Well known among these younger habitués of the 1917 was Geoffrey Pyke, author, escapee, undercover correspondent, minor Bloomsberry (as members of the Bloomsbury Group were sometimes known) and key member of staff at the anti-war Cambridge Magazine. Owing to his modicum of fame, when the news of his engagement appeared in the Daily Sketch it was accompanied by a photograph of his fiancée – which was cut out and added to his ever-expanding MI5 Personal File.
DAILY SKETCH.
SATURDAY, MAY 25, 1918.
Margaret Chubb on her engagement to Pyke, photograph by Hoppé
Pyke had only met Margaret Chubb for the first time five months earlier. A doctor’s daughter from Kent, she had read History at Oxford before taking up a position in the War Office as Deputy Assistant to the Chief Controller of the Queen Mary’s Army Auxiliary Corps. She was level-headed, brave and beautiful and, without meaning to, had shattered Pyke’s resolve to avoid marriage.
As a teenager he would often quote Bernard Shaw to his siblings, indeed there were times when Shaw was the equivalent of a distant father-figure with a penchant for epigrams. In particular, Pyke liked to repeat Shaw’s opinions on marriage, telling his brother and sisters that it was a dotty Victorian institution in need of reform. So everyone was surprised to hear about his engagement – including, it seems, Pyke himself.
Several weeks after Margaret had accepted his proposal she found him drawing up a list of reasons why they should not get married. It was in his nature to doubt, and to rationalise this doubt with himself before presenting it to anyone else, yet on this occasion Margaret was able to talk him round.
Several months later, on 8 June 1918, they were married in a London register office. Mary Pyke was not invited. After a honeymoon in the English countryside – Pyke was still on MI5’s blacklist so even if he had wanted to he would have been unable to leave the country – the newly-weds set up in a small flat on Bouverie Street, just a stone’s throw from the offices of the Chronicle. For perhaps the first time in his life Pyke described himself as content. His wife was everything that his mother was not: university-educated, balanced, loving, undemanding and employed. She had a calming effect on him, and this appeared to be a marriage of equals. Both husband and wife shared a manifest sense that British society was about to enter a post-war age in which everything they took for granted could be recast, traditions sundered and the rules of life written again. But it was not until they had a child that their role in this became clear.
During the Great War, MI5 never found evidence of Pyke doing anything more suspicious than making plans to go sailing off the Scandinavian coast. There was certainly no proof that he and Teddy Falk had escaped from Ruhleben with German assistance. Nonetheless, his name was retained for some years in a ‘Special File’ of those banned from travelling overseas.
It would be just under twenty years before he came to the attention of MI5 again and, though the world was coloured then by a new set of concerns, their suspicions about this man were dogged by some of the same prejudices. For the British Security Service it seemed that the problem with Geoffrey Pyke was not so much his irreverence, his cleverness or his Jewishness – though the combination of all three did little to endear him – it was the sense that they never quite knew what he was going to do next.
HOW TO RAISE YOUR CHILD (AND PAY FOR IT)
PYKE’S REACTION TO the birth of his son David in the summer of 1921 was to book himself an appointment to see a psychoanalyst. Although Dr James Glover became ‘so charmed and so overwhelmed that the analysis fell apart’, Pyke came away with what he wanted. He had gone to Glover for a Freudian insight into a problem that had been troubling him for years, namely, how to give your child a truly enlightened upbringing. Many parents may ask themselves a similar question as they face parenthood for the first time. Few will go as far as Pyke in their pursuit of an answer. It was not that he felt the responsibility of being a parent more than anyone else, rather that he was starting from scratch. As he adjusted to his new life as a father, to the responsibility, the wonder and the occasional sleepless nights, his overriding desire was that his son’s childhood should have nothing in common with his own.
