Enemies Within

by Richard Davenport-Hines

  One such youth was John Cornford, who became a ruling force in Cambridge communism during 1933. Reared by cultivated, tolerant, liberal and inquisitive parents, he rejected their values with righteous irritation, joined the CPGB, visited Russia and used masterful aggression to achieve his ends. ‘Keep Culture out of Cambridge’ was a slogan coined by him. In the magazine Cambridge Left he quoted some lines of Louis Aragon as a rallying-cry for students and intellectuals:

  I am the witness to the crushing of a world out of date.

  I am a witness drunkenly to the stamping-out of the bourgeois.

  Was there ever a finer chase than the chase we give

  To that vermin which flattens itself in every nook of the cities?

  I sing the violent domination of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat

  For the annihilation of that bourgeoisie

  For the total annihilation of that bourgeoisie.

  A Darwin great-aunt described Cornford as ‘poisoned by communism’, thinking ‘of nothing else but his political religion’, rude to his elders, dirty and scruffy. Steven Runciman, who knew him at Trinity, judged him ‘forceful, merciless, rather inhuman’. Runciman’s biographer Minoo Dinshaw pictures Cornford as one of the best-looking undergraduates of his generation, ‘with thick black curls and etched cheekbones worthy of some melancholy Russian princess’. He notes that Cornford, ‘a cold, narcissistic and unavailable heterosexual youth’, knew how to entice Blunt and other sexually susceptible youths into ideological havoc.43

  Cornford and Klugmann transformed student politics in their university in 1933–4. They recruited a strong cohort within Trinity. Their acolytes then carried their disputatious propaganda into other colleges, forming undergraduate Marxist study-groups and mustering anti-war feeling in a period when Moscow rather than Berlin was thought by good communists to be London’s target. They held open meetings throughout the university, and distributed leaflets. Above all they waged a campaign of ruthlessly tactical conversations to influence, convert and recruit undergraduates. Their group was as insistent as Christian evangelicals, and knocked on doors with the zeal of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Klugmann had a canny sense of which Cambridge undergraduates were worth fostering and which university organizations were worth penetrating. The Cornford–Klugmann cell set out to arouse a robust anti-fascist temper among students, and to organize loyal groups of student revolutionaries. Marxism gave their acolytes the notion that all of literature, the visual arts and the learned professions (law, medicine) had to be studied anew, weighed again and relabelled. The belief in the absolute iniquity of their capitalist, colonialist and fascist opponents made them sure of their own invincible rectitude. Theirs was a total system to change the world.

  One such acolyte was Egerton Herbert Norman, who had been born in Japan, where his Canadian father was a Methodist missionary, and arrived at Trinity with a history scholarship in 1933. He had lost his family’s exacting Christian faith and was ripe for conversion by Klugmann and Cornford: it was under the latter’s mentorship that he joined the CPGB. After holding a Rockefeller fellowship at Harvard, Norman joined the Canadian Department of External Affairs in 1939 and rose to ambassadorial rank while still, it seems, loyal to Moscow. The burden of his divided loyalties became so onerous that he finally killed himself.44

  Charles Rycroft, the younger son of a fox-hunting baronet, was another acolyte. Before entering Trinity in 1933, he spent six months in Germany in order to learn the language. He found teenage excitement in attending Nazi rallies, watching street fights and distributing banned copies of The Times, which his brother sent wrapped in copies of Tatler. Arriving at Trinity, he discovered that only extreme left-wingers were interested in Nazi enormities. He joined the Society for Cultural Relations with the Soviet Union. ‘My conversion, however, had surprisingly little effect on my daily life, which continued to be that of a young man who is treating the university as a finishing-school first and as a seat of learning second. I went to sherry parties, May-week balls and point-to-points, and considered it bad form actually to be seen working.’ He did his necessary reading at home in the vacations so effectively that he got a first in the first part of the economics tripos, and was elected an exhibitioner. He took a 2.1 in the modern history tripos at the end of his third year. He was then elected to a studentship, which enabled him to remain at Trinity for a fourth year of perfunctory research. From his comrades Rycroft learnt:

  that intensity, which I had previously thought a vice, was really a virtue, and also that I, poor thing, was decadent, a dilettante, a member of a dying class, precluded from the dialectic of history from ever having any understanding of the modern world or from playing any significant role in it. I was too young and innocent then to realize that passionate intensity is a sign of doubt rather than certainty, or to appreciate that envy and vanity lay behind their attitude towards me. Nor did I cotton on to the fact that their theories led to the conclusion that they, the educated cadres of the proletariat, would form the ruling class of the future.

