by Jimmy Burns
While the post-war Labour Party had been in power, Burns’s sphere of influence had focused on Conservative MPs and their associated networks that extended across the civil service, the Garrick Club and, within it, a convivial dining table known as the Old Burgundians, which counted The Times editor Bill Casey, the cartoonist Osbert Lancaster, the writer Arthur Ransome and the poet T. S. Eliot among its regular attendees. His enduring post-war friendships in the world of intelligence included Walter Bell, who after serving in Washington in the UK–US liaison committee under William Stephenson went on to work as a spy in various Cold War postings, including Cairo and Nairobi. Burns also maintained close links with a number of MI6 officers, including Peter Lunn, son of the Catholic polemicist Arnold Lunn, whose expertise in tapping Soviet communications was made much use of in post-war Vienna and subsequently East Berlin.
The return of a Conservative government in 1951 saw Burns playing an increasingly influential role in bolstering Anglo-Spanish relations with the help of his wife Mabel, their London home an informal gathering place for an assortment of Spaniards living in London, well-connected members of the British political establishment and foreign service and priests and theologians.
Eight months after Anthony Eden, the new Conservative foreign secretary, declared he was looking forward to improved relations with Franco’s Spain, on 2 May 1952 Burns gave a keynote lecture at the Ateneo, the prestigious literary club in Madrid. The invitation had the official blessing of the authorities as well as the patronage of Burns’s father-in-law Gregorio Marañón. No Englishman had been afforded such an honour by the Spaniards for years. Burns spoke on English Catholicism, a subject tailor-made for his audience and to appease the authorities, as well as one genuinely close to his heart.
He began by noting that, in contrast to Spaniards, the English were generally by nature reserved when it came to religious matters, as if slightly embarrassed by them. He went on to identify a growing and increasing confident Catholic population, comprising traditional English families, Irish immigrants and converts who had managed to free the ‘true faith’ from its social and political segregation before concluding thus: ‘Every thinking Englishman today faces a world debate between Christianity and Atheism, and increasingly, as he looks for authentic religion amidst all the confusions, all the darkness, he finds it in the Catholic community … which threatens no one, lest he be the devil.’
Burns’s contacts extended, crucially, to Rome and across the Atlantic, for it was the Vatican and the US administration that led post-war international re-engagement with the Franco’s Spain, culminating in its admission to the UN in December 1955.
Key players involved in discreet negotiations during this period included Spaniards Burns had befriended during his time in the embassy in Madrid. Prominent among them was the Christian Democrat lawyer Joaquin Ruiz-Giménez, who was dispatched as Spain’s ambassador to the Holy See to secure the Pope’s recognition of the Franco regime as a Catholic nation state.
In the US, another of Burns’s friends from Madrid days, the former Spanish foreign minister José Félix Lequerica, coordinated a pro-Spanish lobby. For his part Burns used his regular trips to America under his guise of a publisher to help encourage the restoration of full US diplomatic relations with Spain through a network of staunchly anti-communist and powerful American Catholics, who ranged from the Archbishop of New York, Cardinal Spellman, to the CIA’s Archie Roosevelt.
The grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt and a cousin of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Archibald had risen through the ranks of the American intelligence services during the war. In 1953, the year Franco signed a historic pact with the US, Roosevelt was posted to Madrid as the CIA station chief. During his three years there he was a regular visitor to the Cigarral de Los Menores, the country retreat outside Toledo where Burns had first met the daughter of its owner, his future bride Mabel Marañón, in 1943.
‘Dr Marañón was a true sage – a great medical doctor, historian, philosopher, and a wonderful human being,’ Roosevelt later wrote. He went on to recount how knowledgeable Marañón had shown himself to be about Spain’s Mozarabic culture, a theme the CIA man warmed to, regarding himself as somewhat of a specialist in dealings with Muslims.
