by Adam Sisman
Ann felt alienated when she came up to Oxford for the occasional weekend. David had new friends, new interests and new activities, while she remained the same. Whereas he sparkled at sophisticated undergraduate parties, she was a shy and silent presence. By this time it was three years since they had met at St Moritz, and two years since they had become involved as a couple – long enough, so her parents felt, for him to decide if he wanted to marry her, though he was only twenty-one and she twenty. Her father had become impatient at the lack of ‘progress’, and her mother began to speak slightingly of David in her presence. Then came a chance for her to make a fresh start. Despite being awarded a CBE in the New Year’s Honours list, Bobby Sharp had decided to retire prematurely from the RAF, apparently out of pique at receiving a reprimand from a superior (for conducting an affair with his secretary). He accepted a post with an American company based in Washington. Ann’s mother and sister were also going, and put pressure on her to accompany them. David too urged her to go, arguing that this was an opportunity not to be missed. ‘It might be good for him if I went,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘but six months is so long and him at university and so good-looking …’ She was tormented by feelings of jealousy, which he fed with stories of adventures with other girls. In her diary she reported that she had tried to seduce him, ‘and failed!’
Back at Tunmers for the Christmas vacation, he partied so hard that he made himself sick. On the night of 26 December he was involved in another car smash; though unhurt, he did not reach home until seven the following morning.
Eventually, after much hesitation, Ann succumbed to the pressure from her family: she would go to Washington and stay a minimum of six months, at least until her twenty-first birthday in the summer. She left England early in 1953, soon after the beginning of David’s second term at Oxford. He encouraged her to ‘live a full and happy life in the land of the Jumblies.* But please try to remember they are Jumblies – that truth is told by age and not by neon lights.’11
While Ann was away David saw plenty of other women; according to undergraduate contemporaries, he always seemed to have ‘a girl in tow’. He was particularly fond of the attractive sister of his friend Colin Simpson, also called Ann, then at secretarial college in Oxford. In his letters to Ann Sharp while she was away in America he continued to play on her jealous feelings. ‘Am leaping off to the most frightfully fashionable house party in Essex on Friday evening with all the gay young debs and whatnot,’ he wrote to her in a typical throwaway line.12
Early in the Hilary term 1953 David presented a paper to the Canning Club. He had chosen to speak on the German opposition to Nazi rule, culminating in the attempt to assassinate Hitler in July 1944. His argument was that the Allies should have done more to encourage the conspirators. He was nervous, particularly when he discovered that the Senior Member present was to be the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, an expert on Nazi Germany. Worse, it turned out that Trevor-Roper had made a study of this very subject. The Club had assembled in David’s rooms, and he was about to begin speaking when a commotion announced the arrival of the very last person in the world he can have wanted to see there: his father, obviously the worse for drink, dressed in a too-loud pinstripe suit, accompanied by Percy Pratt, one of his cronies. Somehow David stammered through his paper. As soon as he had finished, Ronnie leaped up and asked an ill-informed question about the Allied policy of unconditional surrender, only to be ignominiously shot down by the Senior Member. Ronnie was furious to be snubbed in this way, and tried to continue the debate for a while before lapsing into silence. Trevor-Roper’s subsequent comments on David’s talk were dismissive. ‘Typical undergraduate rehash’ was his crushing verdict.
After the meeting had dispersed Ronnie took David and a group of undergraduate friends to dinner at the Taj Mahal, a restaurant in Turl Street. David suspected that his father had never eaten Indian food before. When the waiter arrived to take their order, Ronnie asked him with a smirk whether he had been lying too long in the sun. One of David’s friends protested that this was a disgusting thing to say. The waiter himself was understandably offended, and the head waiter came over at his request, but Ronnie silenced them by handing over a wad of cash.
