Ping-Pong Diplomacy

by Nicholas Griffin

  Now that table tennis had a world championship, it was decided that while the organizers were all in London, they should create a federation to ensure it survived. The first meeting of the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF) took place in the library of Kensington Court, the Montagu family home. Montagu’s fellow Ping-Pong devotees got the message. If table tennis was to move from a promising beginning, it would be because of one man’s influence and money—twenty-two-year-old Ivor Montagu. He was promptly elected president of the federation by all present, a position he would hold for more than forty years.

  Table tennis now had a federation and a large following, but did it have respect? The Times suggested that the game could be improved by using a curtain rod instead of a net. “Can you imagine the training” of Montagu’s table tennis players? asked another newspaper. “The long route-marches to give them endurance, the physical jerks to teach them how to crawl under the piano for the ball, the skipping to develop the ankles so that they can leap about like fun. It might almost be worthwhile forming a Ping-Pong Army to institute conscription.” The journalist saved his lowest blow for last. “A rumor comes through, as I write, there is a great surge onwards in the training of tiddly winks athletes, who have been inspired by this noble example.”

  At the time when Ping-Pong was teetering between sport and punch line, Ivor Montagu met his future wife, Eileen Hellstern. She was known to all as Hell. From his parents’ perspective, Montagu couldn’t have made a worse choice. Hell was a divorced mother of one, the daughter of a maker of surgical shoes. Her mother had been institutionalized shortly after her father’s death. A full two years after they had met, Montagu and Hell married secretly at St. Giles’s Registry Office.

  The same month that his son married, Lord Swaythling made a friendly overture to Montagu, offering to go to a soccer game with him. Montagu was so moved that he felt a sudden desire to confess.

  “Father,” said Montagu. “I want to tell you that I’m married.”

  His father stared at him. “Who is she?”

  “Nobody you’d know,” said Montagu, giving a brief description of his bride.

  His father was stunned into silence. After a while, he looked up at Montagu and asked, “Is she a Jewess?” She was indeed. “Why did you have to marry her? Is she going to have a baby?”

  To Lord Swaythling, Montagu’s marriage was “an irredeemable calamity.” His mother entered the room in her dressing gown, and Ivor Montagu watched her stoop to console his father. He walked downstairs and let himself out.

  The story ran from Los Angeles to New York and made the front pages of all the London papers. “BARON’S SON WEDS SECRETARY,” roared London’s Evening Standard. For a week, the newlyweds were on the run from the press, using makeup and a wardrobe department borrowed from Montagu’s film contacts. They sneaked into and out of apartments over fire escapes and rooftops. Eventually, Montagu took the advice of a friend, snapped a beautiful picture of Hell, and handed it to Fleet Street. She made the front page for one more day, and then the story died.

  His mother received dozens of condolence notes. She made the mistake of leaving them out, allowing Montagu time to leaf through until he found the shortest, which he committed to memory. The Queen had sent a one-liner. “Gladys I feel for you. May.” Lord Swaythling held his silence with his son but called in his lawyer to change his will.

  The newlyweds spent a quick honeymoon in Sicily, where Hell came down with paratyphoid fever and Montagu with jaundice. Hell’s sickness peaked during her tense first dinner at Kensington Court. A doctor was called, and to their horror, he ordered Hell confined to a guest bedroom and her new husband to a nursing home. Lady Swaythling took care of her. His lordship would come back from work and sit silently for ten minutes in his daughter-in-law’s room, saying nothing, then rise and leave. As Hell convalesced, Lady Swaythling warmed to her. She would arrive with old dresses from her wardrobe that she thought Hell could make use of.

  Within the week, Lady Swaythling was showing every sign of welcoming Hell into the family, though her approaches were still filtered through the class system that so upset her son. One evening, sitting by Hell’s bedside, Lady Swaythling asked Hell if she would mind changing her manner of speaking. “I would pay,” explained Lady Swaythling, for “lessons to change your accent . . . you know darling, when I’m abroad, I always try to learn a little of other people’s languages.” When Montagu finally reappeared, more or less recovered from his jaundice, his father took him aside to tell him that he should regard them “as reconciled.” Perhaps they would like to visit Townhill one weekend?