While Burns travelled frequently across the Atlantic, mentally Mabel never left Spain. It was not just that she returned to the country frequently, taking her children on holidays, and keeping in touch with her parents and their influential social network. She became, in effect, an honorary Spanish ambassadress, founding cultural associations such as the Anglo-Spanish Society with one of the post-war British ambassadors to Spain, Jock Balfour, and charities such as the Spanish Welfare Fund, which helped channel money from Franco’s Spain into the growing postwar immigrant community, work for which she was honoured by the Spanish state with the Grand Cross of Isabel la Católica.
It was during these post-war years that Mabel met Franco and brought to his attention the plight of elderly Spaniards who wanted to return home from exile, young single mothers, and children who needed Spanish-language classes. There were still hundreds of political prisoners and periodic executions still took place in Spain, but Mabel refrained from commenting on the country’s internal affairs.
Instead she focused on getting a sympathetic response from the dictator to her request for money for her charities when she pointed out that the majority of Spanish immigrants in the UK at the time were from his native Galicia. So moved was Franco by Mabel’s special pleading that, at one point in their conversation, he burst into tears. ‘Mis pobres Gallegas’ (my poor Galician women) he wailed, for Franco was himself of Galician stock. Behind his tears, Franco had also spotted a political opportunity to counter-balance the opposition to his regime by the old republican exiled community that had established itself in London during the Spanish Civil War. In the post-war years the house – and later the flat – that Mabel shared with her husband in the English capital would leave its doors open as an informal meeting place for a politically wide cross-section of Spaniards. Discussions about Spanish culture or alternatives to Franco’s dictatorial regime would take place over a coffee or a glass of wine or an extended dinner of Spanish food.
But Mabel’s charities, which she helped run when not working for the BBC’s Spanish language service, became the beneficiaries of Spanish public and private funding with Franco’s blessing, part of it channelled through the Foundation set up in 1955 in memory of Juan March, the banker who had helped bankroll the Spanish Civil War in the first place and later worked as a British agent.
While using the Marañón name to maintain his own contacts in Spain, on his return to Britain Burns wasted little time in getting back in touch with the world with which he had been familiar as a bachelor. Burns stayed close to the Richey brothers, Harman Grisewood, and his best friend David Jones, who in 1955 was awarded a CBE. When the Queen asked Jones what he did, he answered simply, ‘I paint pictures and your mother has quite a collection of them.’ He might have added, ‘and Anthony Blunt looks after them’, which he did at the time, as Surveyor of the Queen’s pictures.
While gaining some recognition for his undoubted talent as a poet and artist, work which Burns helped promote, Jones never rid himself of a life-long depression which took hold of him in the trenches in the Great War. Jones spent his last years as a semi-recluse in a nursing home in the outskirts of London. Burns would visit him regularly at weekends, and paid a moving tribute to him in his memoirs. ‘I doubt if any other mortal soul has been such a counsellor, such a kind comrade,’ wrote Burns eighteen years after Jones’s death in 1974.
Among Burns’s female friends and one-time lovers, Ann Bowes-Lyon settled into her marriage with Dr Frank D’Abreu, became a devoted Catholic, and helped run charities. The fund-raising events and the Stonyhurst old-boy network meant that the Burnses and the D’Abreus met socially from time to time. The affair between Tom Burns and Ann Bowes-Lyon was never resumed, although Ann secretly kept his pr
ewar letters until she died in 1999.
For her part, Mabel Marañón found her new post-war life in London as Mrs Tom Burns difficult only when having to suffer some of the old friendships her husband had forged in a different era.
‘Back early (11 o’clock) to hotel where just as I was in bed I was telephoned by Burns who came up with his bride, swarthy, squat, Japanese appearance. He says he can arrange a holiday in Spain for me,’ Evelyn Waugh noted in his London diary on 21 February 1946.
Mabel, whom most other men considered a beauty, did not keep a diary at this time, but her dislike for Waugh was mutual. She found him physically repugnant, snobbish and rude to the point of cruelty. It was soon after that first encounter that she and her husband invited Waugh for dinner at their first post-war London home in Victoria Square. The author spent part of the evening mocking Mabel for bringing a Spanish maid over from Franco’s Spain to serve at table wearing white gloves and also complained about the smell of garlic given off by the chorizo stored next to the guest room. Mabel felt it a terrible abuse of her hospitality.
