Pope’s apparent inability to speak out unequivocally against the Nazis, ‘browbeaten, by people who talk of a large and powerful Catholic body in Boche-land’. As Belloc put it, ‘There is no such thing. The Catholic Germans were swamped and dowsed long ago in a flood of horribly vulgar Paganism with Atheistic architecture.’

  In fact the need to encourage the stirrings of opposition to Hitler within German Catholic circles was one of the tasks Burns had set himself from his early days at the MoI. In this endeavour he was helped by Harman Grisewood and Bernard Wall, who, after a stint working undercover in Rome, went on to join the Foreign Office research department based at Balliol College, Oxford, under the direction of Dr Arnold Toynbee and Sir Alfred Zimmerman.

  ‘Before the war … violent polemics were carried out by literary men, but they hardly ever bothered to check and counter check their facts. Now facts took their revenge,’ recalled Wall. ‘We had to find out what was true in a world deluged by lies. The lies weren’t only Hitler’s and Stalin’s. Though in Dr Toynbee’s department we told no lies, we were surrounded by lies. The British and Americans, once they had set their minds to war and propaganda, pursued both ruthlessly.’

  Once again the network of Catholic public school boys had a common point of contact not just in Burns, but also in his old Jesuit mentor Fr D’Arcy. The enthusiasm D’Arcy had put into backing the Franco cause during the Spanish Civil War was channelled into the new war aims of the British government. Appointed to the BBC’s religious committee, D’Arcy began to broadcast frequently on the need for Christians on both sides of the Atlantic to unite against the Nazi persecution of the Catholic Church. Later, in September 1941, D’Arcy left for the United States on a mission organised by the Catholic Department of the Ministry of Information. His aim was to influence the Catholic community in the US, namely the Irish and Italians, to drop its opposition to US intervention in favour of the Allies.

  D’Arcy’s success in becoming part of the Allied war effort contrasted with Evelyn Waugh’s failure to join a network of friends at the MoI. In Put Out More Flags Basil’s own attempt to gain useful employment during the phoney war is drawn from Waugh’s own frustrating experiences during that period.

  Waugh wrote to Basil Dufferin, the Under Secretary of State for the Colonies, an old acquaintance, in the hope that he might use his influence. This and subsequent approaches failed to elicit a positive response. Waugh himself suspected the dark hand of MI5, the security service, which, after Munich, and especially after the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, was digging up old files and creating new ones on potential fifth columnists it saw as capable of furthering the interests of an international conspiracy of Nazis and communists. Waugh had supported Mussolini in the Abyssinian War, and had been pro-Franco during the Spanish Civil War, declaring his sympathies for both causes respectively in Waugh in Abyssinia and Robbery Under Law. His social contacts during the 1930s had extended to families like the Mitfords and the Mosleys, who moved on the fringes of British politics and openly sympathised with Hitler’s Germany. It was this background, combined with Waugh’s reputation as a satirist, that might have contributed to putting obstacles in his way inside Whitehall. Burns, thanks to his friends in the Foreign Office, seems to have been initially more fortunate in ensuring that his pro-Franco leanings were not held against him, although he failed, despite Waugh’s recommendation, to enlist for covert military duties with the Special Operations Executive, having been judged to lack a killer instinct.

  Burns later recalled: ‘Evelyn turned up at the Ministry of Information early in the war. He had fixed an interview for me with some Special Services unit and advised me to go, “Get a haircut …” I eventually reached the War Office via Trumper’s suitably trimmed. Here a bull-necked officer rushed at me with unexpected questions: “Can you gouge a man’s eyes out with your thumbs – from behind?” “Can you find the kidneys with a sharp knife?’ I must have failed in these and other questions because I never heard from him again. Anyway, I was soon off on other business in Spain.’

  Burns’s ‘business’ in Spain was a few weeks away yet. It was still a phoney war for almost everyone except those in the Royal Navy who were already embarked on a dangerous mission at sea. Instead of engaging in full-scale military operations, the British shadow-boxed with the enemy, drawing up secret plans, intercepting secret messages, distributing agents, befriending friendly foreigners and tracking suspect aliens. Priests, public school boys, convent girls came and went at the MoI, a building whose architecture and some of its activities partly inspired the model for the Ministry of Truth wherein Winston Smith laboured at the falsification of history in George Orwell’s novel 1984. ‘The Ministry of Truth – Mintrie, in Newspeak – was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up terrace after terrace 300 metres in the air.’