Although he wrote so much during his adult life – to a degree that suggests a compulsion, graphomania – among the millions of words that Pyke committed to paper almost none refer to his upbringing or to his mother. His younger brother Richard compensated for this omission with his first book, The Lives and Deaths of Roland Greer, published in 1928, a roman à clef that focused to the exclusion of all else (including a plot) on the relationship between the four Pyke siblings as children and their mother Mary, barely disguised in the novel as ‘Myra’.
Lionel and Mary Pyke, seated, with their eldest daughter Dorothy
Written in the wake of Mary’s death, while Richard underwent psychoanalysis, it is a stark and often unforgiving portrait of a woman unable to reconcile herself to widowhood. ‘What had been even in favourable circumstances a hasty temper and a shrew’s tongue were transformed by grief, a sense of isolation, and a hatred for all women who were not bereaved, into savage misogyny and a lashing speech that knew nothing of conventions. Half of her was dead, and four ghosts stayed to mock her. As ghosts they haunted her; as at ghosts she lunged at them; like ghosts they left her no spiritual peace.’ In time she grew to love her children, but it was a bullying, paranoid kind of love, that of a dictator towards the masses. ‘Myra was consumed by the feeling that she must fight. It was only thus that her love found an outlet. And fight she did – relatives and servants, strangers and tradesmen; brothers, sisters, mother, children.’ Richard described her ‘hurricane shakings’ and the memory of her ‘fist flourished villainously under his nose, her teeth clenched, her eyes flashing crazy passion, and her face dark red with murder’. His elder brother bore the brunt of this. For Richard the most explosive relationship in that household, the one that seemed to embody its immanent tension, was between Mary and Geoffrey – or Myra and Daniel.
In the book, Daniel is ‘irresistibly impelled by his mother’s widow-hood and his cruelly exploited ambition to fill a father’s place, and to assume responsibilities from which he should have been exempt for many years’. As well as being told, from the age of five, that he was the man of the house, Daniel became Myra’s ‘only formidable opponent, if not her equal’. In one exchange, aged fourteen, Daniel / Geoffrey physically restrains his mother ‘with an expression of utter horror, such as he might have worn if forcing himself to touch a mutilated corpse’. Keeping hold of her, ‘he pushed his elbows outwards and forced them up, thus twisting her wrists round and holding them down’. On wriggling free Myra began to beat him ‘on the side of his head as hard as she could’. Richard later described to a friend how his ‘mother chased them round the dining-room table with a carving knife, and once held Richard out of a third-floor window to frighten him into good behaviour’.
The effect of all this on the four siblings was profound. As a teenager, Pyke maintained that he would never have children for nobody should endure what he had gone through. From an early age the Pykes began to distance themselves from their mother and took to ‘playing at pork butchers and drawing crosses’ in the face of her growing religious conservatism. The more she urged her sons to provide her with Jewish daughters-in-law the stronger their determination to do otherwise. Mary’s elder daughter converted to Christianity, broke all ties with her mother and left home in her early twenties; both of her sons became committed atheists; one refused to talk to her for the last years of her life.
The Pyke siblings: (left to right) Dorothy, Richard, Geoffrey and Evelyn
For Richard, this troubled and at times violent upbringing also had the effect of oversensitising all four children. ‘Not only could their emotions be roused far more easily, but they were roused to a far higher pitch, and far oftener, than should have been.’ As well as echoing Mary’s Manichean mood swings the children became familiar from an early age with inconsistency and co
ntradiction. If, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, ‘the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function’, then the Pyke children were precocious.
Of course it was hard for Mary to raise four children in the more straitened circumstances which followed Lionel’s death. Her neuralgia came and went and she was tragically unable to resolve herself to the death of her beloved husband. Perhaps it is unfair to highlight her violent outbursts and the way her children turned against her. But she made mistakes, and for Pyke one of the most egregious was her choice of where, aged thirteen, he should go to school.
