by Peter Day
Nadia’s sister, also named Olia, came to help her through the first six weeks of child rearing before Nadia and Peter were packed off to the Schönblick sanatorium in Württemburg, where Klop’s mother and two of his aunts were staying. Klop followed a few weeks later for Peter’s christening and, with typical insensitivity, nominated one of his former admirers as godmother. He explained to Nadia that since the girl had hoped to marry him it was the least he could do, even though when he had met her in Munich it was her sister he had an affair with.52
They soon returned to Ridgmount Gardens where they spent three years, short of money, initially with few friends and beginning to discover the reality of married life. Nadia recognised that Klop could be a spoilt child, autocratic and averse to criticism. He needed sympathetic company, people to laugh at his jokes and appreciate his repartee, to be sociable and have fun. Nadia seems to have accepted these character traits phlegmatically, balancing them against the gaiety and exhilaration of his good moods. She was not without friends and social connections in London, including the ballerina Tamara Karsinova, a leading dancer with the Imperial Ballet who played a leading part in the development of the British Royal Ballet. She had married the First Secretary at the British embassy in St Petersburg, Henry ‘Benji’ Bruce, son of a baronet, and introduced him to Nadia’s uncle Alexandre. Benji used to attend his Sunday afternoon drawing master class for the city’s leading artists. He and Tamara escaped to London shortly before Klop and Nadia and remained friends.
As Klop and Nadia began to entertain at home, many of the guests had Russian or artistic connections. Among them was Mary Chamot, who had studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and earned her living as a lecturer at the National Gallery and Victoria and Albert Museum. She introduced them to William Constable, then at the National Gallery but later first director of the Courtauld Institute, where he revolutionised the study of art history and in 1933 played a part in the transfer to London of the Warburg Institute, fleeing Nazi persecution in Hamburg. Another visitor was gallery owner Earnest Lefevre, who specialised in French Impressionists, and his wife Nina. Klop was keen that Nadia should pursue the painting career for which her studies in St Petersburg had prepared her. Nina Lefevre was persuaded to pose at the flat, dressed in red evening gown, delicately manipulating a long cigarette holder. Mary Chamot came along to paint her portrait at the same time. Klop was in constant attendance, amusing their model with jokes in French and offering drinks and snacks. Nadia she did not find Klop’s domineering approach conducive to artistic expression and the result was not a happy one. Her first exhibition failed to sell a single painting, although it got a kindly review in The Times. Tragically this professional mishap was overshadowed by the loss of a baby through miscarriage, followed by several weeks of illness, a misfortune which the stoical Nadia dismissed in a single sentence in her account of that time. But she wrote later about how much she regretted that they had not had more children. Klop, on the other hand, seemed to be intimidated by the responsibilities of parenthood and told her, in terms that must have jarred just as much then as now:
To worry about one is quite sufficient. And what a blessing that it was a boy! I dread to think how it could have been! Fancy us having an ugly daughter whom nobody wanted or, even worse – a very beautiful and attractive one! I would have died long ago worrying and trying to keep her out of trouble!53
Klop’s greatest achievement, in terms of raising Nadia’s artistic profile and enlarging their social circle, was his recruitment of a cook (and nanny for Peter) in place of the elderly Miss Rowe, who had died. The enigmatic Frieda, from Hamburg, spoke fluent English in an atrocious accent, cooked like a dream, and in quieter moments posed in the nude for Nadia. She attracted the attention of the Daily Mirror. In its ‘As I See Life’ column, under the headline ‘Cooks become models’ it reported:
Mme Ustinov, the Russian artist, who paints under the name Nadia Benois, is the fortunate possessor of an excellent cook who is also an excellent artist’s model. I have sampled her cookery and seen her posing. A very graceful tribute to her has been paid by Nadia Benois in the dining room of the South Kensington flat where she lives. Above the service lift she has painted the cook’s head surrounded with pots and pans and held up by little cupids.54
By that time Klop and Nadia’s fortunes and social standing were on the up and in 1924 they moved to a more spacious apartment in Carlisle Mansions, Victoria. Klop’s mother, acting on behalf of herself and her four surviving children, had sold a plot of land and three-storey house in Jerusalem to the Empress Zäwditu, co-regent of Ethiopia with Haile Selassie, for use as an embassy. The price was £9,500 – equivalent to nearly £500,000 today.55 Klop showed his appreciation by escorting the Abyssinian delegation to the British Empire exhibition at Wembley and bringing the entire party, including the emperor, back to their new flat for dinner. The young Peter Ustinov was hauled out of bed to perform party pieces for the Lion of Judah while frantic phone calls were made to the German embassy to prevail upon their chef to despatch a meal suitable for a royal visitor round to the flat by taxi.56 This more spacious flat had room for a grand piano, helpfully provided by Klop’s sister Tabitha and her Palestinian husband Anis Jamal. Nadia painted the ceilings blue, adding figures representing the constellations, and turned a dividing screen door into a medieval icon depicting Klop as a scribe and twenty of their friends in appropriate guises. Here Klop could give full rein to his artistic talents: playing, singing and acting extracts from his favourite operas; mimicking chorus girls and prime ministers and telling tall stories. They could cram as many as eighty people into their Friday night buffet supper parties. Their guest list ranged from the chef Rudolph Stulik to Lady Tyrrell.
