by Roland Perry
Whitney, at age 15 in 1927, found he had to learn Latin to enter Cambridge. Beatrice never learned to spell, and Michael Straight complained in old age that his grammar was poor. In fact, none of the original students, who along with the three Straights included fourteen local and other kids from poor backgrounds, could spell or do algebra or geometry.
By contrast they attended lectures by speakers such as Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, and A. S. Neill and had visits from T. E. Lawrence and George Bernard Shaw. A teacher, Wyatt Trevelyan Rawson, taught Freudian psychoanalysis and interpreted dreams for the children in class. Michael Chekhov taught drama. H. N. Brailsford, the socialist writer, stayed at Dartington for six weeks during the autumn term of 1928. Consequently, the more intellectual students in the early teens, such as Straight, were semiliterate and innumerate but capable of grasping the big, persuasive ideas of the time. They comprehended a bit of Freud and the broad principles of Marxism-Leninism despite being unable to articulate them on paper with grammatical clarity. In September 1929, Michael Young (later, Lord Young of Dartington), a “pauper” as he called himself, began at the Hall when stars of the ideological firmament were frequenting there more than ever. He was Straight’s age, and they were thrown together, according to Young, because of Dorothy’s propensity to find permanent playmates for her children.
Young loved the freedom after a succession of preparatory and state schools in London and Australia, where straps and canes were used on hands, knuckles, legs, and buttocks. He was amused by the mixed-sex showers, which Leonard had suggested would take the curiosity out of the youngsters and reduce sexual tensions. “I had found it had the opposite effect,” Young noted in interviews.
As for the unisex dormitories, a worry in his five years at the Hall was the prospect of pregnancies. “There were surprisingly few compared to other schools,” he observed, “but it wasn’t for want of trying.”
Young had not long been at Dartington when he became fascinated by the new panacea that was Marxism. It was fashionable among thinkers at the leading universities. Both boys were inspired by a desire to change the world through revolution. Their isolation in the Dartington educational milieu assisted their precocious development. They were at least aware that their inspirations were radical and a threat to the establishment, even the liberal, democratic views of Dorothy and Leonard. It forced them into a bond, an early adolescent cabal, which, despite their intellectual equality, Straight appeared to dominate.
“He was arrogant and could be cruel,” Michael Young recalled.1 “He was extrovert and I, introvert.” He remembered them being “more rivals than friends,” although they remained friends through that original bond into their 80s.
Teachers at Dartington noted that Straight was difficult, uncooperative, and rude. Wyatt Rawson, trying out his newly discovered Freudian analysis, found Straight to be “tremendously under the influence of an English governess [the redoubtable May Gardner], who kept his emotions arrested at an age of about five.”
Straight used to repeat this amateur observation over the decades in an attempt to show that he was in need of being attached to somebody or something—that he was vulnerable to his later recruitment to a secret cause. On a 1929 trip with his parents to Bengal to see Tagore, he found his stepfather (here in a diary entry dropping the affectionate nickname “Gerry” for Leonard) remote and Dorothy naive. Straight seemed to be painting her as not the best mother a sensitive lad could have. This added to the image of a poor little rich boy who needed that sense of belonging once more. Thus he was later open to being fostered in the communist cause. Added to this was his professed alienation in the United Kingdom since leaving the United States, which was again to propose that he had no true motherland. He was implying that when another was later offered, he was attracted.
An alleged example of parental guidance, or lack of it, concerned a play that his mother put on at Dartington when he was 13, Le Tombeau Sous l’Arc de Triomphe by Paul Regnal. Its central character was a French soldier who volunteered for a suicide mission. He was given twenty-four hours to be with his father and his betrothed. Straight claimed to Dorothy that he did not understand the soldier’s mentality. If he was the top fighter, why did he have to sacrifice himself? Dorothy cut him off by implying he was ignorant. Then she pointed out that the soldier’s status caused him to be obligated to make the sacrifice.
Straight claimed, unconvincingly, that this all related back to his agony over his father’s desire to abandon his family and go off to war. Dorothy never went beyond the explanation that the top man should lead the way in sacrifice. Straight said this befuddled him. The impression he wished to convey was that he had developed a deep sense of noblesse oblige, after the example set by his father and upheld by his mother.
Just like his father, he would put his hand up if he were ever asked to serve for a cause in which he believed. Again, this temperament, when coupled with his emotional statelessness, implied that Straight would be vulnerable to any later overtures to become a KGB agent.
The self-portrait of Straight as an emotionally defenseless neo-orphan waif did not sit with those who knew him intimately. Young found him a dominant personality obsessed with extreme left-wing ideology and driven to fulfilling political ambitions through it. “He was extremely good-looking,” Young recalled, “an Adonis with intellectual gifts to match.”
Straight was very competitive. He hated losing even on the tennis court, which was one of the few areas Young managed to conquer him.2
Even as a young teenager, Straight could summon an excess of charm and apply it at will. His self-styled emotional retardation seemed even more implausible when he encountered the curvaceous dancer, Margaret Barr, an Australian communist of 24 who came to teach dance at Dartington in 1930.
