by Adam Sisman
Back at Tunmers, David showed his German visitor the manuscript of a short story he had written. Reinäcker was already familiar with David’s skill as a cartoonist. After reading the story he offered his frank opinion. ‘You should keep drawing, but stop writing,’ he advised. ‘My friend, promise me that you will never write a book.’
David was now in limbo, conscious that he was liable to be called up at any time once he reached the age of eighteen in October. National Service had been introduced the previous year, making it compulsory for all British men aged between eighteen and twenty-six to do eighteen months’ military service, with a further four years in the reserves. As he awaited his call-up papers, David dated his first real girlfriend, Ann Taylor, daughter of Stanley Taylor, a golfing chum of Ronnie’s and a partner in the firm of luxury grooming products for men, Taylor of Old Bond Street. Then someone else Ronnie knew, Roger Constant of the Constant Shipping Line, which operated a fleet of tramp steamers, suggested a passage aboard a boat carrying coal to North Africa. The boy was welcome to take a friend if he wanted, so David invited his schoolmate Robin Cooke, who happened to be staying as a guest at Tunmers, to accompany him. ‘I’d love to, but I’m due to join the army in October,’ Cooke explained. ‘Don’t worry about that,’ interjected Ronnie. ‘I’ll phone up the War Office and get it postponed.’ Cooke was astonished when Ronnie’s intervention proved successful. The two boys embarked at Hull, and steamed first to Lisbon and then past Gibraltar to Oran, where the purser dispensed contraceptives to those going ashore. ‘This is to stop you getting dust in your eye,’ he said as he handed them to the puzzled boys, who had never seen a condom before.
Ronnie was busily cultivating another golfing pal, Sir James Barnes, the Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Air and a director of Arsenal Football Club. He introduced Sir James to a succession of attractive young women, in the hope that Barnes’s influence would secure for him the concession to lay down the aggregate for the new air bases then being built across the south of England in response to the Soviet threat. Ronnie involved himself also in a new charitable scheme to provide winter sports for wounded or traumatised RAF pilots, run by the head of the RAF station at Abingdon, Group Captain Ray Collins. He generously undertook to find hotel accommodation in Switzerland, transport, skis and other equipment, all at the best possible prices. Through his contact with Barnes, Ronnie arranged a few months’ work at the Air Ministry for David, helping with the practical arrangements for the new scheme. This job, which paid £4 a week, was David’s first experience of bureaucracy. As time passed he began to sniff corruption. The suspicion grew in his mind that his father’s motives for becoming involved in the RAF Winter Sports Scheme might not have been purely charitable.
Ronnie always tried to control his sons by monitoring their activities. David had learned to expect that his room would be searched, his post opened and his telephone calls listened in to on the extension. He now responded in kind by spying on his father, making stealthy sorties into Ronnie’s dressing room, to delve into the pockets of his camel-hair coats and to leaf through his pocket diaries. He learned to move silently, noting Ronnie’s surprising ability to do the same. From time to time he would attempt to spring the lock of a large green filing cabinet that his father kept at home rather than in the office. Ronnie had occasionally referred to its contents as the ultimate solution to all his problems. ‘All the answers are in that cabinet, son. One day everybody will be seen right.’
Around Christmas David was summoned to St Moritz by his father, there to lend his essential weight to the RAF scheme. With barely credible cheek, Ronnie was staying at the Kulm, with the RAF Winter Sports Association billeted in the hotel annexe; somehow he had once again persuaded the trusting Badrutts to accept his credit.
Ronnie was not above using his good-looking son, now just eighteen, as bait to lure a profitable catch, in this instance to escort the daughter of a potential business associate. Though David complied, he did so reluctantly. The girl bored him, and when he took her skiing, he led her deliberately into a snowdrift.