  During that weekend, the fifty-three-year-old Lord Swaythling went fishing and caught a chill. Back in London, the King’s physician was consulted, but his lordship slipped into a coma. He was dead within days. “The family,” wrote Montagu, “would not be the same.” His mother told him that his father had thought he’d judged Ivor’s marriage too quickly. But when the will was read, Montagu found that his father’s thaw was not reflected there. Montagu’s share of the inheritance had been reduced by “three fifths,” a sum that Montagu would always refer to as “the curious fraction.”

  As the 1920s were coming to an end, Communism itself was in the middle of a shattering rift. Leon Trotsky, one of the fathers of the revolution and founder of the Red Army, had faced off against Stalin for control of Soviet Russia and lost. Trotsky was protected twenty-four hours a day in exile by Turkish police officers. Montagu would visit Trotsky after the 1929 World Table Tennis Championships in Hungary. As usual, Ping-Pong wasn’t to be far from politics.

  CHAPTER 5 | Table Tennis and Trotsky

  Montagu began his journey to the Hungarian capital of Budapest alongside a very young English table tennis team. It included a bright nineteen-year-old named Fred Perry, still the last Englishman to win Wimbledon. Montagu noted “his bright-red face and his boundless self-confidence.” Montagu himself was only twenty-four. “I doubt,” he wrote, “whether so young a team have ever represented England at anything.”

  Montagu had brought the game to cosmopolitan Budapest for the simple reason that if England was the birth mother of table tennis, then Hungary was her only surviving child. The level of play certainly indicated so. No foreigner had ever won a tournament there. Ping-Pong’s status in Hungary equaled England’s thirst for cricket or America’s for baseball.

  The popularity of the game wasn’t lost on Hungarian politicians. Hungary’s ruler, Admiral Miklós Horthy, sent Montagu a note letting him know that he would attend the finals. Montagu was suitably disgusted. He professed that he didn’t “approve of political leaders trying to show off at international sporting events . . . constitutional monarchs, perhaps, neutral officials such as mayors or ministers of sport were inoffensive, but dictators or prime ministers who were identified with controversial public events—certainly not. It imposes a totally unwarranted embarrassment on the sportsmen whose prowess they exploit to court popularity.” Montagu’s position depended entirely on the political leanings of the leader.

  The rest of the field watched Perry with amazement. “The greatest attacking stroke we have seen,” wrote one “foreign expert,” “is Perry’s forehand drive.” Dressed in long, white trousers and sneakers that he wore out during the tournament, Montagu’s young protégé began to clear the field in men’s singles.

  Perry was the older finalist, up against a “short, stocky expressionless” local teenager named Szabados. The great hall was packed with three thousand people, thick with “cabinet ministers like Christmas trees in evening dress” and a crowd “oozing into every exit.” Students roamed the streets outside, singing patriotic songs in support of Szabados. To get Perry safely inside, Montagu had to smuggle him in through a coal chute in the back of the building.

  Montagu was the nonplaying captain. It didn’t matter that Perry had the best forehand in the world. Szabados retrieved the ball from farther and farther behind the table, a full thirty-five feet, th
e longest returns Montagu had ever seen. Then Perry tried a drop shot. It inched over. Szabados roared in and reached it just before it touched the table, only to see Perry blast it past him again. Perry won. The crowd stood and cheered “for more than ten minutes.”

  The news was splashed across Hungarian papers but found no traction back in England. “I have finished now with serious table tennis,” Perry wrote to his father, retiring as champion. He returned to England and went to work on his tennis strokes. But Montagu had learned something vital: table tennis could attract the attention of a country’s elite politicians. Now he turned toward Turkey.

  In July Montagu had written to Trotsky, introducing himself as a “zoologist by profession” who had “taken part in the labour movement since 1918.” His trip to Turkey would find him spending a night with the man who had helped turn the world upside down. Trotsky lived in constant fear of assassination by Stalin, yet Ivor Montagu, a secret Stalinist at the beck and call of the Kremlin, was staying in his house. Trotsky ended their late evening by passing Montagu a loaded revolver and telling him to put it under his pillow. Montagu was many things, but not a killer. He barely slept, “terrified that the gun would go off.” At dawn, accompanied by two policemen assigned for Trotsky’s protection, they went fishing.