Straight thought that she was dark, dramatic, bold, and strong. He likened her to a statue by Gaston Lachaise.
Margaret took class twice a week, and Straight, just 14, set out to impress her with his knowledge of communist ideals and by his working hard at exercise routines started by her mentor, Martha Graham. These exertions won Margaret’s attention. He proved to be a fair dancer, and she cast him in leading roles she had created. Margaret’s epic was a clichéd heroic-workers-versus-the-fat-capitalist-boss saga—typical of that produced in Moscow and Leningrad by order of the state—performed to the Second Symphony of Jean Sibelius. Straight led a large chorus of workers out of poverty and oppression and into a painless new order. The show received a mixed reaction. Left-wing critics invited down from London for the opening night liked it. Admiral Sir Barry Domville, who had two children at Dartington, thought it was evidence that the school was a potential hotbed of Soviet propaganda and influence, and said so. Pom Elmhirst, as left wing as anybody at the Hall, threatened him with a libel suit.
Straight continued for more than a year in his pursuit of Margaret until she relented, and they began a furtive love affair in her cottage. Straight insisted on outlining this in detail to a salivating Michael Young.3 Margaret and Straight stole away to Dorothy’s weekend cottage in Cornwall and read Lady Chatterly’s Lover aloud. Straight was Mellors, the working class gardener, who had the affair with Connie (Margaret’s role), the upper-class wife.
By 1932, the school—under the leadership of W. B. (Bill) Curry—had shed its unstructured attitude to the basics of education. Now any student could move on to higher formal qualification. English had to be taken every year. The fundamentals in arithmetic, languages, history, geography, and science were taught. The principle of enticing VIPs to visit Dartington continued. By now leaders in all walks of life were being invited or were coming on their own volition to examine the experiment. The contrast in visitors was notable. Rabindranath Tagore, always willing to lend his wisdom to his good friend Leonard, was there for some time in 1930. Tagore pleased Dorothy by declaring that the estate grounds had spiritual roots. He claimed that they went back to Christ’s time and that the natural springs and water beds had he
aling properties.
At the other end of the belief spectrum, the Comintern—the international arm of Russia’s espionage operations, which ran communists and parties in other countries—was interested in the key British educational institutions for propaganda and recruitment. They had infiltrated Oxford and Cambridge, from where the nation’s leaders in every field had come and would come. The Comintern, which had been set up and directed by Leon Trotsky, had a patient long-term view about recruitment. If they could nurture the right kind of idealist—one with the potential to climb into high ranks of politics, intelligence, or the military—from early undergraduate days, it fitted their plans. Even if the recruit was a sleeper (mole)—quietly working in a chosen field for even twenty years before being directed to spy—that was in accord with communist strategy. Marx wrote about it, Lenin articulated it, and Trotsky, then later Stalin (to a telling degree), implemented the long-term plan. It applied as much to industry as it did to espionage. But in the seventy years of communist domination of Russia it was more successful in the latter.
Dartington’s radical approach to education even attracted the Soviet ambassador, Ivan Maisky, who was invited to visit the Hall in mid-May 1933. Pom Elmhirst, Straight, Young, and the other students warmly greeted him and his wife.4 Maisky gave his usual glowing chat about the Soviet Union, stayed two days and nights, and dined with the Elmhirsts. No doubt Straight, then 16, impressed the ambassador with his keen mind. Over dinner on May 14, the estate patriarch, Leonard—a liberal and open-minded humanist—spoke about his visit to Russia in 1930 and how he admired its scientific developments in artificial insemination and in cattle. Leonard told the ambassador how he had tried to introduce such techniques in England, a point that would have raised the ambassador’s eyebrows. Ever since Trotsky’s instructions soon after the revolution for communists to steal everything they could from the capitalist nations, Soviet representatives abroad had been desperate to “gather” as much data of any kind, including scientific information, for the advancement of “the great Soviet experiment.” Leonard’s effort on behalf of his more modest experiments at Dartington was a case of plagiarism. It was no worse than what the Soviets were doing.
Dorothy too was open to the superficial Soviet line of propaganda. She espoused “internationalism”—international peace, the breaking down of national barriers, goodwill to all men and women. All Russia’s key representatives preached internationalism while planning the undermining of the British system and all other Western democracies, in their various states of decay and fragility in the 1930s.
The school itself, at least, became international and fashionable in an eclectic circle of, as Aldous Huxley remarked, the “‘odd, the odious, the famous and the fatuous, the accomplished and the artistic.” He sent his son Matthew there but was not pleased that he chose carpentry as his main subject. It wasn’t sufficient for Matthew to plead that it had been good enough for Christ, so why not him? Bertrand Russell took a liking to the school too and sent along his two children, Kate and John, by his second wife, Dora. Sigmund Freud’s architect son, Ernst—a refugee from Nazi Germany—enrolled his three sons. The eldest, Stefan, complained that it lacked games and competition in work. He missed racing to finish his algebra sums.
Among the other talented creatives to put in cameo appearances were the painter Ben Nicholson and his later wife, the sculptor Barbara Hepworth. Victor Gollanz, the publisher and life-long Stalin enthusiast, turned up, as did the controversial Jacob Epstein, another notable sculptor.