But worse was to come in the conflict between the most brilliant English novelist of his generation and the self-assured youngest daughter of one of twentieth-century Spain’s most eminent men of science and letters. Despite the earlier fiasco, Mabel was reluctantly persuaded weeks later by her husband to lend Waugh their home for a party he wanted to give in honour of Clare Booth Luce. The glamorous wife of the proprietor of Time-Life was an ardent Catholic convert and Waugh thought the Burns’s residence an ideal place to gather together a good sampling of London’s Catholic intelligentsia. ‘There was a fine mixture of writers and hacks with a sprinkling of selected clergy; the house was awash with champagne; Dr Hyde, so to call the better side of Evelyn, was at his kindliest and most amusing,’ Burns later recalled.
And yet Burns was as upset as Mabel by the appearance at their door the following evening of Robert Speaight, the Catholic actor and author. He had turned up a day late because of a misleading invitation Waugh had deliberately sent him.
Some years later Burns had transferred his young family of one daughter and two sons from their elegant Georgian house in Victoria Square to a flat in a Victorian mansion block opposite Westminster Cathedral. No sooner had he moved in than he received a postcard from Waugh. ‘I am sorry that you have come down in the world,’ Waugh snarled. Burns thought it best not to show the postcard to Mabel.
While Mabel never reconciled herself with Waugh’s acerbic wit and brash manner – both of which she found offensive – Burns continued to value him as a literary and social asset, suffering as best he could his idiosyncrasies, over occasional meals together and correspondence, and seeking some advantage in return.
In the summer of 1946, Burns helped arrange for Waugh’s first postwar visit to Spain. At the time Waugh was basking in the fame of his bestseller Brideshead Revisited. He was ‘alternately absorbed in writing and high living, with hard drinking, to the neglect of his wife and family’, Burns later recalled. As he would later reflect in his memoirs, Waugh had acquired a persona with a constant scowling glare alternating with an expression of ineffable boredom. ‘These masks cracked occasionally with a smile which seemed to me a grotesque grimace,’ Burns wrote. And yet Burns considered Waugh’s acceptance of an invitation to attend an international congress in Madrid in honour of the fifteenth-century Spanish Dominican Francisco de Victoria something of a diplomatic coup, at a time when the wartime allied powers appeared determined to exclude Franco’s Spain from the United Nations.
The congress was ultimately postponed but Waugh and his companion, his old friend from Oxford days, the Tablet editor Douglas Woodruff, spent two weeks touring emblemic cities of Franco’s Spain – Valladolid, Burgos and Salamanca – and laying a wreath at the Peninsular War memorial in Vitoria. Despite periodic organisational setbacks, the two companions were treated to endless banquets and vins d’honneur by the lay and ecclesiastical Spanish authorities and, in the British ambassador Victor Mallet’s absence, by his wife Peggy, whom Waugh knew from an earlier trip abroad.
Two years later, in the summer of 1948, Waugh repaid Burns the favour of his free holiday in Spain by editing a book by the American Trappist monk Thomas Merton. ‘Tom Burns gave me enthralling task of cutting the redundancies and solecisms of Tom Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain. This took a week and resulted in what should be a fine thin volume. I gave dinner to Mia, the Pakenhams and Burns. Bill £26. But lavish,’ Waugh wrote in his dairy.
Merton’s book, with Waugh’s amendments, was published in Britain as Elected Silence, a title chosen by Burns in consultation with Waugh. This time Waugh did not question his publisher’s judgement as he had done with the earlier Waugh in Abyssinia.