  Montagu would confess privately that Trotsky was notable for “charm that resides in a perfect frankness, an eager unaffectedness of manner. The two policemen, the fisherman, and the aged and courteous gardener are manifestly his devoted friends.”

  Trotsky’s two policemen rowed for them, laughing at Montagu’s efforts in the heavy seas. The sea grew rougher and rougher, Montagu greener and greener. It took Trotsky a while to recognize that the situation was becoming dangerous. Soon Montagu was curled up at the bottom of the little boat as they rose and plummeted down raking waves and the policemen rowed for their lives between “monstrous rocks.”

  Montagu’s admiration for Trotsky dried up on his return to England. Soon he would join the Communist Party of Great Britain officially. This remained highly unusual, not because Montagu was a wealthy aristocrat, but because he was British. In 1930, with Britain’s population at 40 million, the nation’s Communist Party had 2,550 members.

  Trotsky was sanguine about the articles Montagu published based on their conversations. During their late-night talk, Trotsky had told the young man, “We can only be right with and by the Party, for history has provided no other way of being in the right.” Now he knew what Montagu really was, a declared Stalinist who avowed that true Communism was whatever Moscow said it was.

  CHAPTER 6 | Culture and the Coming War

  By 1937, Montagu had the support of the new King as patron of the English Table Tennis Association. Better than that, the King had adopted the game, playing in Buckingham Palace until he had “perfected a special shot of his own . . . declared by those who have been his opponents to be unplayable.” He had become one of the game’s “keenest devotees.”

  That same year found the new Queen walking through the British Industries Fair at Olympia and “showing very great interest in the modern table tennis equipment” while marveling at “its present day popularity.” Her mother-in-law, Queen Mary, was still a regular visitor to the Montagu household, and the table tennis table on the main landing had not gone unnoticed by Her Majesty. Montagu’s mother, Lady Swaythling, had also done her bit for the sport, playing a match against boxing champion Joe Beckett and winning. “In the winter evenings,” she wrote, “table tennis is a distinct asset to people who suffer from cold in the extremities.”

  Ivor Montagu was by now also one of the busiest men in the world of British film. Having started the Film Society and continuing to import the work of the finest Soviet filmmakers, he was also in lockstep with perhaps the best young director working in England, Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock’s coterie would meet for “hate parties,” where they’d dissect that week’s releases. Ivor Montagu was at the center of the group—Hitchcock had great regard for his understanding of narrative. Their shared credits include the best of Hitchcock’s movies on spies—The Thirty-Nine Steps, Sabotage, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and The Secret Agent.

  In retrospect, the situation seems unbelievable, almost comical. Montagu and Hitchcock would sit up into the small hours. Hitchcock had his favorite book, Plotto, a primer on the pace of plotting, on his lap. There, giving him advice, sat the unremarkable Ivor Montagu, now a little tubby around the middle, black glasses halfway down his nose, a shabby gentleman braced against his fall from the aristocracy by a secure income, encouraging Hitchcock to weave outlandish plots into ordinary settings.

  At the same time, Montagu was embedded in the Comintern’s accelerated quest to spread propaganda. He made his way to America, lunched with family friend Franklin Roosevelt, met up with Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, and pitched their distinctly left-wing scripts to Los Angeles studios. The two men took a meeting with Samuel Goldwyn, who was looking for “something like Potemkin only a little cheaper, for Ronald Colman.”

  Eventually Paramount bit, and for a few months, Montagu and Eisenstein wrote happily together. They would drive into Beverly Hills with their new friend Charlie Chaplin, teaching him Russian swearwords to shout out the window at the old White Russian generals standing stiffly in their new roles as parking valets. Even then Montagu was followed. He’s a “clever Moscow propagandist” warned the US Department of Labor, who “devotes the whole of his energies and not inconsiderable intellect to the fomentation of industrial revolt. . . . Believe nothing he says or anything that may be said to you in his favor. . . . Deport him bag and baggage.”

