• • •
To a modern journalist, working for a security service is total anathema, the betrayal of an honourable profession. But this is a relatively recent attitude, dating back to the demonisation of the CIA at the time of America’s war in Vietnam. To the generation of Lederer, and indeed of David Astor, who had survived two world wars, working for your country was not a betrayal but a patriotic duty.
Besides, Lajos could easily reconcile passing on messages between political leaders with his journalism, since it gave him access to information and contacts not otherwise available. Some of these messages were from Tito to pass to other leaders in Eastern Europe, especially in Bucharest, where Lajos also had high-level contacts and which he tended to visit on his way home from Belgrade. I suspect he also kept the Israeli Foreign Office or their embassy in London closely informed about everything he found out, especially about changing Soviet attitudes to the Middle East.
Did that make Lajos a spy? If so, he would not have been alone on David Astor’s Observer. David himself had been in the SOE during the war and had been wounded while being dropped into occupied France. Some of the staff he recruited to the newspaper at the end of the war came from SOE or other intelligence backgrounds.
Several foreign correspondents – Gavin Young, Mark Frankland and John de St Jorre – admitted to me in later years that they had been recruited by MI6 but hadn’t seen it through. Then, of course, there was Kim Philby, The Observer’s Middle East correspondent, who, it turned out, had been working for both MI6 and the KGB at the same time. Philby’s deputy for The Observer in Beirut, Patrick Seale, was widely assumed, rightly or wrongly, to be engaged in intelligence, but it was never clear who he might have been working for.
Lajos was certainly accused of being a spy. Among his papers is a document, mainly about one of his Hungarian contacts, Ferenc Kiss, which says that ‘Dr Lajos Lederer is in the Secret Service of a foreign Great Power’ (it doesn’t specify which). The document, which appears to be an English translation of a Hungarian Communist report, adds: ‘Through Lederer, Kiss also kept General de Gaulle informed about the situation in Hungary.’
He was once interviewed by the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv, which described the encounter thus:
He is tall, with a sportsman-like appearance and a somewhat dancing walk. He took me immediately to the corner of the hotel, so that no one could eavesdrop on our conversation. Most of what he told me was about a secret mission which he had fulfilled and which could not be disclosed generally. He always added: ‘Please, this is for your information only. The matter is still top secret.’ He is always remarkably up-to-date about the Eastern bloc and creates an aura of mystery around himself.
The last bit was certainly true.
Frankland, an Observer correspondent in Moscow, described Lajos as ‘essentially a central European gossip who enjoyed confounding the experts and getting them in a tizzy’.
• • •
Lajos was regarded as Israel’s unofficial ambassador at The Observer. He had been converted to Zionism in the late 1920s at a dinner at the home of Israel (later Lord) and Rebecca Sieff, where he met Chaim Weizmann, who two decades later became the first President of an independent Israel. Although he was never a practising Jew, Lajos was well connected to many of Israel’s leading politicians and to the senior figures in British Jewry.
Lajos was Jewish when it suited him. To say that is not to impugn his sincerity. He had been born Jewish, but his family did not practise religious observance in Hungary and he married outside the faith. But because many of his friends were Jews, he showed respect for their religion and often spoke at meetings in London synagogues or to Jewish MPs at the House of Commons about Israel, the plight of Soviet Jews and developments within the Communist world. He was a guest speaker, for example, at a memorial meeting in London for the victims of the Warsaw Ghetto.
Teddy Kollek once wrote to Lajos: ‘Jerusalem and its Mayor have no better friend than you.’ Lajos accompanied me on two visits to Israel and opened doors for me with many of the country’s notables, from the Prime Minister and Kollek downwards.
• • •
Despite his long association with The Observer, Lajos was never a member of the permanent staff. He hung on narrowly to his meagre retainer through several budgetary purges as the paper’s financial situation deteriorated in the 1970s. Given the level of entertaining at Gordon Place, I sometimes wondered how he managed for money.