  Klugmann’s rooms were on the next staircase to Rycroft’s at Trinity. ‘He seemed to need little sleep, and I joined the Party after a marathon series of indoctrination sessions lasting far into the night. It had become a choice between joining and exhaustion.’ It became fashionable in Trinity, said Rycroft, to join the CPGB – ‘a recognized form of social climbing’. The undergraduate communist cell was sub-divided by party headquarters. ‘Nominally, “A” was the privileged cell; its members were supposedly the crème de la crème of the liberal intelligentsia, too original and gifted to be subjected to Party discipline.’ Their revolutionary duty was to infiltrate universities, government departments and metropolitan elites, and to hold themselves ready to restore cultural life after the chaos of revolution. The deceived innocents of ‘A’ cell, who thought themselves exclusive and privileged, had in reality been quarantined in order to protect simple-minded proletarians from contamination: so far from being admired or envied by the rank and file, they were disparaged as ‘social pansies’.45

  On every Armistice Day (11 November) during the 1930s intimidating mobs of drunken undergraduates roamed through Cambridge requiring passers-by to fill the collecting boxes of the British Legion. Most dons kept inside their colleges during the afternoon and evening to avoid this patriotic thuggery. In order to exploit the justified resentment of this bullying, Dobb (abetted by Cornford and Klugmann) formed the Cambridge Anti-War Council, a communist front which helped to organize a march to the town’s war memorial on Armistice Day of 1933. There were counter-demonstrations from rowing and rugger hearties, who blocked the road near Peterhouse and bombarded demonstrators with flour, eggs, tomatoes and white feathers (some of which were worn with pride as trophies). The hooliganism was so rowdy that the police drew their truncheons. Fingers and noses were broken. Burgess clambered into a car piled with mattresses, which Julian Bell drove on the edge of the march to block counter-demonstrators and to deflect their missiles. This confrontation invigorated undergraduate resistance to established authority. Even apolitical youths such as Alan Turing were impressed by the anti-war marchers. Anthony Blunt recalled this street skirmish as the moment when the Marxist lightning-strike hit Cambridge. ‘We simply knew, all of us, that the revolution was at hand,’ Klugmann recalled in old age. ‘If anyone had suggested that it wouldn’t happen in Britain, for say thirty years, I’d have laughed myself sick.’46

  Maclean wrote some fighting verses, entitled ‘Dare Doggerel. Nov 11’, which were published in the Trinity Hall undergraduate magazine The Silver Crescent, extolling undergraduate dissidents who:

  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 sak
e 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.47

  In the winter of 1933 Maclean complained in Cambridge Left, of ‘the obscurity and the thin-bloodedness of modern writing’, which was, he thought, serving as ‘the unconscious propaganda of ruling-class culture’ because it was divorced from contemporary reality. By ‘reality’ he meant ‘the economic situation, the unemployed, vulgarity in the cinema, rubbish on the bookstalls, the public schools, snobbery in the suburbs, more battleships, lower wages, the genus undergraduate, and, above all, the rising tide of opinion which is going to sweep away the whole crack-brained criminal mess’.48

  The National Unemployed Workers’ Movement, which had support from neither the Labour party nor the Trades Union Congress, organized the Hunger March which headed for a Congress of Action at Bermondsey in February 1934. The Cambridge University Solidarity Committee (chaired by Cornforth) arranged buses to take student sympathizers to Royston, where they marched for some miles in solidarity with the Hunger Marchers. Some undergraduates felt like impostors in a proletarian march and worried if it would be patronizing to buy packets of cigarettes for unemployed men. Their self-consciousness abated as they marched along singing ‘Pie in the Sky’ and ‘Solidarity Forever’ or chanting ‘Down with the Means Test!’ Maclean was glimpsed there by his friend Robert Cecil, striding arm in arm with an unemployed worker and his face suffused with ardour. ‘We believed’, Cecil recalled half a century later, ‘that if we could lose ourselves in dedication to a cause, this would solve our personal problems, to say nothing of the problems of the world around us. Commitment, we thought, like falling in love, would lift our hearts and minds above the complexities and frustrations of day-to-day existence.’49

  Given the lurid and probably invented stories that began to circulate in the 1950s about Maclean’s sexuality, it is noteworthy that Cecil recalled: ‘he was handsome in an effeminate way, but was not regarded by his friends as a homosexual’. In July 1934, with his friends Roualeyn Cumming-Bruce and Anthony Blake, Maclean rented a holiday cottage at Saint Jacut de la Mer in Brittany. Cumming-Bruce had ‘a holiday diversion’ with a villager named Francine, while Maclean began ‘a passionate alliance’ with Francine’s sister Marie, who was older than him and married to a member of the Garde Mobile stationed elsewhere. ‘MACLEAN was seriously in love with the married sister,’ said Cumming-Bruce. The young men and women drank cider together, lazed on the beach and in the evenings joined villagers fishing for lobsters and crabs. Maclean and Marie would disappear behind rocks while Cumming-Bruce with Francine found another place where they could make love. This idyll ended when Marie’s irate husband returned to Saint Jacut seeking explanations, and the English boys decided that it was prudent to make a night-time getaway. For some months, recalled Cumming-Bruce, Maclean was pursued by amorous letters from Marie.50

  Blunt returned to Cambridge briefly in January 1934 from a year’s sabbatical in Italy and Germany. According to his manuscript memoir, he noticed then that most of his friends had joined the communist party or were allied to it. In June of that year Klugmann graduated with a double first in French and German: in the autumn he returned to Trinity for postgraduate work on Balzac under the supervision of Henry Ashton, the Molière expert. Ashton was also the tutor of John Cairncross, whom he introduced to Klugmann. Cairncross had previously studied at the Sorbonne, and had been appalled by what he had seen on bicycling tours of Austria and Nazi Germany during his vacations. At Trinity Cairncross soon succumbed to Klugmann’s dialectic wooing: he became convinced that communism was the only force that could overpower fascism. In these same months Blunt, who had returned permanently to Trinity in September 1934, was converted to communism by Burgess, whose command of the Marxist dialectic of history impressed him, and by Klugmann’s long night-time exegesis.