By then, Pyke’s atheism and lack of discipline were causing his mother real concern. After five happy years boarding at St Edmund’s, Hindhead, a preparatory school in Sussex, Pyke was not sent to a Jewish day-school in London, where so many of his cousins went. Instead his mother packed him off to Wellington College, the ‘military Lycée’ in Berkshire which embodied the sporty, strict, empire-building ethos of a nineteenth-century public school, and where, at Mary’s insistence, Pyke was to be treated as an observant Jew. He was forbidden from attending lessons or playing sports on the Jewish Sabbath, he had to wear slightly different clothes from the other boys and kosher food was prepared for him at every meal. All this in a school where there had never before been a practising Jew.
He later recalled the sensation of ‘running as fast as your panting breathing will allow you, with a rabble of respectable people thundering and shouting after you. You have only got to see a real man-hunt once in your life, for all your sympathy to go to the hunted.’ This strange spectacle, he added, ‘can always be seen at any really good public school’.
Like sharks scenting blood, packs of teenage boys will pick up on the slightest difference in their ranks and even without his Jewishness paraded like this, the young Geoffrey Pyke was the odd one out at Wellington. He was taller than most and brighter. He was no good at games. None of his family had been in the military. His father was dead. He loved to read. He did not live in the country and had never shot an animal. The bullying that followed was relentless and at times systematic. As well as opportunistic attacks – his brother referred to ‘malicious devils’ brandishing ‘wetted towels’ – there were moments when whole sections of the school chased him along the corridors yelling ‘Jew Hunt!’ or just ‘Pyke Hunt!’
After two miserable years, Mary took him out, and until the age of eighteen Pyke was tutored at home before going up to Cambridge in 1912.
Five years later he was asked to give a talk at Wellington about his escape from Ruhleben. Having run through the first set of lantern slides he described his arrest and the moment when he was told that he would be shot in the morning. The young Wellingtonians were rapt. ‘Yet when things were at their worst in Germany,’ he told them, ‘even when I was quite certain I’d be taken out and shot as a spy, I was never quite so unhappy, never so completely miserable as I’d been when I was a boy here at Wellington.’
It was not just the bullying and the casual anti-Semitism which had worn him down, so much as the unimaginative teaching and relentless emphasis on discipline for discipline’s sake. George Orwell, briefly at Wellington soon after Pyke, described the school as ‘beastly’. The author, politician and publisher Harold Nicolson, another contemporary, described being ‘terribly and increasingly bored’ there. ‘One ceased so completely to be an individual, to have nay but a corporate identity.’ Nicolson later ‘blamed the Wellington system for retarding him mentally and socially’. Naturally Pyke did not want his son to endure anything similar. So where to send him instead?
Perhaps this was the wrong question. The problem might not be with Wellington per se but the English educational system as a whole.
The early 1920s was later described by Evelyn Waugh as ‘the most dismal period in history for an English schoolboy’. The expression ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’ was not yet a historical curiosity and in schools up and down the country the ghost of Dr Arnold stalked the battlements. Arnold was the Rugby schoolmaster who had done more than any other to change the character of so many English schools – until ‘an English public schoolboy who wears the wrong clothes and takes no interest in football, is a contradiction in terms’, as Lytton Strachey had pointed out several years earlier. ‘Yet it was not so before Dr Arnold; will it always be so after him?’ The assumption for most British parents was that yes, it would. The character of these institutions appeared to be entrenched, the people running them had little incentive to change and it was hard to see why or how things would evolve.
As he had done in the face of those who believed that no Englishman could slip into Germany undetected, or that escape from Ruhleben was impossible, Pyke challenged these verities. In the months after David’s birth he reached a pivotal realisation. To give his son the education he wanted for him he must set up his own school. Of course he had no experience of teaching and only an amateur interest in educational theory. Even if he was able to get down on paper a convincing outline of a radical new establishment, it was hard to see how he could persuade any parents to offer their children for this scholastic experiment. This was a risk he would have to take.