During the 1953 spring vacation David took a three-day walk across the Sussex Downs, accompanied by Hugh Peppiatt. Afterwards he made a trip to Paris on business for his father, before he ‘pushed off’ to Wengen, where he meant to dispose of a hoard of ski equipment he had accumulated. By chance he ran into Dick Edmonds, a fellow member of the DHO racing team, the editor of the Club journal who had commissioned him to produce a series of caricatures after his accident. The pair of them decided to exploit this serendipitous meeting by undertaking a four-day climbing expedition. On their second morning they climbed a col between two peaks, both more than 13,000 feet high, cutting steps in the glacier with an ice-axe as they ascended. A storm blew up, forcing them to rope together. Edmonds fell through the ice into a crevasse, but luckily his fall was broken by a ridge not far below the surface, and he was able to climb out again. They became lost in a blizzard, and groped their way forward until the clouds parted to reveal a tiny mountain hut, where they took shelter for the night. In the bitter cold David suffered some frostbite in his thumb. The next day they descended to Trümmelbach, where they spent that night at the von Almen family’s hotel in what seemed ‘obscene luxury’, sleeping in proper beds, guzzling well-cooked food and drinking ‘innumerable bottles of wine’.13
In the summer the two of them would return to the Bernese Oberland for another climbing holiday, which David would combine with more ‘business’ for Ronnie in Zurich and St Moritz.
Dick Edmonds would become a lifelong friend. Six years older than David, an Oxford graduate with his own Triumph Roadster, Edmonds was crown prince of Clements department store, ‘the Harrods of Hertfordshire’. A young blade with an eye for the girls and a droll, self-mocking wit, he described the family business as ‘flogging knickers on Watford High Street’. After borrowing £20 from Edmonds, David sent him a letter in mock cockney, addressed to ‘My dear ’Erb, as ever was’ and signed ‘yer old mucker, ’arold’. He enclosed a ‘chick’, postdated, ‘becos my dad ’as an ’orrible ’abit of forgettin my lolly for a couple of weeks or so.’ Years later, David would characterise Edmonds as ‘a fully paid-up closet rebel’: especially once he became, in due course, a magistrate, and, eventually, high sheriff of the county.14
That spring the Australian cricketers arrived back in England for another Ashes tour. Once again Ronnie invited the visiting team to Tunmers. A marquee was erected on the lawn, and champagne served.15 Besides the cricketers, there were 120 other guests of various kinds. The young Australian all-rounder Richie Benaud, then on his first overseas tour, remembered the party for his first encounter with aristocracy: a peer of the realm tried to jump an eighty-yard queue for the lavatory.16 The Australians were without Don Bradman, who had retired from Test cricket at the end of the Ashes tour five years earlier; Lindsay Hassett had replaced him as captain, while Arthur Morris had taken over from Hassett as vice-captain. Morris had been the most prolific batsman on the 1948 tour, but he was to be less successful this time. Speculation linked his difficulties on the field to his personal relationships; during the tour he fell in love with Valerie Hudson, a showgirl performing in the Crazy Gang vaudeville show at the Victoria Palace Theatre, whom he married after a brief courtship. It seems likely that Ronnie made the introduction.
Ronnie was happy to oblige the visiting cricketers if they found themselves temporarily short of funds; it later emerged that he had lent £100 to Ray Lindwall and £150 to Keith Miller. He had bought a hundred cricket bats for the Australians to sign, which he had intended to distribute to the sons of potential or existing creditors; but in the commotion of the party this had proved impossible to organise. Ronnie was only briefly at a loss. He assembled a group of ‘lovelies’, and at six o’clock one evening sent them with the cricket bats round to the Strand Palace
Hotel, where the Australians were staying. The players received the message that he had sent them a ‘nice present’, which they would find waiting for them in the hotel bar.
For all Ronnie’s largesse, he was facing increasing financial difficulties, besieged by creditors demanding payment. His two principal lenders, the Skipton and Dudley Building Societies, had taken the management of the properties for which they had advanced loans into their own hands, leaving him with little room for manoeuvre. In the very same month that Ronnie held the garden party at Tunmers for the Australian cricketers, he applied for planning permission to build fifty-four houses on the site. This application was rejected. There was some relief, however, when Ronnie was able to buy the ticket agency Keith Prowse Limited and sell it on at a profit to Peter Cadbury, a former test pilot and Liberal Party candidate, then just beginning his career as an entrepreneur. It is possible that this deal, from which Ronnie realised about £15,000, was facilitated by Cadbury’s godfather, Norman Birkett.
