The disappearance of Burgess and Maclean aroused a storm of publicity in 1951. Their reappearance in 1956, and accusations about the treachery of Philby, renewed the commotion. These squalls broke over an epoch when Marx and Freud were the two totems of the western intelligentsia. The Marxist misdirection reduced all explanations to class struggle and class guilt. The Freudian misdirection, in which the treachery of four of the Cambridge ring of five was infantilized by interpretations based on supposed familial psychodramas, stemmed from a painful historical context. Nazi ideology had categorized people by their bloodlines and family stock, and used imaginary racial traits as the justification for genocide. As a reaction, the western intelligentsia after 1945 preferred to explain human character and to understand adult choices according to psychological theories about parental nurturing, childhood environment, feelings and emotions. More than ever, in the 1960s, when American and west European students were rebelling against their parents, the treason of Burgess, Maclean and Philby (for Blunt remained publicly unidentified until 1979) was attributed to defects in their parental upbringing. Family dynamics from half a century earlier were imagined and interpreted by commentators who were uninhibited by the fact that they had never met any of the family concerned.
The litterateur Cyril Connolly belonged to a generation that treated Freudianism as a faith. ‘Politics begins in the nursery; no one is born patriotic or unpatriotic, right-wing or left-wing,’ he asserted in 1952 in his pamphlet about Burgess and Maclean. ‘It is the child whose craving for love is unsatisfied, whose desire for power is thwarted or whose innate sense of justice is warped that eventually may try to become a revolutionary or a dictator.’ The subversive rebellion of the Cambridge spies expressed their hostility to their early paternal experiences, Connolly affirmed: ‘Before we can hurt the fatherland, we must hate the father.’4
Fantasies about hateful fathers and fables of nursery politics more than ever clouded understanding after the intervention in 1968 of David Cornwell, who after serving in both MI5 and SIS had taken the pen-name John le Carré. It was under this fictive identity that he contributed a prefatory essay for a pioneering biography by Sunday Times journalists, Philby: The Spy Who Betrayed a Generation. Burgess and Maclean are ‘psychiatric misfits’ in le Carré’s depiction (ten years later Andrew Boyle followed le Carré’s misdirection, and with reductive inaccuracy entitled the chapter in The Climate of Treason on the boyhoods of Burgess, Maclean and Philby ‘The Young Misfits’). Among other suppositions, le Carré wrote of Philby’s father, who spent most of his working life abroad: ‘Kim loved the absent parent best; and even though he had marked down the parent authority of England as his lifelong enemy, Kim Philby never quite absolved it from its parental duty to protect.’ In le Carré’s view, Philby used women ‘as a consolation for a manhood haunted by his father’s ghost. When they came too close, he punished them or sent them away, either as unsatisfactory mother-figures or as the spent instruments of his expression.’ Philby’s four wives and serial mistresses, le Carré continued, were always secondary to the symbolic woman to whom he gave most: ‘Mother Russia was the boy’s absolute.’ Such fancies were shared by Leo Abse, who arranged for his fellow Labour MP Will Owen to receive immunity from prosecution in return for undergoing MI5 interrogation about his spying for communist Czechoslovakia. Abse attended the questioning, and knew the extent of his colleague’s avarice, but nevertheless gave an absurd explanation that treachery was a version of incest: ‘Owen certainly did his puny best to rape his motherland.’5
The ideas of Connolly, Abse and their ilk are obsolete, but their baneful influence persists. We now understand that DNA is as influential in character-formation as parenting. It has, for example, been evident since 1993 that chromosomes have a stronger influence in creating a disposition towards male homosexuality than psychoanalytical notions about aloof fathers or suffocating mothers. Yet writers continue to fret over the remoteness of the fathers of Blunt, Burgess and Maclean, as if most English fathers of the 1920s were not aloof and inexpressive by twenty-first-century standards. More cruelly, they indict – sometimes with harsh misogyny – the spies’ mothers for various contradictory defects: possessiveness, indifference, coddling, neglect, over-indulgence, lack of sympathy.