Burns later wrote to Waugh on the subject of their mutual friend Graham Greene’s new novel, The Heart of the Matter. The central character is called Scobie, a Catholic expatriate policeman living in West Africa. Scobie’s marriage is in crisis, and he falls in love with another woman. When his wife discovers the affair, Scobie pretends he still loves her and, to maintain the pretence, takes Holy Communion with her. Believing that his adultery has placed him in a state of mortal sin, he commits suicide, offering his damnation as a sacrifice for the two women in his life. Whatever its literary merits, as a fellow Catholic Burns believed that Greene had produced a ‘sham spiritual dilemma’ with ‘a caricature conventional Catholic couple’. He told Waugh: ‘He [Greene] almost turns things upside down and hates the sinners whilst he loves the sin. G. G. is becoming a sort of smart Alec of Jansenism.’
Waugh’s subsequent review published in the Tablet was no less visceral. ‘To me the idea of willing my own damnation for the love of God is either a very loose poetical expression or a mad blasphemy …’ he wrote in a review that provoked a lengthy debate in the letters column of the magazine but which ultimately left his friendship with Burns and Greene unaffected.
Greene had officially left MI6 in 1944 in mysterious circumstances. Just as Burns had facilitated Greene’s original recruitment into government service with the MoI in the immediate aftermath of war, so he played a part in helping the author reintegrate into civilian life. Burns arranged for Greene to be offered a job at the publishers Eyre & Spottiswoode. These were days before the advent of the big conglomerates, when publishing was still a cottage industry run by a close social circle of well-known public figures.
Greene was a member of one such coterie, their meetings at the Lamb and Flag pub in Covent Garden recalled by Burns: ‘Graham seemed to have a spotlight on him, although his companions were by no means shadowy figures and I recall them with affection … there was Douglas Jerrold, the chairman of the company and a tall, saturnine figure … all of a right-wing piece … in contrast was his close colleague Sir Charles Petrie; an owlish, round and bearded baronet, a learned historian but as much as home in the Lamb and Flag as in the Carlton Club.’ Frank Morley made up the trio, a Harvard graduate and Rhodes Scholar who had ‘adopted England as his own and had settled near its heart, in Buckinghamshire’.
While Burns’s relations with Waugh cooled in later years, his friendship with Greene intensified as publisher and author found common ground in their engagement with the more liberal Catholic theology emerging from the Second Vatican Council and their more discreet and enduring contacts with the murky world of espionage. Burns’s friendship with Greene was made easier by the fact that he was much admired by Mabel, who found him thoughtful, kind and attractive, in striking contrast to her feelings for Waugh.
When Burns took over as the editor of the Tablet in 1967 from the more conservative Douglas Woodruff, he stepped up his correspondence and informal meetings with Greene, at which conversation would range freely over matters of politics, theology and love. In 1976 Burns persuaded Greene to become a Trustee of the Tablet Trust, along with several of the great and good of the post-war British Catholic establishment led by the Duke of Norfolk and the one-time head of the civil service, Sir
John Hunt. Burns came to rely on Greene’s voluntary contributions to raise the Tablet’s profile at minimal cost, most notably the submission by the author of episodes of what became the novel Monsignor Quixote.
A regular visitor to his flat in Antibes, Burns was in correspondence with Greene right up to the final week of the author’s life, in June 1991, when he himself had already been diagnosed with cancer – two Catholics struggling to come to terms with their mortality, raging against the night, with their faith in God facing its ultimate test and with the frustration and pain of old age and incurable illness.
Two years younger than Greene, my father died four and a half years later, on 8 December 1995, the iconic Catholic Feast of the Immaculate Conception, having suffered from the same fatal blood condition as his good friend.
More than four decades had passed since the author of this book was conceived. Mabel Marañón, my mother, and my father, Tom, were then staying in their new Madrid flat on the sixth floor of a building on the Avenida Castellana also occupied by her parents and her two sisters. On 27 January 1953, Mabel gave birth in the Spanish capital to Jimmy, her fourth surviving child, the first to be born in Spain since the premature death towards the end of the Second World War of El Inglesito. My parents saw my coming into this world as a symbol of a new beginning in Anglo-Spanish relations. Thirty years later, on his retirement from publishing in 1983, Tom Burns was awarded the OBE in recognition of services to Queen and Country.
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