There was much public excitement about the forthcoming coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, who had succeeded her father on his death the previous year. Huge crowds were expected to line the streets, to watch the young monarch as she rode in her carriage between Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey. Privileged vantage points were at a premium; the Australian touring team had already been warned that there was no chance of their being able to see the procession. Nonetheless Ronnie was able to fix this, arranging seating for them on a building-site along the route.17 David watched the coronation on television at Tunmers with his half-brother and sister. ‘The children were bored stiff,’ he wrote to Ann afterwards. ‘But it was a beautiful thing to watch, full of royal tradition and splendour, full of terrifying solemnity; all the finality of a wedding-service, all the dedication of priesthood … a day to tell one’s children about.’18 News that two climbers from a British expedition had reached the summit of Mount Everest, the first ever to do so, had arrived in London on Coronation Day. David saluted the conquest of Everest as ‘a magnificent and all-time achievement that we can be very proud of’. He celebrated by getting drunk.19
Gordon Richards, Ronnie’s sometime adviser on horseflesh, had been knighted in the coronation honours list. Four days later he won his first Derby on the colt Pinza, beating the Queen’s horse Aureole into second place, after twenty-eight years of trying and almost three decades as champion flat jockey. David, who had backed Richards, hailed this in a letter to Ann as ‘a glorious – really glorious – victory’. A couple of weeks later he accompanied Ronnie to Ascot, dressed in ‘a grey topper and a funny coat’.20 And a few weeks after that both David and Tony were members of ‘Mr R. T. A. Cornwell’s XI’ that travelled down to Poole to play the local cricket club, with which Ronnie had been associated for almost thirty years. His team included the former Test players Sidney Barnes and Learie Constantine, the promising young West Indian Roy Marshall (then playing for Hampshire) and the Sussex wicketkeeper, Jim Parks. Despite this talented line-up, Ronnie’s XI could only draw the match.
David reported to Ann that ‘life at home has been utterly chaotic’, with ‘all the family in a raging temper’. Ronnie was ‘livid’ with Tony, perhaps because he had announced he did not want to practise law. Tony had moved out of Tunmers to live in Hampstead – ‘a very good thing because it paves the way for me to do the same thing myself if I want’. David fled back to Oxford, to gain some respite from ‘the nervous tight-rope walking of home life and the endless bickering’.21
Nigel Althaus, one of Hugh Peppiatt’s friends, then in his third year reading ‘Greats’ at Magdalen, invited David to play golf.
‘I don’t play golf,’ said David.
‘Well, walk round with me, anyway.’
As they strolled around the course Althaus sounded out David on his political views. ‘I’d like you to meet a friend of mine,’ he said before they parted. Though nothing had been made explicit, David understood that he was being recruited once more.
Althaus’s ‘friend’ contacted David to suggest that they lunch together in Woodstock, a village outside Oxford where they were unlikely to encounter anyone David knew from the University. This was George Leggett, a man ten years David’s senior, with whom he would form a lasting friendship. It helped that Leggett shared David’s passion for German literature. The son of an English father and a Polish mother, Leggett had read modern languages at Cambridge during the war; he spoke Russian as well as French, German and Polish. While still in his early twenties he had served as an interpreter at the Potsdam Conference; it was said that Stalin had complained that Leggett spoke Russian with a Polish accent. Afterwards he had been recruited into MI5, where he had proved himself to be an analyst of outstanding quality.
Leggett asked David to adopt a left-wing persona. His task would be to infiltrate left-wing groups, to report back on who was present and what was said, and to identify previously unsuspected Communists. And in the process he was to trail his coat, attending meetings addressed by visiting cultural attachés from Communist bloc countries that might be on the lookout for disaffected undergraduates. David confided in Robin Cooke that he had been asked to keep an eye on subversive elements in the university.
His recruitment was part of a wider MI5 response to the discovery that Burgess and Maclean had been spying for the Russians. This pair had been recruited as long-term ‘penetration agents’ back in the 1930s. Where there were two, there might be more. Suspicion surrounded those who had associated with them at Cambridge, including the former Foreign Office official John Cairncross and the former MI5 officer Anthony Blunt, now an eminent art historian. Both would eventually be shown to have been Soviet agents – as would Kim Philby, a senior MI6 officer once considered a future ‘C’, head of the Secret Service. Philby was asked to resign from MI6, though he was given a golden handshake and several of his colleagues indignantly maintained that the evidence against him was purely circumstantial; and when, in 1955, he was named in parliament as the ‘Third Man’, the Foreign Secretary, Harold Macmillan, felt obliged to exonerate him.