In a café where a band was playing David found Group Captain Collins taking tea with his wife. Also at the table was a slight, pretty girl who looked younger than her real age of seventeen, her dark hair pinned up in plaits. A year later he would recall ‘a little girl I met in St. Moritz … the image of an almost childlike face gazing into mine’.8 This was Ann Sharp,* the elder of two daughters of an air vice-marshal recently posted to the Air Ministry. When David asked her to dance, she mutely accompanied him on to the dance-floor. Ronnie arrived and sat with her companions for a few minutes watching them, before he beckoned David back to the table.
Over the next few days David and Ann met several times. At the Chesa Veglia, a converted farmhouse attached to the Badrutt’s Palace Hotel, they danced cheek to cheek. He boasted to her of imaginary sexual conquests. To her, he seemed sophisticated and glamorous, like a hero of the romantic fiction she had devoured in her mid-teens – if a little smug. She admired his skill on the slopes, and was impressed when he told her that he was likely to ski for England. But Ronnie kept him on a short rein. ‘I have to slip out when my father doesn’t need me,’ he told her. On her last night in St Moritz she waited for him until it was so late that she had almost given him up. He arrived at her hotel shortly before midnight, apologising that this had been the earliest moment when he could escape from the family party, by pretending that he was retiring to bed. Together they walked along a path out of town, slipping in the compacted snow. Ann’s feet became cold inside her soaking high-heeled shoes, and her long dress became wet and bedraggled; but suddenly he turned to face her, and kissed her full on the mouth. She responded, and the two of them kissed for hours in the darkness, as the snow fell softly around them. The next morning he came to the railway station to see her off, promising to write.
In Britain a general election was looming. Ronnie decided that the nation required his services, and suddenly departed, leaving his wife and son at the Kulm without the means to sustain themselves. For several days they were forced to steal bread from the hotel breakfast-table in order to have anything to eat at lunchtime. Eventually they crept out through a back entrance and made their way discreetly to the station.
Ronnie had been chosen to stand for the Liberals in the Yarmouth Division of Norfolk, embracing the coastal town of Great Yarmouth and the surrounding countryside. Doubtless his connection with Edgar Granville, who had represented the nearby Eye Division of Suffolk since 1929, mostly but not exclusively as a Liberal, played a part in his adoption. Granville’s interests encompassed all his neighbouring constituencies, since one of his policies was to make East Anglia a self-supporting region.
For half a century control of the borough of Great Yarmouth had swung back and forth between Liberals and Conservatives, until 1945 when it had been seized by Labour. In 1950 the sitting Labour MP was facing a strong Conservative challenge. But the last-minute intervention of a Liberal candidate turned this into the first three-cornered contest in Yarmouth since 1929. Boundary changes had enlarged the constituency to take in many fenland villages, more than doubling the size of the electorate in the process. These changes made the 1950 election especially unpredictable. The campaign promised to be an active one, with all three candidates speaking at numerous public meetings.
Why did Ronnie want to become a member of parliament, now that he no longer faced the threat of being called up? It seems unlikely that political conviction supplied his primary motive; what seems more plausible is that he believed it would further his interests. For Ronnie, politics and business went hand in hand. Politicians played a part in the awarding of lucrative contracts and could receive valuable rewards from the grateful contractor, as he had reason to know. But there was another motive. Ronnie craved the status of an MP. What he longed for, perhaps more than anything else, was respect, and in his world MPs were respected very highly. As a member of parliament, he would be able to claim belated
parity with Alec Glassey.
Thirty-six years later David would provide an entertaining fictionalised account of the election in A Perfect Spy. Just as in the novel, Ronnie rode into this sleepy Norfolk constituency in his Bentley, rousing the locals with his eloquence and warming them with his energy. In his wake trailed family and friends, including members of the Court, several of whom were concealing a criminal past which would have shocked the people of Yarmouth had they known of it. The Cornwell team set up its headquarters at a small temperance hotel in the centre of town, equipping it with a temporary bar. David obtained two weeks’ deferment of his National Service call-up in order to campaign for his father, while Tony interrupted his studies at Pembroke College, Cambridge. William Douglas Home turned out for Ronnie, as did several other well-known personalities, bringing with them a whiff of glamour. But, despite all the razzmatazz, the campaign was doomed from the start. Thirty years later, in a Sunday Times article coinciding with the publication of A Perfect Spy, David represented Ronnie’s decision to stand for parliament in 1950 as a perfect example of his inability ‘to distinguish between the world as it existed and the world that he thought he could control’.
