by Tim Milne
My father taught all his four children to read at an early age – I read fluently and avidly by the time I was four. How he – a busy and successful civil servant (he had a CBE before he was forty), but handicapped by poor health – found time and energy to do this, I cannot imagine. He was a marvellous teacher; the secret was, I think, that he seemed to be learning with you rather than teaching. By the time I reached my kindergarten, just six years of age, I had, among many other books – and for no reason that I can remember – read Kingsley’s The Water Babies ten times. I was put into a class that could read – and our book for the term was The Water Babies. My education proceeded through kindergarten, first prep school, second prep school, but also through my father. He, like his brother Alan, had been a mathematical scholar at Westminster, though unlike Alan he had not gone to university. I was never to be a mathematician myself, but he gave me a lasting feeling for arithmetic and algebra. His greatest love was books, and we children grew up in a house lined with English classics.
I began to acquire a capacity for mental arithmetic and for absorbing statistics, dates and names. Along with other useless but agreeable information, I became a walking Wisden’s. The scores and players of the early 1920s are still vivid in my mind. I tested this statement the other day, and found that of the first hundred players in the batting averages of 1922 I could name the teams of ninety-eight. We were, needless to say, a crossword family; Sunday was Torquemada day from the moment he first appeared in The Observer, in the middle or late 1920s.
At my second prep school – the one which my grandfather had founded and which St John Philby had attended – I was groomed for a scholarship in my last four terms, working on my own. The school spent a lot of effort on this, although they had not had a success for some years. Most of my time was given to Latin and Greek. The mathematics master, a man of wisdom, simply handed me a thick volume of Hall and Knight’s Algebra, with answers at the end, and left me to get on by myself. A year later I had reached the binomial theorem, though it was true I had slightly neglected things I found less interesting, like geometry.
On my thirteenth birthday I sat for the Westminster scholarship examination and came out top. At the end of my first year at Westminster I and several other juniors in College took the School Certificate, something like today’s GCSEs. I had to get five credits to pass. Four I knew were in the bag – Latin, Greek, French and mathematics – but I also needed history or English or divinity, to none of which had I devoted enough attention. Numbers and dates came to my rescue. A few hours before the history exam, I was feverishly trying to ‘revise’ – i.e. learn things I ought to have learnt earlier – when I came across an account of John Wesley, full of dates of journeys and statistics of conversions in various towns and counties. That afternoon I was delighted to find in the history paper a question about Wesley. The examiners must have been surprised to receive a whole page of accurate dates and statistics: perhaps they thought I was an ardent Methodist. Anyway, with Wesley’s help I got my credit in history.
In the same summer term of 1926 my arithmetical turn of mind came in handy in another way, and one which may have made an impression on Kim. The Cheyne Arithmetic Prize (it actually involved algebra rather than arithmetic) was open to the whole school. The paper was compulsory for those who had not yet taken the School Certificate and voluntary for others, but the prize was usually won by someone in the top mathematical form. To my astonishment, when the marks list was published, I was first, although as I was barely fourteen, I was only allowed to receive the junior prize. (In my last year I sat for it again and was again top, so I got the senior prize in the end.)
After the School Certificate one had to choose between classics, science, history, mathematics and so on: I decided to stick with classics. I turned out to be a reasonable solid classicist but not a brilliant one. Possibly I might have done slightly better in science or mathematics; I cannot say. I continued to do a little mathematics on the side and learnt the elements of calculus, trigonometry, statics and dynamics. At the end of my third year I took Higher Certificate in Latin and Greek, with mathematics as a voluntary subsidiary. When the results were published it appeared that I was the only person in the entire country that year to have got both a distinction in a classical subject (Latin) and a pass in the mathematics subsidiary. I know this sounds a little like being the only left-handed red-headed person to have ridden a bicycle from Wapping to Wigan on a Thursday, but I suppose it does indicate a slightly unusual mental combination, and one that could come in useful in certain types of job.
At Oxford, where I had a close scholarship to Christ Church, I read honour moderations (classics) for five terms, and greats (philosophy and Greek and Roman history) for seven. I got a sound but uninspired double second, the thing one is always advised to avoid – the only classes worth getting, people said, were a first or a fourth. But my double second did well enough for me, and no doubt helped me to get into advertising.
Everyone knew Benson’s advertising in those days. Our star client was Guinness, but we also had Kodak, Bovril, Johnnie Walker, Austin, Colman’s, Wills’s, and many other names famous in the 1920s and 1930s. Dorothy Sayers’s Murder Must Advertise was written about Benson’s, a year or two before I got there, and conveys extremely well the atmosphere of moderately gifted amateurism. Advertising ideas never came easily to me, but I had some family facility for writing verses and parodies, which occasionally came in useful for Guinness and others. Most of the work was hard slogging; I was especially concerned with one of our most interesting clients, Kodak. There were only about nine or ten of us in the Benson copywriting department, which was responsible for planning the campaigns, thinking up the ideas, writing all the words, doing much of the contact with various clients and a great deal besides. Mortality, in those competitive days of the Depression, was high; I think that in my five and a half years, Michael Barsley and I were the only two completely new boys in the copy department to survive infancy. By the outbreak of war, still a bachelor, I was probably better off in real terms, that is, net purchasing power after tax, than I was to be again for at least twenty years.