  Another new arrival at Trinity in October 1934 was to have a major impact on Blunt’s ultimate destiny. Michael Straight was a rich young American marxisant who studied economics under Dobb. Soon he was held by Klugmann and Cornford in nightly dialectical discussions. Their foxy and remorseless logic-chopping caught him for the Trinity cell. ‘I’m filled with a violent, uncontrollable love for them; an extraordinary sense of comradeship,’ he told his mother of Dobb, Klugmann and Cornford in 1935. He found in party activism, to use a line from Cornford’s poem about Kirov, his only constant certainty. In his college rooms he hosted late-night doctrinal discussions which ended with the participants standing in a circle and singing ‘The Internationale’ with booming confidence. The noise, Straight liked to say, hastened the death of the ailing Trinity Fellow A. E. Housman, but in truth Housman was already in a nursing-home. Even in disobliging details, members of the Cambridge cell liked to misdirect.51

  John Maynard Keynes epitomized the liberalism, rationality, altruism and progressive faith of Cambridge in the 1930s. He visited Leninist and Stalinist Russia in company with his wife, who had been born in St Petersburg and many of whose family remained stuck there: his detestation of Bolshevist collectivization was inveterate; he upheld instead the creativity of competitive individual initiative. Always Keynes distinguished between the Comintern’s Bolshevization and native communist thinkers. ‘There is no one in politics today worth sixpence outside the ranks of liberals except the post-war generation of intellectual Communists, under thirty five,’ he told New Statesman readers in 1939. ‘In their feelings and instincts they are the nearest things we now have to the typical nervous nonconformist English gentleman who went to the Crusades, made the Reformation, fought the Great Rebellion, won us our civil and religious liberties and humanised the working classes.’ Perhaps it was so.52

  CHAPTER 9

  The Vienna Comrades

  Red Vienna

  After 1918, in every capital city of the defeated European powers, there were spivs dealing in currency, weapons, medicines, orphans, heirlooms, contraband and fake passports. ‘Vienna, the lost city of Europe’, wrote George Slocombe in 1921, is ‘the prey of disease, hunger and death, and of worse than these, the greedy men, the traders of all nations who have descended upon it to exploit’. Thirteen years later, after a process of constructive renewal and violent relapse, it became the crucible that made the Cambridge spies. Treason in London had class warfare in Vienna as its provocation.1

  The election in 1923 of Karl Seitz as mayor inaugurated the period of ‘Red Vienna’, during which, in the words of the Foreign Office’s Soviet expert Don Gregory, the city became ‘a Socialist Mecca, second only to the Kremlin’. Seitz’s planners aimed to turn the former imperial capital into a model city for the urban proletariat. They built salubrious housing, parks and amenities, health and welfare institutions, co-operative shops, workmen’s banks and adult educational facilities. Karl-Marx-Hof, erected in 1927–30, was a block of flats two-thirds of a mile long containing some 5,000 occupants, with laundromats, nurseries, doctors’ surgeries and a library. These schemes were financed by onerous property taxes, which eliminated the rental income of private landlords and aroused vengeful resentment. ‘One day,’ an Austrian general promised, ‘we are going to stop that business in Vienna by fair means or foul. Parquet-floors and shower-baths for workers, indeed! You might as well put Persian carpets in a pigsty and feed the sow on caviar.’2

  About one-third of Austria’s population lived in Vienna. Politically the nation was divided between the Social Democrats, who held an unassailable majority in the city, and the Christian Socialists, who commanded unshakeable support among the devout, conservative peasantry. Don Gregory, a stalwart Catholic, abhorred Vienna’s socialists, whom he dismissed as ‘non-Christian by heredity’ and ‘
middle-class talmudists’, for corrupting the workers with ‘Marxian secularism’ and the ‘pagan squalor’ of divorce, birth-control and cremation.3

  After a crisis in 1927, in which scores of people were killed in street-fighting, Austria remained riven by violent tension. The bankruptcy of the leading Austrian bank in 1931 brought economic dislocation. A year later, in 1932, Engelbert Dollfuss, a dwarfish man nicknamed ‘the Pocket Chancellor’ or ‘Millimetternich’, formed a Christian Socialist government with a majority of only one vote. His party was pinioned between two vehement ideological enemies, the Marxists and the Nazis, with the latter intensifying their propaganda for the annexation of Austria by Germany. Politically Dollfuss was devious and agile, with the ecclesiastical nature that combines vanity with selflessness. In Slocombe’s estimate, ‘he felt himself quite honestly to be a servant of God and of God’s church. The nation came next, and himself a very long way after.’4