Anyone in the street could have told him that, if you stand in an election, the details of your past life are likely to be subjected to unfriendly scrutiny. Yet Ronnie stood. A kind of hot air bubble of his own making conveyed him inexorably towards the hustings … First he talked his friends into it, then they talked him into it. Doubters, if there were any, were booed off the stage, as they always were … Never mind that he knew not the first thing about politics. Never mind that in any serious debate, matched against less generous minds and deprived of his rhetoric, he would have fallen as surely as one of his racehorses at the first fence. His personality – ever a buzzword among the faithful – would vanquish. His incredible brain – another buzzword – would absorb, rewrite and parrot everything an honest man needed to know in order to become an MP. To know more was to be a snob.9
Ronnie had waited until 20 January, just over a month before the poll, before announcing that he would stand. According to the Eastern Daily Press, he had been approached some time before and had agreed to contest the seat, but his name had been withheld at his own request.10 During this period, the Yarmouth Mercury commented that by leaving it so late to come forward, ‘the mystery candidate’ faced ‘an uphill task’. But the paper believed that there was still sufficient Liberal sentiment in the constituency to justify the Party’s intervention.11 There was a strong nonconformist tradition in the area, which the Liberals had drawn on in the past and might do so again. Ronnie flung himself into the campaign with gusto. ‘Never was Liberalism more necessary, more vital to the recovery, well-being and future prosperity of this country than at the present day,’ he asserted at the outset. The Eastern Daily Press quoted freely from Ronnie’s election literature. In politics, it reported, he had been ‘a lifelong Liberal’ (omitting to mention his plans to stand as an Independent Progressive in the 1945 Chelmsford by-election). ‘During the War, Mr Cornwell served with the Royal Corps of Signals until his release in 1945.’ The Eastern Daily Press and the Yarmouth Mercury both repeated his claim that ‘the property companies in which he was interested had provided some 1,000 homes for workers in the south of England’. The provision of adequate housing for all sections of the community, Ronnie told them, was ‘a problem constantly engaging his attention’.
‘To me, Liberalism is a way of life,’ he declared at his adoption meeting. ‘In my view it stands for justice and fair play for all.’ He launched a strong attack on conscription, referring to the fact that he had two sons of National Service age, and spoke of young men occupied at work that was of no benefit to them or to their country. Anyone who was a father or who had anything to do with boys knew what a completely stupid thing conscription was, he said.12
Ronnie conceded that the Party’s policy of world government was at the moment no more than an ideal. But ideals, he added, were like the stars – ‘We might never reach them, but always profited by their presence.’ Let them hitch their wagons to this star, he continued, in an unfortunate mangling of metaphors, and go along the road as far as they possibly could.13
The candidate’s wife also addressed the adoption meeting: saying that, if her husband were returned, she would, as the mother of a young family, ‘be able to acquaint him with the housewife’s difficulties’. (This was at a time when the Cornwell family was spending at a rate of £7,000 per annum – about £500,000 in today’s money.)
Two days later, at his first public meeting, Ronnie urged the voters to give the Liberals ‘a fair crack of the whip’. He was supported by Bruce Belfrage, Liberal candidate for South Buckinghamshire, where Ronnie was vice-president of the local Party. Belfrage was a well-known actor and BBC radio presenter, especially famous for having continued to read the news while covered in plaster dust, after an enemy bomb had exploded in Broadcasting House.14 His wife was one of Ronnie’s longstanding mistresses. When Ronnie died, she laid a mauve boa on the doorstep of her house in tribute to her former lover.