Dartington started as “alternative” and took a huge left turn as it developed and departed radically from traditional schooling. Leonard had disliked his own establishment schooling and wanted something different. Dorothy veered away from the norm too as a follower of John Dewey, an American educator and philosopher. He was also one of the founders of the philosophical school of pragmatism, a pioneer in functional psychology, and a representative of the progressive movement in U.S. education, which was only too willing to embrace the far left. Dartington was also a coeducational boarding school, something unheard of in the establishment system. British institutions and conventions were not studied or lauded at Dartington. In other words, this new radical facility was looking for a utopia that would overthrow tradition where learning was a preparation for a vocation. Dartington wanted education to relate to the here and now. For instance, the students would be shown how to tend pigs and clean out their pens, the latter being a solitary lesson for most in what they would never do for the rest of their lives.
Dartington was a state within a state—self-enclosed and self-governing. There was little to relate to in outside communities in rural Devonshire, which was isolated enough as it was. The headmaster, W. B. Curry, was a pacifist whose guru was Bertrand Russell. Curry was cut off from the British establishment and essentially a radical, although he would not have seen his politics in this light. (When World War II broke out, Curry couldn’t cope and committed suicide, which in a perverse way meant that he stuck to his anti-war principles.)
The school also had a heady atmosphere of sexual freedom and liberal thought. It absorbed the “in” ideology of Marxism. It looked to a false and idealized vision of the mysterious Soviet Union as a trendsetter for life, society, and political development. Not surprisingly, seven of Straight’s final-year class of ten went on to join the Communist Party. Dartington was a wonderful breeding ground for communism despite the fact that only Straight’s “lover,” Margaret Barr, was the one raw and knowing Communist, although she never taught it. (Barr moved to Australia, where she joined the communist movement there.) She limited her Dartington teaching to dancing and to “hands-on” sex education, with Straight chosen as the only one-on-one student. Straight absorbed the naive communist indoctrination while making the banal claim that he was naturally the creative type, particularly in writing and art, although Dartington offered nothing in these fields.
In this rarefied atmosphere of alleged political and creative enlightenment and inspiration, in the summer of 1933 Straight, then 16, took the school certificate exam. He failed mathematics, which meant he would have to sit out a year before going on to Cambridge. He thought of himself as a poet/writer but was made to realize that to attain his vague, unshaped dreams of saving the world through revolution, he should comprehend economics, especially at Cambridge. It was reputed to be the most radical university in the country next to the London School of Economics (LSE). In the 1930s, especially the early part of the decade, economics was viewed by the leading left-wing intellectuals as the key to understanding Marxism.
This was made clear to Straight when he used family contacts to meet liberal American jurist Felix Frankfurter, who was living in Oxford in 1933, on sabbatical from his job as professor at the Harvard Law School. The New Dealer and close friend of Franklin Roosevelt suggested he see the leading academic Marxist, Harold Laski, professor of political science at LSE, even though Straight’s mediocre exam performances didn’t warrant entry there. Laski, who was a regular contributor to The New Republic, was impressed enough by Straight to use his influence as chair of its admissions committee in order to get him in.5
Straight moved to London and joined his brother Whitney, who had left Cambridge. They rented an “elegant” house in Mayfair from the writer P. G. Wodehouse, who gave a dinner in their honor. He spoke in support of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.
Whitney showed his eccentric side by having the dining room redone in a luminescent paint, purchasing six big paintings by Ben Nicholson, and buying a monkey, which had its home on the top floor. Soon Whitney, a racing car driver, took off for the European circuit, with his team of mechanics and Maseratis, leaving Straight with a footman to look after him and the monkey. It was a bizarre start for the budding revolutionary, but despite these upper-class trappings, Straight tackled his new life at the LSE with zeal. He become a member of the Communist-controlled Socialist Club, joined in debates, attended radical rallies, and used his wealth to g
et noticed. He became a card-carrying member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, associating rarely with anyone at the university except like-minded Soviet-supporting Communists, such as Geoffrey Marmont, editor of the radical magazine The Student Vanguard, who late in 1934 committed suicide; American Frank Meyer (expelled and deported to the United States in 1934 for his radical activities); Oxford graduate Peter Floud, who became a leading communist intellectual; Krishna Menon (later the foreign minister of India); Leo Silberman, a German refugee, later murdered in an intelligence operation involving South Africa; Michael Young, who studied law; and many others.
Frank Meyer ran a fund for refugees from Nazi Germany, and Straight donated twenty pounds, which was ten times that raised in seven weeks. It allowed him to ingratiate himself with Meyer, LSE’s most militant Communist. Straight got on the LSE hockey team by using his Ford convertible to chauffeur other players to games. These were undergraduate lessons in how he could buy access to what he desired, a practice he would call on as a matter of course to far greater effect for decades to come.
4
CAMBRIDGE CONSOLIDATION
The London School of Economics had given Straight experience at communism beyond Dartington. Cambridge, he hoped, would provide the opportunity to embrace it further, although he was not aware of how that would occur and what form it would take. He began, age 18, at Trinity College, in the autumn of 1934. Its style and atmosphere attracted him from day one.