Undeniably parents are formative influences on their children. Miranda Carter in her biography of Blunt depicts his parents as ‘pious, austere, fiercely teetotal, anti-gambling and keen on charitable works’. Blunt, she says, was a dutiful son, who imbibed their missionary zeal for good causes, which he diverted from Christianity to Marxism. Maclean’s upbringing in a frugal, teetotal and Sabbatarian household disposed him, judged his friend and biographer Robert Cecil, to substitute the Communist Manifesto for the Bible as holy writ. Such judgements are tenable; but to exceed the evidence by attributing the mainsprings of treachery to parental influence seems banal and suppositional. The assertions of Connolly and le Carré cannot be proved, and prove nothing.6
Debased Freudian interpretations have not been imposed upon the fifth Cambridge spy, John Cairncross @ MOLIÈRE. He was born in 1913, in a cottage at Lesmahagow, a small town in Lanarkshire where his father was an ironmonger. His mother had been a schoolteacher. There is no reason, other than their relative poverty, why Cairncross’s parents have been protected from the punishing hypotheses levelled at the Blunt, Burgess, Maclean and Philby parents. Arnold Deutsch, the illegal in London who engineered Cairncross’s recruitment in 1937, wrote a psychological profile of him: ‘MOLIÈRE comes from a Scottish lower-middle-class family – religious people who because of the difficult life they lead are very hard-working … He is pedantic, industrious, zealous and thrifty. He knows the value of money and how to handle it.’ A taxi-ride with Deutsch had been the first time in his life that he had travelled by motor-cab. Deutsch found him ‘naïve and rather provincial’, but ‘very trusting’.7
To reiterate, Philby was a well-travelled married man of twenty-two, with recent experience of revolutionary street-fighting, when in 1934 he was enlisted as a penetration agent by Deutsch on a bench in the Regent’s Park. Burgess was a worldly adventurer of twenty-three when Deutsch recruited him six months later. Blunt was in his thirtieth year when in 1937 Burgess introduced him to Deutsch, who recruited him as a Comintern talent-spotter. Cairncross was twenty-three when on Blunt’s recommendation he was taken to meet Deutsch. Only Maclean could be thought callow, having turned twenty-one at about the time that he was enrolled. The ring of five took adult decisions, in an adult environment. It infantilizes the significance of their ideas, their acts and their consequences to treat them as programmed by defective parenting.
Kim Philby at Westminster
Philby was born in the Punjab on 1 January 1912. He was given the forenames Harold Adrian Russell, but was universally known as Kim. He was the only son and eldest child of St John Philby, then an official in the Indian civil service. St John had obtained a first-class degree in modern languages at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he spent an extra year studying Hindustani, Persian and Indian civil law before going to India in 1908. Valentine Vivian, the Indian Army officer who became chief of MI6’s Section V, met St John Philby at this time. ‘As a bullet-headed young Assistant Commissioner in Shahpur in the Punjab, he was singularly devoid of manners and always up against his superiors,’ Vivian reported to Guy Liddell in 1940. ‘He was strongly self-opinionated and expressed himself, often extremely capably and accurately, with such arrogance that no one had a good word for him.’ He was not unlike his irrepressibly vain cousin Bernard Montgomery, later a field marshal and the victorious commander at the battle of Alamein, who was best man at his wedding in 1910 to Dora Johnston. Her father was a railway engineer in the Indian Public Works Department.8
May Philby, Kim’s paternal grandmother, had been deserted by her drunken Ceylon coffee-planter husband, and averted poverty by opening a boarding-house in the military town of Camberley. She travelled from England to the Punjab in order to attend
her grandchild’s birth. Although she returned to Surrey during his infancy, she was installed as the primary figure in his boyhood when in 1915 he was sent to live with her at Camberley. One of her three sons had been killed at Ypres in 1914, and another was killed there in 1916. She brought up her grandson from the age of three, provided his home, felt consoled by his presence and had a closer influence than his parents.