He may have received legacies from the first Lord Rothermere, for whom he worked in the 1930s, and from one of the Rothschilds, and at one time there was a monthly allowance from Israel Sieff. He also provided useful commercial intelligence about the Communist world for his rich friends and they seem to have found ways of repaying him – either through assistance with school fees (Anthony Rothschild) or through paid consultancies (the Sieffs and Wolfsons).
For all his expertise on Yugoslavia, Lajos was in fact a Hungarian, born in 1904 at Lőcse (now Levoča) in the Carpathian Mountains, where his father was the mayor and editor of the local newspaper. His family were among the 3.5 million Hungarians uprooted by the Treaty of Trianon, part of the Versailles peace conference that ended the First World War, when his home town became part of the newly created Czechoslovakia.
Apart from his post-war scoops about Tito’s Yugoslavia, his best journalism was published at the time of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. He went into the country with the young student idealists – with the help of old friends who were now generals, professors or liberal politicians – and shared their high hopes for the outcome of the uprising.
He stayed on to see these hopes shattered and the democratic dreams for his homeland crushed by Soviet tanks. The tragic fate of his country had a profound effect on him and it took him some time to recover his normal high spirits, though he went on to speak on a number of British platforms to protest at the plight of his countrymen and the purge of Jews from senior posts.
Sadly, he was to die four years before Hungary was liberated by the collapse of Communism and the end of the Cold War he had spent his life reporting.
‘My father refused to swear an oath of allegiance to the new country,’ he said, ‘and he had his house burned down for his pains. In 1921, we were all – that is, my father, my mother, my grandmother and my two brothers – hustled into carts, taking whatever household chattels we could carry.’ They were driven into exile in what remained of Hungary after its dismemberment. For months, he said, they survived mainly through his grandmother selling off pieces of family silver. Lajos was in his late teens.
They settled finally in Budapest, where his father went back into politics – ‘he could have been Prime Minister if he had lived in different times,’ Lajos claimed. He himself took a doctorate in law at the University of Budapest. The family album of this period shows a handsome, well-dressed middle-class family in large gardens, playing with toys and dressing up for amateur theatricals, or out on the ski slopes. His father is shown in a uniform that looks like something out of a comic opera by Gilbert and Sullivan.
Francis Lederer, a cousin with whom Lajos shared a family resemblance, became a matinee idol in Hollywood and appeared in such films as Confessions of a Nazi Spy and The Bridge of San Luis Rey. He did not appear in The Prisoner of Zenda, but there was something of the dashing Rupert of Hentzau about both Hungarian cousins.
Lederer came to London in 1926, at the age of twenty-one, to pursue a postgraduate course in international law. He evidently arrived armed with social introductions, for he was soon to be found in the drawing rooms of London’s leading families. Friendly letters from Lord and Lady Astor, half a dozen Rothschilds, the Duke of Kent, the Earl of Athlone, Lord Camrose (owner of the Daily Telegraph), Randolph Churchill, Sir Simon Marks and several Sieffs survive among his papers.
While in Budapest in 1935, he had shown the visiting Lord and Lady Astor around the capital. Nancy Astor, the first woman MP to take a seat in the House of Commons and a s
trong personality used to getting her own way, was entranced by the rich tapestries and glass in the old Hungarian palaces and churches and instructed Lajos to help her acquire them for their stately home at Cliveden.
He was horrified at the idea of ransacking his country’s national treasures and finally persuaded her to allow him to have copies made instead. This was duly done, at vast expense, and the artefacts, including a gigantic candelabra modelled on one in the Alexander Palace, were transported to England.
After the war, the Astors used to entertain the whole Observer staff at an annual party at Cliveden. At one of these outings, many years after their successful shopping spree in Budapest, Lajos was surprised and rather hurt when he heard Nancy say to her son, Lajos’s editor: ‘David, surely you’re not still employing this old Jew.’ David, a gentle liberal, was deeply embarrassed. Lady Astor had a habit of saying shocking things like that, believing them to be light-hearted banter, without realising that they were likely to cause offence.