  Hollywood soon listened. Eisenstein was called a “red dog” in the press, and Paramount was accused of “having betrayed the United States.” There was no work left for the writing partners. The precarious situation in Europe drew Montagu straight home to England, while Eisenstein headed south to direct a film in Mexico. Hitler’s threatening speeches, Germany’s burgeoning arms production, and reports of Nazi behavior horrified the left. The British secret services wouldn’t be able to confirm until the summer of 1940 that Montagu had begun spying, but Montagu’s familiarity with those at the center of the Comintern’s activity across the world was already a deep concern to British intelligence.

  The man through whom Communist propaganda poured into Europe was named Willi Munzenberg, the Red Millionaire, who as a teenager had dined at Lenin’s table. Montagu first met Munzenberg in Berlin in 1924, where Munzenberg provided the young Englishman with a long list of introductions for his very first trip to Moscow. Munzenberg was in charge of all covert operations in the West, appointed by Lenin himself. He had not only set up a large number of front organizations, but he’d also invented the concept of front organizations, including the Friends of the Soviet Union, which Montagu had immediately joined on his return from Russia. The British intelligence agents in MI5 watched as money flowed from Munzenberg to Montagu but could not figure out what Montagu was doing with it.

  Even in 1933, British public sentiment was at odds with its government’s passive approach to the rise of Fascism on the Continent. It was a heady opportunity for Communists like Montagu, who suddenly found themselves having a great deal in common with the general public in Britain. The idea that the survivors of the Great War would have to send their own children to fight Germany once more was deeply disturbing.

  The first tremors of the coming war were felt in Spain. In the mid-1930s, Spain’s civil war became the front line in the battle between Fascism and Communism. Naturally Montagu was there, this time with a documentary film team. It was a testing ground for both the German and Russian militaries and was riddled with spies to a preposterous extent—preposterous, but never funny; the penalty was too stiff. A Nazi death list had recently been found with thirty-three names on it; Munzenberg was at the top. “If you meet one of them, kill him,” instructed the list. The danger for men like Montagu was spelled out in the second sentence. “And if he is a J
ew, break every bone in his body.”

  Russian intelligence officers were everywhere, dividing their time between analyzing their enemies and their supposed allies. Members of the International Brigades associated with Trotskyism had a strange way of ending up in mass graves well back from the front line, victims of mini-purges conducted by Stalinist officers. Montagu managed to avoid being murdered by the Soviet state, but Munzenberg would end up garroted beneath an oak tree near a French internment camp in the summer of 1940, victim of a pair of agents of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, known by its Russian acronym, NKVD. That same summer Montagu’s erstwhile friend Trotsky, now exiled to Mexico, received an ice pick to the brain from another NKVD agent.

  Once the Spanish government became genuinely concerned that it might be toppled by Franco, it deferred to Stalin on all matters. The first thing that went East was Spain’s gold. Stalin, at his own leisure and at inflated prices, supplied Spain with second-rate weaponry and armaments. Spanish gold ended up in many places that had nothing to do with the Spanish struggle, including Central China, where Ivor Montagu’s future partners in Ping-Pong, the Red Chinese, were locked in their own struggle for dominance.

  All of this was done with an even more cynical intention in mind. Stalin would soon be making a pact with the most hated of enemies, Adolf Hitler, the very man who had driven young antifascists to Spain in the first place. There were many challenges to the pure of heart in Communism, but 1939’s Treaty of Non-Aggression between Russia and Germany was the most startling. Montagu would toe the party line: that it was a necessary maneuver on Stalin’s behalf to avoid being caught between two fronts.

  Montagu patrolled the Spanish front lines, where he produced and directed two pro-Soviet documentaries, carrying letters of introduction written by the highest-ranking Soviet agents. Montagu’s 1936 production, Defence of Madrid, was crude in comparison to his work with Hitchcock, but it had urgency, thanks to the rawness of the footage. His crew was up early one morning, shaving in their hotel bathrooms, when they heard “the sound of a descending bomb.” The building next door was destroyed. They watched from the window as the dead and dying were pulled from the rubble.