Kim Philby saw little of his father in 1912–15, and nothing of him from 1915 until 1919. In 1921 the father succeeded T. E. Lawrence as chief British representative in Transjordan, and immediately proved cantankerous: as Reader Bullard, the British Consul in Jeddah, said, ‘Any scheme that someone else puts up he disagrees with. His great phrase is, “I join issue with you”, and he spends his life joining issue with someone.’ In 1923 May Philby took her eleven-year-old grandson to visit Damascus, Baalbek, Tyre, Nazareth and Jerusalem with his father. It was only on this trip, and during the year that St John Philby spent in London after resigning as High Commissioner in Transjordan in 1924, that he had the possibility of exerting direct influence on his son. His resignation was ostensibly on a point of principle, but Bullard computed that it left him with an annual pension of £700 when his age was not yet forty.9
With the security of a pension St John Philby bought his first home in England, at 18 Acol Road, in what was euphemistically called West Hampstead although it bordered the far eastern reaches of Kilburn. This was a humdrum middling district: its one distinction was a bridge club where the world-famous Acol bidding conventions were devised. Kim Philby continued to spend much time at Crossways, his grandmother’s villa in Middle Gordon Road, Camberley. The ordinariness of these houses and the shortage of ready money make nonsense of historians of espionage who write, as Oleg Tsarev and John Costello did, ‘He hailed from a background of privilege and was schooled in the establishment of Britain’s ruling class,’ before adducing as supporting evidence that in Moscow he enjoyed Worcestershire sauce and The Times crossword.10
In boyhood Philby had a convulsive stammer which blocked any tendency to his father’s fatal vehemence. He spent five years at a preparatory school near Eastbourne before election as a King’s Scholar at Westminster School in 1924, when he was aged only twelve. The school had been founded by Queen Elizabeth I in 1560 in buildings which had been the monastery of Westminster before the Reformation. It abutted Westminster Abbey, and was across the road from the Palace of Westminster. With only about 360 pupils, two-thirds of whom were day-boys, it was an atypical public school: most of the boarders returned home at weekends to families living, like Philby’s, in the London conurbation. In competitive sports, academic results and social cachet the school was not in the top bracket with Eton, Winchester and Harrow, but in the next grade with Charterhouse, Rugby and Shrewsbury. Its ethos was not barbaric. Ian (‘Tim’) Milne, Philby’s contemporary, remembered its urbanity. ‘There was room for a hundred flowers, if not to bloom, at least not to be trampled on. Eccentrics were prized, particularly if they made you laugh.’ There was minimal bullying: ‘the small boys tended to take advantage of this by taunting the larger ones, as a puppy might an Alsatian’.11
As a King’s Scholar, Philby will have received preliminary instructions before reaching Westminster. These included the rules for wearing the five stipulated types of headgear (mortarboard, top hat, trilby for weekends, straw boater and sports cap of green and blue). School slang had to be memorized: King’s Scholars were tested on arrival, and threatened with a beating if they did not know that ‘greaze’ meant crowd or scrum, ‘shagged’ meant tired, and ‘pitch’ meant apprehensive. All male servants were addressed as ‘John’, and all female servants (regardless of age) as ‘nymph’. Masters’ nicknames had to be learnt by rote too: Chuff, Preedy, Coot, Cissy, Puppy, Poon, Tubby, Beaker. One annual school tradition was the ‘pancake greaze’ on Shrove Tuesday, when a cook tossed a pancake high over a beam in the Monk’s Dormitory, and the boy who emerged from the brawl with the biggest piece of pancake was rewarded with Maundy money (coins specially minted for the monarch to use as alms). The King’s Scholars had a more lethal ceremony, ‘Declams’, in which four tables were piled atop one another: each junior boy had to clamber to the top of this tottering edifice and there declaim a four-line Latin epigram of his own composition while being pelted with tennis balls. Shortly after Philby left Westminster, ‘pancake greaze’ and ‘Declams’ were abolished as too violent.12