I continued to work in Benson’s for a few months after the war began, in an increasingly unreal atmosphere, until the time came to join the Army. A friend of my sister’s, Peter Shortt, was a major in the Royal Engineers (though at that time he was acting as personal assistant to General Gort, the Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force). Knowing my predilection for maps and travel, and that I had a grounding in mathematics, he suggested I might try to get into the Survey Service of the Royal Engineers. So it was that I became one of twenty-four officer cadets at Fort Widley in June 1940. About half the twenty-four were master printers and others from the printing profession, while the other half were supposed to be, or have been, mathematical specialists. I was neither, but it turned out that what was needed, apart from basic trigonometry, was the ability to handle figures quickly and accurately. At the end of the course we were marked on mathematics, knowledge of instruments and astronomy. I came second, missing 100 per cent through a single elementary slip. On the practical map-making side in the field, which took three weeks, I had 96 per cent for accuracy but only 40 per cent for speed. Probably I was more cut out for the Ordnance Survey than an RE map-making unit in battle.
The Sunday Times book says, ‘We know nothing about the political stance of [Kim’s] admiring former school-friend “Ian” [i.e. me].’1 Let me try briefly to fill this gap. In my twenties I was, of course, left wing. I say ‘of course’ not because everyone of my age had those views – a number of my friends did not – but because most young men who took any interest in politics, particularly European politics and the rise of fascism, were left wing. I never joined any political party, except that in my first term at Oxford I was persuaded by an old school friend to part with half a crown as subscription to the Oxford University Labour Party or Labour Club – I have forgotten the exact title. I attended no meetin
gs and my membership soon lapsed. In my undergraduate days and for a time afterwards I regarded myself as belonging to the left of the Labour spectrum. My guiding light was the New Statesman and Nation, which I devoured weekly as soon as it came out. Though I never managed to read more than a page or two of Marx or Lenin, I recall that when I was studying Roman history at Oxford and had to write an essay on ‘The Year of the Four Emperors’ (those who followed Nero in rapid succession in ad 68–69), I tried to interpret the whole complicated story in what I conceived to be Marxist terms of class struggle. The attempt went rather well, and maybe had an element of truth, but I realise now that the available facts could probably have been made to support any other historical theory with equal effectiveness.
Kim certainly had some influence on my politics up to the time I was twenty or so, but in the eight and a half years between April 1933, when our Berlin visit ended, and October 1941 I suppose I saw him no more than a couple of dozen times, nearly always in general company. In any case, as I have recounted above, he became less and less communicative about politics from 1935–36 onwards. I went my own way. My views in the second half of the 1930s were largely conditioned by the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, the Spanish war and the rise of Hitler. Domestic problems interested me less, and I do not think I felt much involvement with the Jarrow marchers and the millions of unemployed. Russia I regarded as a country that could be relied upon for hostility to Hitler. The Nazi–Soviet pact came as a tremendous shock, partly for this reason but even more because it clearly meant that war was inevitable. For the few months of the phony war I floundered in political confusion, and it almost came as a relief when the Germans began attacking in the west; it certainly did so to join the Army in June 1940 and become immersed in a new world. There was little time to think or read about politics, which anyway seemed to have simplified wonderfully. By the time the war ended I had outgrown a great deal of my rather woolly left-wing idealism. I voted Labour for the last time in 1945. As far as I recall, I did not vote in 1950 or 1951 owing to absence abroad, and since then I have voted Conservative.
I have no doubt that Kim’s primary reason for proposing my entry into Section V was that he had a particular and unusual job to offer which, as I hope to show, was right up my street. Politics did not come into it, nor did he ask what my current politics were. No doubt he was glad to have an old friend joining, but it must be remembered that the usual method of recruiting into the Secret Service was by personal recommendation of this kind. He told me later that he had known after four days that he had picked the right man for the job.
It seems quite likely that before long I would have got into one of the clandestine organisations anyway. No fewer than six of my relatives and connections got jobs during the war in one or more of the ‘funnies’. My wife was in SOE for a time, and later the London office of OSS, the American equivalent of our Secret Service. My brother joined SOE in the Middle East.† My sister Angela was in the famous Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley. So was my father’s cousin, Janet Milne – indeed she had joined it before the war. I had a cousin in MI5, and my brother-in-law’s wife was in SOE. Each obtained his or her post independently of me and independently of the others. I myself was approached by a friend in December 1941 and asked if I would like to be considered for an SOE covert propaganda job in Turkey, but by then I was firmly entrenched in Section V.
And it is there we must now return.
Notes
1. Phillip Knightley, Bruce Page and David Leitch, Philby: The Spy Who Betrayed a Generation, André Deutsch, London, 1968, p. 177.
† Editor’s note: The four children of Kenneth and Maud Milne were Marjorie, Angela, Tim and Tony, who was three years younger than Tim. Tony was also a scholar at Westminster School before going up to Christ Church, Oxford. He travelled in Europe as a freelance writer between 1937 and 1939 and during the war worked in the SOE in north Africa and Greece. He joined SIS in 1944 and remained with them for the next twenty-five years.