• • •
Back in the salons of 1930s London, Lajos made good use of his contacts with Hungarian and other foreign exiles to assist his upward social mobility. Names like Count Esterházy, Count Apponyi, Baron von Ullmann, Baron Lang, Mrs Philip de László and Ferdinand Goldschmidt-Rothschild appear in his address book of the period.
One can visualise the dinner-jacketed, moustachioed men with their gold cigarette cases, the coiffured women sparkling in their haute couture dresses, the crystal glasses, the grand pianos, the Art Deco drawing rooms, like something out of a Hercule Poirot television series. In this setting, Lajos played the perfect boulevardier.
By far the most useful of his contacts was Zsigmond Strobl, the fashionable Hungarian sculptor who received A-list commissions in the 1930s from the British social elite, including the royal family. Strobl appears to have been a family friend from Budapest. The arrangement worked to both men’s advantage. Lederer would meet society ladies and persuade them to let their husbands, daughters or themselves sit for Strobl. The sculptor would get a financially rewarding commission and Lederer, helped by his charm, his single status and his patrician demeanour, would become a welcome guest in the salons of yet more of London’s society hostesses.
The Duke of Kent, the Earl of Athlone, Lord Camrose, General Allenby and George Bernard Shaw were among Strobl’s subjects. Lajos would court these exalted figures by attending the studio sessions and get himself invited to some of their homes.
The real coup, however – the jewel in the crown you might say – was the young Princess Elizabeth, then aged ten, who sat for Strobl in 1936 and 1937 after Lajos had met her mother, then the Duchess of York, at a party and persuaded her to visit Strobl’s studio. She was impressed and agreed to commission a likeness of her daughter.
There were many handwritten letters to and fro between Lajos and various ladies-in-waiting at Buckingham Palace and Balmoral about the details of the arrangement – from Ladies Helen Graham, Katharine Seymour, Cynthia Spencer, Lettice Bowlby and Victoria Wemyss, sometimes asking him to call at the Privy Purse Door at Buckingham Palace.
There were also some friendly personal notes from more than one of these ladies from private addresses, thanking him for flowers, suggesting that the dashing young bachelor had worked his exotic charms on them too. His success with the royal courtiers is perhaps not surprising, given that he was a consummate courtier himself.
Once the Duchess of York’s commission of Strobl was settled, Marion Crawford, governmess to the princess, became a key figure. Lajos became good friends with the legendary ‘Crawfie’, who was still writing him chatty letters about her holidays after the war and giving him snippets of information about her charges that a modern newspaper diarist would die for. She obviously took to Lajos and trusted him to sit in the studio with the little princess to keep her amused.
Fortunately, he kept detailed notes of these sittings. They provide a fascinating insight into the personality of Princess Elizabeth at the historic moment when, through the abdication of her uncle, King Edward VIII, she became heir to the throne. They also illustrate how far the skilful deployment of charm and other social graces could elevate a penniless young Hungarian immigrant, even in the stratified society of pre-war England.
He recalled that the princess burst into Strobl’s Kensington studio wearing a homespun woollen jersey, a tartan skirt and wrinkled socks in buttoned shoes. ‘What am I supposed to do?’ she asked brightly. When she caught sight of other busts Strobl had made, she exclaimed: ‘Why, there’s Uncle George,’ pointing at a clay figure of the Duke of Kent, ‘and there’s Great-uncle Athlone. And isn’t that Mr Bernard Shaw?’ Then, pointing at Ramsay MacDonald: ‘Wasn’t he the Prime Minister?’
A bust of Herbert Morrison, however, defeated her. When told he was leader of London County Council, she said: ‘Oh, is that important?’ Reassured that it was, she asked: ‘But is he a nice man?’ (By all accounts, he wasn’t. There is a story that when Ernest Bevin heard someone say: ‘Morrison is his own worst enemy,’ the Labour Foreign Secretary replied: ‘Not while I’m alive he isn’t.’)
The princess gave Strobl eighteen sittings over two years for two works – one a head, which is now in Clarence House, and the other of her as an equestrian figure sitting on her favourite pony, Snowball, a gift from King George V. Lajos made conversation with her throughout these sessions, which each lasted over an hour. He was impressed by her knowledge of history and geography, especially about countries in the British Empire. ‘I am reading The Times,’ she said proudly at one point.