In an open letter to the electors of Yarmouth, Ronnie rejected the fear that a Liberal vote was a wasted one. He asked the electors to forget the ‘split vote bogey’ and vote for what they believed in. Voting Tory was playing into the hands of the Communists. He believed that the world was moving leftwards, and that unless the people wanted a permanent socialist government, gradually turning to Communism, they should set up an effective, progressive opposition.15
The campaign continued apace. Driven by his chauffeur Mr Nutbeam, Ronnie sped around the fenland villages giving stirring speeches. On several successive bitterly cold nights in the week before the poll, he spoke at four different venues within the space of an hour. He presented himself as a teetotaller, like so many of those assembled, though the boot of the Bentley had been equipped with a special rack to hold bottles of comparatively odourless champagne, from which the candidate could safely refresh himself between speaking engagements, indeed sometimes offering a nip to his chauffeur – ‘Have one on me, Nutty.’ David’s role was to persuade the voters of Yarmouth that Ronnie was a loving and abstemious father, with frugal Christian habits, who had done his bit for the country during the war and who was now ready to serve the folk of this remote East Anglian constituency. Bellowing through a loudspeaker mounted on the roof of a van, he cruised the streets of Yarmouth, urging its citizens to vote for his father, the Liberal candidate Ronald Cornwell.
On the Friday before the poll, a Liberal ‘Brains Trust’ was staged at the Yarmouth Town Hall assembly rooms, chaired by the candidate. The format derived from the hugely popular BBC radio series of the same name. Among those taking part were ‘the candidate’s eldest son, Mr Tony Cornwell’, ‘the well-known West Indian cricketer, Mr Learie Constantine’* and ‘Mr Edward Ryder Richardson, the Recorder of Walsall’. At the finish Ryder Richardson congratulated the chairman on his ‘brainwave’ in organising the meeting to ease the tension of the election, and commended him to the voters of Yarmouth as a man of proven capacity, resource and steel.16
As the election approached, Ronnie intensified his efforts. Three days before the poll, he addressed a well-attended meeting at Yarmouth Town Hall, at which David also spoke. ‘I know what it is to fight against fearful odds,’ Ronnie declared. ‘The greater the odds, the better you will find me.’17
When David returned to the Commercial Hotel after a day’s canvassing, he noticed that everyone was looking very solemn. Ronnie turned to address him. ‘Son, we’ve got to talk.’ The Conservative candidate’s agent had approached him, he explained in a sanctimonious tone. ‘He’s said that if I don’t stand down, they’re going to let it be known that many years ago I had certain difficulties.’ He then touched briefly on his conviction and subsequent sentence. ‘I was in the position of the office-boy who had taken a few stamps out of the box and was caught before he had a chance to put them back.’
This wa
s the first time that Ronnie had ever spoken openly to David about going to prison. ‘The question is,’ he concluded, ‘do we fight or do we give in?’
There was only one answer that a loyal son could provide to such an appeal. ‘We fight,’ said David; and when told this, the assembled courtiers cheered. ‘Told you he had it in him, Ronnie.’18
Thinking about it afterwards, David suspected that his uncle Alec Glassey had leaked the truth about his brother-in-law’s criminal past, in a letter exhorting the local Tories not to reveal their source.
That evening, addressing a small audience at a local school, Ronnie prefaced his speech with a statement of masterly obfuscation:
In the light of reports reaching me as to certain completely inaccurate statements being made concerning my personal character and reputation, I feel it might be appropriate if I had a word or two to say on that subject. I recognise, of course, that at the time of a General Election, it is inevitable that all kinds of rumours must be expected, and this one is no exception. It is, however, of paramount importance that when statements are made concerning the personal character of a candidate, due regard should be paid to the words we know so well, ‘the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’.*
No candidate can have complaint if the requirements of these words are observed, but speaking for myself, I shall have no hesitation in taking legal proceedings against any person who participates in the circulation of any statement that does not conform to these requirements.