5
SECTION V
As I walked through the front door of Glenalmond that afternoon, there was little to tell me I was entering a highly secret office. I recall no security guards or showing of passes. Somebody – probably a passing secretary – directed me to a door on the right of the hall, which opened into a large room with unbarred windows on two sides and a view over the garden. Two or three people of about my own age were working there. Kim, they told me, was upstairs with Felix Cowgill. He came in a few minutes later and began to give me a rundown of the section I had joined.
Section V, the counter-espionage department of SIS (as I now learnt to call the Secret Service), was responsible for counter-espionage operations and intelligence outside British territory; within British territory, this field was covered by MI5, otherwise known as the Security Service. Section V not only directed the collection of counter-espionage intelligence by SIS stations abroad, but also collated and appraised all such overseas counter-espionage intelligence whatever the source: it was largely its own customer. It was for us in Glenalmond to build up as complete a picture as possible of enemy intelligence organisations in foreign countries: their staffs, agents, premises, operations, communications, plans and so on. It was also for us to keep MI5 abreast of this general picture, and more specifically to give them advance information if possible of any hostile espionage operations and plans against British territory, or of the arrival in Britain of an enemy agent, and to carry out enquiries abroad arising from MI5’s work at home. A third potential task for the section, scarcely as yet embarked upon, was to initiate or encourage whatever steps could be taken abroad to stifle enemy espionage organisations and activities on the spot, through diplomatic or other means.
Section V was organised into a number of subsections, some geographical, some functional. The geographical ones included at this time Va, dealing with the Americas; Vb, occupied with western Europe; and Ve, covering eastern Europe and the Middle East. The room I was sitting in was the home of the Iberian subsection, called Vd (the name was liable to be a subject of ribaldry, but after five minutes you got used to it). The ‘symbol’ Vd was also used for Kim himself, head of the subsection: names were not used in communications within SIS. The other officers in Vd had the symbols Vd 1, 2, 3 and so on. I was to be Vd 1; three others had already joined the subsection, and one arrived shortly after. Thus the total officer establishment, including Kim, was six. Until a few weeks earlier it had been no more than one. The suicide of one officer, the nervous breakdown through overwork of another, and complaints from MI5 of inadequate service, had together precipitated the sudden increase. The total officer strength of Section V as a whole at this date was probably only about twenty. In addition there were perhaps twenty to twenty-five secretaries and cardists. The term ‘officer’ did not necessarily mean an officer in the armed forces. Some, including Kim, were civilians, as were all the girls. Everyone was allowed to wear civilian clothes, and I did so for the next two years or more.
Kim gave me an outline of the job I was now beginning. I was to be the ‘ISOS’ officer in Vd. ISOS was the code-name for German intelligence service wireless messages which the British had been able to intercept and decipher. The deciphering was done by the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley, which by October 1941 had broken a number of hand cyphers used locally by German intelligence in Spain, Portugal, Tangier and elsewhere but had not yet cracked the machine cypher used for the main links such as those between Berlin and Madrid, Berlin and Lisbon, and (very importantly) Madrid and Algeciras, overlooking Gibraltar. The number of such intercepts that would appear on my desk each day averaged about twenty, and there was lively expectation that before long the machine cyphers would also be broken, which would bring a vast increase in the work. Meanwhile, Kim showed me samples of what I would be dealing with. The daily batch from Bletchley was cut up by the secretaries into its individual messages, which were then pasted into files according to the terminals: Madri
d–Barcelona, Madrid–Bilbao and so on. Madrid to Barcelona would be on the left-hand page, Barcelona to Madrid on the right, and all in date order.
I am not sure how much of this Kim was able to explain to me that evening before we reckoned it was time to go home. Most of the officers and secretaries were billeted in private houses scattered all over St Albans, but one or two married officers rented their own houses. Kim and Aileen had acquired one on the northern outskirts of the town – The Spinney, in Marshalswick Lane – and had invited me to join their household, consisting of themselves, the infant Josephine and Nannie Tucker. This was to make an enormous difference to life. Later I had an interval of three miserable months in a billet because Aileen was ill, and I was able to appreciate the contrast. For the remainder of my twenty-one months in St Albans I was living at The Spinney, except that for two nights and a day each week I would join Marie in Chelsea.
On that first evening, I was a little apprehensive how it would work out. It was many years since I had seen much of Kim, and I knew he had changed, as I had myself. I reckoned that the sheer interest and pressure of the work would make it easy enough for the two of us to find a modus vivendi, but Aileen was an unknown quantity and with a new baby in the house I might well feel in the way. It was a week or two before we all got to know one another, and it might have been longer if there had not been a very minor contretemps. The dining room had been made over to me as my bedroom, but it was also being used, increasingly, as a dump for anything for which no other home could be found. Finally, when I discovered one evening that I could not get into my bed except by climbing over a bicycle, a sewing machine and a pram, I launched into a rather pompous protest. Aileen laughed so much that the situation was immediately deflated, and thereafter we were all on very easy terms. They even moved the bicycle out.