  In fact Senate House is built of Portland stone and not quite 300 metres high. The Ministry of Truth was an amalgam of Orwell’s literary imagination, which was also influenced by his experience working as a propagandist at the BBC, and that of his wife Eileen’s time working for the Ministry of Food.

  At the MoI, Burns was joined by Graham Greene, an appointment he helped facilitate with the help of Denis Cowan, the head of his Catholic propaganda section. Greene was recruited initially into the Film Division, sharing an office with his Oxford contemporary John Betjeman, and put to work on some scripts. After returning from Mexico, and writing up his account of his time there for his publisher Burns in The Lawless Roads, Greene had set about turning this into fiction in The Power and the Glory. This was followed by The Confidential Agent, a novel set in the Spanish Civil War. Its two main Spanish characters were drawn from opposite sides of the conflict.

  Greene had never been to Spain. As we have seen, the nearest he’d got to the Spanish border was his attempt to reach besieged Bilbao in 1937, but the book shows that Greene’s literary imagination had not remained idle during a period when some of his closest professional contacts and friends were fully absorbed by events south of the Pyrenees.

  The two main characters combine to mirror Greene’s own torn loyalties when faced with the stark clash of ideals the war in Spain provoked. The confidential agent ‘D’ of the title is a Republican but was a scholar of medieval literature before the war. The other agent ‘L’, who is on the side of Franco, in conversation with ‘D’ confesses to also being a student of such literature but laments the fact that ‘D’s comrades had burnt his pictures and books, including a manuscript of St Augustine’s City of God.

  In September 1939, in order to complete the novels he was working on, Greene persuaded a draft board of the Officers’ Emergency Reserve to postpone his call-up by a few months. After joining Burns at the MoI, Greene managed to survive the administrative upheavals higher up the management chain by helping to enlist the support of a variety of authors and other contacts for the propaganda effort.

  Among those who visited the MoI during this period was the writer Barbara Lucas, Bernard Wall’s wife, whom Burns had first introduced to Greene while working as a young publisher for Sheed & Ward. Wall was accompanied by Mike Richey, who had by now followed Burns’s advice and enlisted in the Royal Navy.

  Lucas recorded in her diary, ‘Mike on leave came to see us … went to the Ministry of Information to see Graham Greene and Tom. We hadn’t got passes but Mike said we were parachutists (SOE) so were let in. Had a nice chat with Graham Greene and a horrid one wit
h Tom who is always a bit stiff when he is in his office. I recall that Tom thought it rather a bore that these two rather scruffy people were dropping in on him just when he was starting in his rather nice new office.’

  If the stress of wartime government work occasionally got the better of Burns, he, like Greene, knew how to compartmentalise his existence, compensating for the self-imposed discipline of office life with romantic entanglements. The prospect of war, the pervading sense that life as lived till then was about to change irrevocably, with unforeseeable consequences, fuelled a basic human instinct to live for the moment, and focus on what was achievable, a need Burns and Greene were reminded of no sooner had they stepped out of the cold interior of Senate House and into the surrounding neighbourhood of Bloomsbury.

  And yet the woman Burns pursued at the time, Ann Bowes-Lyon, continued to resist marriage, and any enduring emotional attachment. The declaration of war brought back memories of the death in action of her youngest brother in the last Great War and of so many of their generation, making her anxious and threatening another bout of depression not unlike that which had ended in her older brother’s suicide in 1923. This time nothing her lover could say to her seemed to motivate her. Instead it was her extended Royal family who saved her, for they fuelled in her a sense of patriotic duty, and determined what action she should take.

  A major influence was her enthroned cousin, Elizabeth. For within days of Chamberlain declaring war on Germany, Queen Elizabeth threw herself into a hectic round of morale-boosting visits and initiatives aimed at encouraging the involvement of women in the war effort. A new generation of women – voters and workers – was being called for special duties, many of them separated from their children. This was a war destined to draw women into a whole range of fields, from nursing to special operations. With no medical training, Ann joined VAD (Voluntary Aid Detachment) and was posted to the Royal Herbert Hospital in Woolwich. Just over twenty-five years earlier, in December 1914, the first wounded soldier from the First World War had arrived from Dundee Royal Infirmary at Ann’s childhood home at Glamis. It had taken a quarter of a century for Ann to rediscover a sense of public duty which she believed she carried in her blood.