Over the following months he developed the blueprint for a new kind of school, one that would go further than existing progressive models such as Bedales, Abbottsholme, The King Alfred School or St Christopher’s in Letchworth Garden City, and take in children at a younger age. It drew on the painful lessons he had learnt growing up and combined them with ideas filleted from Rousseau, contemporary philosophy, psychology and Freudian psychoanalysis. Underpinning it all was his ardent belief that each of us arrives in the world as a scientist in the making, that as children we are naturally inquisitive and will conduct experiments in order to understand the world around us. This new school would be revolutionary and scientific. It would also be hugely expensive to set up. If David Pyke was to have the ultra-modern upbringing his parents wanted then they would have to raise a lot of money, and fast. In many ways this was an even greater challenge.
Pyke and his son David in 1922
Pyke’s job at the time was poorly paid and precarious. He had been employed by the Cambridge Magazine since 1916, and while he had always seen this as a cause as much as a livelihood, identifying with its internationalist anti-war perspective, the demand for such publications had evaporated since the Treaty of Versailles. In 1922, Pyke was asked to dispose of its most valuable asset, a weekly survey of the foreign press. He sold it to the Manchester Guardian, and later that year the magazine folded. Very soon after, another pillar in his life began to totter: Mary Pyke told her children that she was dying of cancer.
Having refused to see her during the previous five years, Pyke now visited her in the nursing home – in body if not in spirit. He had cut her out of his sentimental attachments with such finality that now it was as if he was seeing her for the first time. Mary did not seem to notice. Indeed, as she lay there surrounded by her four uncomplaining children, her sense of family, as Victorian as it was Jewish, was at last satisfied. Over the days that followed her face greyed, the cancer spread and the daily dosage of drugs was increased. Her stream of complaints about the nursing staff petered out, and on 18 August 1922, aged 57, she died.
Her corpse was taken to Willesden Green Cemetery where just one exception was made to the orthodox Jewish ritual. Following her instructions, Mary Pyke was buried wearing her wedding ring. Pyke found the funeral shocking and lonely, and would later urge his son to stay away from his, describing it as ‘a silly business’.
The death of his mother and the end of the Cambridge Magazine produced in Pyke an overwhelming urge to get away, and the next month his passport application was finally approved. He had been removed from MI5’s Blacklist. Yet this was not in response to fresh intelligence which exonerated him from suspicion – indeed, five months later MI5 would refuse a request from the Passport Office to remove him from the
ir ‘Special File’ – but he was free to leave the country and did so at once, setting off with Margaret for the Swiss Alps.
Geographically, emotionally, sexually, they had never felt so free. Though married and in love, neither claimed a proprietorial hold on the other. Even if this went against the gospel according to Shaw, who wrote that ‘a real marriage of sentiment [. . .] will break very soon under the strain of polygamy or polyandry’, the Pykes professed a looser sexual morality, not in a bohemian spirit of laissez-faire but as part of what they saw as a more scientific approach to life.
The Pykes on honeymoon
The word ‘scientific’ had a particular resonance by then. Once confined to machines and laboratories, there was a fashionable new sense that a scientific perspective could be applied to everything. Science could do away with all traditional assumptions – indeed, the word had come to stand for a youthful rejection of what one’s parents had taken for granted. Shaw envisaged a society dominated by scientifically minded ‘engineer-inventors’; H.G. Wells referred to ‘scientific samurais’, the men and women of tomorrow who would rise to the top by dint of their ruthless intellectual technique, slicing through a thicket of outdated prejudices. While there was nothing new about this urge to cast off Victorian certainties – journalists, novelists and playwrights had been doing this since the turn of the century – by the early 1920s this project had a pronounced urgency. The blind slaughter of the trenches seemed to be evidence of what happened when society was run according to traditional precepts. The Soviet Union, dazzling in its potential, suggested that it was possible to reinvent an ancient nation along more scientific lines. This was not to say that a scientific attitude must always be left-wing, only that it implied starting from scratch. For the likes of Geoffrey and Margaret Pyke, science allowed for a modern perspective on everything from sexual morality to warfare, the education of children and, of course, the business of making a lot of money quickly.
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