But it was her knowledge of horses that really amazed him. She had been an accomplished rider since the age of six and had read books on thoroughbred breeding. When he told her he was Hungarian, she said the best thoroughbred horse would be a mixture of Arab and Hungarian. She added that she had some Hungarian blood too. This surprised him, but it turned out that her grandmother Queen Mary’s own grandmother had been the Hungarian Countess Rhédey.
The princess said she much preferred receiving toy animals, such as horses, dogs, cattle or sheep, to dolls as Christmas presents. She loved games, riddles and puzzles and asked Lajos: ‘Why is the sea so strong?’ When he was stumped, she clapped her hands delightedly and explained: ‘Because it’s full of mussels!’
She told him she used to have a secret arrangement with her grandfather, King George V, after his afternoon nap. She would look through binoculars and wave from the bedroom of her parents’ home at 145 Piccadilly and he would wave back to her from the balcony of Buckingham Palace.
George V had died in January 1936 and been succeeded by the Duke of Windsor, her father’s elder brother, who became King Edward VIII. She knew him as Uncle David. Then came the constitutional crisis which led to his abdication in December of that year over his refusal to give up Mrs Simpson, his mistress, whom he chose to marry and thereby renounce his claim to the throne. Around this time, Lajos was in a car with the princess and Crawfie when they saw newspaper placards about the growing crisis. The young Princess Elizabeth turned to them and asked: ‘Is Uncle David in trouble?’
She continued with her visits to the studio after her father became King George VI, but Lajos noticed some differences. She was now the heir presumptive. She was more subdued and there was less spontaneous merriment. She no longer chattered on. She didn’t rush into the studio, but arrived with a detective, and there was a policeman placed outside the door.
But she seemed happy enough about her new status. Six days after her father was proclaimed King, she brought Lajos an autographed photograph of herself, torn from a book. As she handed it to him, she said solemnly: ‘This is the first time I have signed my name since I became heir to the throne.’ Lajos kept a number of photographs of these sessions with the future Queen.
Many years later, when Lajos and I were introduced to the Queen Mother at the opening of new premises for the Press Club in London, she remembered the Strobl episode fondly.
• • •
/> Lajos had persuaded the Hungarian daily, Pesti Hírlap, to take him on as a London correspondent in 1926. It was a liberal newspaper, dedicated to democratic ideals, opposed to the rise of fascism and committed under its campaigning editor, Dr Otto Legrady, to the return of the territories lost by Hungary in the Treaty of Trianon – a cause close to Lajos’s heart. The country had lost 70 per cent of its territory, 58 per cent of its population and 32 per cent of ethnic Hungarians, like the Lederer family.
This cause was also close to the heart of Harold, the first Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail, Northcliffe’s younger brother and a fascist who admired Adolf Hitler and met him in Berlin. Northcliffe was a newspaper genius, owning The Times, The Observer and sundry magazines; Harold was a financial genius, taking over and expanding his brother’s newspaper interests when he died, becoming, it was claimed, the second richest man in England.
Lederer, as a young correspondent for a Budapest newspaper, was desperate to interview the powerful English lord who had used his Daily Mail to campaign for the return of Hungary’s lost territories. What prompted Lajos to approach him was a front-page editorial under Rothermere’s byline entitled: ‘Hungary’s Place in the Sun’.
Overnight, Rothermere became a hero in Hungary. His interest in the country had been quickened, it is said, by a romance with a Hungarian beauty, Stephanie von Hohenlohe, who had become a princess through marriage. When his many requests for an interview were declined, Lajos found out that Rothermere was living in a suite of rooms at the Savoy Hotel. So, he went round there in his best suit and stood around in the foyer trying to look as though he lived there too.
Eventually he dodged into a lift and asked the bellboy, casually: ‘What room is Lord Rothermere in?’ Overhearing the question was a well-dressed old gentleman at the back of the lift: ‘I am Lord Rothermere,’ he announced. ‘And who the devil are you, young man? You had better come with me…’
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