Philby was a polite, neat, private, self-reliant, fastidious pupil. He won school prizes and scored high marks without cutting a figure in the school. His enthusiasms were for Beethoven, Arsenal football club and Tallulah Bankhead. Milne, who was caned only once at Westminster, doubted if Philby ever was. Philby was not forced to join the Officer Training Corps (OTC) or to play sports in his final year (previously he had boxed for the school, and fielded at cricket: ‘I wish I could report that his regular position there was third man, but I think he was more usually to be found at deep extra cover,’ recalled Milne). The lurid tale that at school Philby had ‘buggered and been buggered’ is a nasty invention. Overall he had scant reason for resentment. When he fled to Russia in 1963, he left his wife in Beirut but took his Westminster scarf with him. Nor did the school repudiate Philby entirely: when a new boarding-house was founded in 1997, pupils were consulted about which famous Old Boy should be commemorated in its name. Many voted for Philby: the school authorities however preferred the name of Milne’s House, after Tim Milne’s uncle A. A. Milne, the creator of Winnie the Pooh.13
Attendance was compulsory for daily morning prayers in Westminster Abbey and two services on Sunday: Philby, like other pupils, will have sat through up to 1,500 services during his time at the school. The sermons by the headmaster, the Reverend Harold Costley-White, were remembered as ‘foggy and elliptical’. In his sing-song voice, Costley-White accentuated syllables in an arbitrary way in the forlorn hope of making his commonplaces sound pensive and sincere. His mellifluous remarks were often thoughtless contradictions. When asked about the Book of Kings, he replied: ‘It is amazingly interesting, my friends, and perhaps what you might call extremely boring.’ Compulsory chapel attendance was the rule at all similar schools during this period, although it receded in Cambridge colleges during the 1920s (partly because, with the rise in student numbers, few college chapels were large enough to accommodate all members of the college).14
The future philosopher of aesthetics Richard Wollheim and the future diplomat Brian Urquhart, who were King’s Scholars at Westminster in the mid-1930s, recalled the opportunities for bracing political discussions: debates in the back seats of the coach taking them to football, in which Peter Ustinov, son of the MI5 agent known as ‘Klop’, and Rudolf von Ribbentrop, son of the Nazi Ambassador in London, disputed the justice of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Anti-militarist pupils formed a school society, the United Front of Progressive Forces, known as Uffpuff. Rudolf von Ribbentrop used to be driven to school every morning in a plum-coloured Mercedes-Benz limousine. On arrival, the chauffeur would alight, give the Nazi salute and shout ‘Heil Hitler!’ as he strutted through the medieval arch into Little Dean’s Yard. Urquhart organized an ever-swelling group of boys who gathered each morning to laugh and jeer. The German embassy protested to Costley-White, who summoned Urquhart and said he would be expelled for ‘insults to a friendly power’. Urquhart saved himself by remembering the headmaster’s talent for missing the point. He told Costley-White that the Mercedes-Benz was plum-coloured (plum being the colour reserved in England for the royal family’s Daimlers). ‘My dear boy,’ the headmaster replied, ‘why didn’t you tell me this before?’ The diplomatic protest was rejected, and Ribbentrop was told to arrive at school on foot.15
Political activism was unknown in the Westminster School of Philby’s time, although there were many lessons in the power games of adulthood. The masters, like their pupils, were embroiled in feuds, jealousies, alliances and stratagems. Wollheim recalled John Bowle interrupting a history
lesson when he saw the French master walking outside in the yard. ‘There goes Claridge,’ he said, as he opened the mullioned class-room window. ‘Spit whenever you see him, boys, like this!’ And Bowle expectorated across Little Dean’s Yard. Bowle’s political hero was Frederick II, the thirteenth-century Holy Roman Emperor who was excommunicated by the Pope. Philby may have absorbed his taste for excommunicants from Bowle.16
Mutual antipathy flourished between Philby and the Reverend Kenneth Luce, who was housemaster of the King’s Scholars. Admirers thought Luce was a fine earnest Christian, while his detractors sneered at his sanctimony. Philby evaded confirmation by telling Luce that he had not been baptized. He cannot have been impervious to the annual Armistice Day ceremony when the King’s Scholars gathered at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. But he was always indifferent to beauties of English landscape and architecture: the Abbey seemed a remnant of Gothic barbarity, and the services like the entrails of disembowelled superstition. Dreary, complacent preaching made him receptive to Marx’s view that Christianity was a futile sham which upheld class privilege. A quarter of a century after leaving Westminster, when Philby had children of his own, he showed an invincible hostility to them learning the abracadabra of religious dogma.17
Enemies Within Page 24