Meanwhile the newly appointed head of MI5, Dick White, had ordered F Branch (responsible for counter-subversion) to infiltrate every left-wing organisation in Britain, including the Labour Party, the trades unions, the peace movement and student unions. White had appointed Alexander Kellar, a former president of the Scottish Union of Students, as the Branch’s Director. MI5 enlisted students and trades unionists, who were told to express views sympathetic to Communism in the expectation that some of them would be recruited as Soviet agents themselves.
David showed a boy-scout enthusiasm for doing anything Leggett asked of him, just as he had done when ‘Sandy’ had recruited him in Bern. Once again he would answer the call to patriotic service, eager to atone for his father’s dereliction of duty. His only reward would be a succession of furtive lunches in Woodstock. He maintained his cover even to his girlfriend. ‘Forgive me if I wave the red flag at you for a while,’ he asked Ann. ‘I’m trying socialism now,’ he told her; ‘there must be an answer to all the utter waste of life and thought and energy – a creed that covers all the problems.’22
David joined the Oxford University Communist Club, which met, supposedly in secret, on Sundays at Lyons’ café in Cornmarket. At least one member noticed that David seemed unusually inquisitive about others present. According to another member of the Club, David was different: ‘he wasn’t one of us’. This same witness, speaking forty years afterwards, remembered him as ‘very withheld’, with ‘a terrifying reticence’.23 At a meeting of the local branch of the Anglo-Soviet Friendship Society, David met the Soviet Cultural Attaché, who was often in Oxford, bringing Russian vodka to woo undergraduates. Since he seemed interested, David was invited to an evening party at the Soviet Embassy in London. This was one of several visits to the Embassy, which often put on showings of stirring films; David reckons that he must have seen The Battleship Potemkin three or four times during this period. At one st
age in the courtship, the Cultural Attaché suggested that it might be ‘more fun’ to meet outside the Embassy, and suggested a rendezvous between the two of them at a pub in Victoria. Then, without explanation, David was suddenly dropped, perhaps because the mask had slipped.
He was unusual, though not unique, in being simultaneously a member of the Communist Club and the Grid. More unusual, perhaps, was to be a member of the Communist Club and to attend gatherings of the Cole Group, an informal discussion group of left-leaning undergraduates centred around the economist and political theorist G. D. H. Cole. Though sympathetic to Russia, Cole was not a Communist and steered his disciples away from what he saw as the Marxist cul-de-sac. Among those influenced by Cole were successive leaders of the Labour Party, Hugh Gaitskell and Harold Wilson.
David also joined the Socialist Club, which welcomed left-wingers of every hue, from pale pink to dark red. The Club’s secretary was Caroline Carter, often said to be the first woman undergraduate ever to be invited to speak at the Oxford Union. Attractive and charismatic, she was referred to around Oxford as ‘the Body Politic’. At the time she was conducting a love affair with the Union president, Bryan Magee, who had joined the Socialist Club after falling for her, though she was believed to be a Communist and his politics were always on the moderate, anti-Communist left. David’s constant presence at Club meetings and his obvious anxiety to please made the two of them uneasy. Furthermore Magee suspected David of having designs on his girlfriend.
Towards the end of his time at Oxford, Magee contemplated going into the Foreign Office. After performing well in the exams, he underwent a number of interviews, culminating in the final selection conference with a panel whose members included Walter Oakeshott, then about to succeed Keith Murray as Rector of Lincoln. Afterwards Magee was disappointed to receive a letter informing him that he had not been selected. Back in Oxford, he ran into Oakeshott in the street, who enquired how he was getting on ‘at the FO’. Embarrassed, Magee explained that he had not been selected. Oakeshott expressed surprise. Years later, Magee would be told by a highly placed source at the Foreign Office that he had not been selected only because information had been received that he was likely to marry a member of the Communist Party. Magee suspected that this information had come from David.*