Stulik was the proprietor of the Hôtel de la Tour Eiffel, in Fitzrovia, just north of Oxford Street, which in its heyday in the 1920s and 1930s had a slightly louche but glamorous reputation. Royal princes were claimed to be occasional visitors; artists Augustus John and Wyndham Lewis, socialite Nancy Cunard, poet and playwright Dylan Thomas and their literary friends were regular patrons of the restaurant, which after normal licensing hours transformed itself into an amusing but discreet nightclub. The hotel was equally discreet. Lady Tyrrell was the wife of the Foreign Office grandee Sir William Tyrrell who had been a powerful influence on Foreign Secretaries from Sir Edward Grey onwards and had founded the political intelligence department.
Klop’s position as the Wolff Bureau representative meant that he had access to German celebrities visiting London. The acclaimed concert pianists Wilhelm Backhaus, Artur Schnabel and the Russian Vitya Vronsky would visit his flat to practise on the baby grand. Schnabel and Nadia enjoyed a mild flirtation which provoked a jealous response in the constantly libidinous Klop. At around this time they also got to know the Chenhalls family, Alfred and his sisters Hope and Joan. Alfred was an accountant but in reality more of a showbiz agent. Among his clients was the actor Leslie Howard, who played Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind. The two men died in 1943 when the Luftwaffe shot down a civilian aircraft carrying them from Lisbon to London. There has long been speculation that they were involved in a secret operation for MI6; Alfred bore more than a passing resemblance to Winston Churchill and he had a connection to the intelligence services. His sister Joan worked for MI5 for twenty-five years, liaising closely with Klop while maintaining a public persona as a lively spinster, Methodist minister’s daughter and head of the international wing of the Girl’s Brigade, where she introduced lessons in deportment and encouraged the girls to wear lipstick. Hope had been secretary to the British film star Charles Laughton, worked with Harry Yoxall who founded British Vogue and would go on to be chief inspector of the Good Food Guide. Yoxall was another of Klop’s lunch and dinner guests and a great admirer of his cooking.
With professional musicians to provide the entertainment, Klop could indulge in playing the part of a host, supervising the eating and the drinking, steering the conversation and flirting; above all flirtin
g, with any attractive new female who appeared in their midst, seeking to establish a semi-amorous relationship. For the most part Nadia took an indulgent view:
The adventurous, somewhat Casanovian spirit of his youth never died. He was always on the look-out, eager for new conquests. But as he was superstitious, even a God-fearing man, he never intended ‘going the whole hog’, for he believed that some terrible calamity would befall us all as retribution for his sins. A mildly amorous relationship sufficed him. His imagination did the rest and the certainty that everything was possible completely satisfied him. Klop’s flirtations … were light and gay, like a joyous pas de deux on ice, with lots of slips and slides but never a fall.57
What did exasperate her were his frequent attempts to make her a conspiratorial partner in his assignations, trying to draw her into a discussion of their respective merits. He pushed his luck too far over the photographer Thea Struve. Nadia recalled later:
I had to sit there and listen to their endless tête-à-tête of a rather superficial kind, yet heavily laden with hidden allusions, mainly on Klop’s side: I felt like an unwanted old duenna. This was Klop’s usual stratagem. He always wanted to draw me into the situation for some reason. I often told him: You know, Klop, I’d rather you had a real love affair without my knowledge – for what I don’t know does not exist – than to sit through that kind of insipid deal.58
In her mostly affectionate portrait of her husband this is the nearest Nadia ever comes to a reproach for his infidelity but their son Peter, growing up in this heavily charged atmosphere and occasionally inveigled by his father into comment on his latest amour, was outraged and instinctively recognised the wounds his mother preferred to conceal. His father’s entertaining style involved ‘galloping like a daring scout in the no man’s land between wit and lapses of taste,’ full of juvenile double-entendres and risqué jokes with which his mother sportingly laughed along. Peter regarded his mother’s behaviour on such occasions as ‘always impeccable.’59
Looking back, the paradoxes of his father were apparent to a son whose relationship with him was frequently antagonistic and bitter. The mask of the convivial party host disappeared when the guests were gone. Klop had ‘a mercurial temper and, at times, a wicked and hurtful tongue’. In contrast to his own Calvinistic father, Klop was totally irreligious. Family rows were frequent and he was domineering and didactic with regard to Nadia’s artistic method. She stood up for herself only within the bounds that would preserve a fragile peace. And in his early teens Peter turned on his father over his dismissive criticism of one of Nadia’s paintings, thereafter treating Klop’s sarcasm with cold imperviousness. The atmosphere in the flat was, said Peter, ‘glowering and intense’.
Yet he conceded that his father had a distaste for the brutal and cruel and a moral courage surprising in a man so devoted to the good life. Even in later life, in the company of his favourite young women, he ‘offered consistent amusement, an elegance of spirit, a sense of joyous irresponsibility’.
Peter shared a greater warmth with his mother whose benign, liberal nature led her to accept all sorts, even Klop’s girlfriends who remained friends with her long after Klop’s glad eye had alighted on another social butterfly. Peter was convinced though that this merely disguised the humiliation and degradation she must have felt. He regarded her account of Klop, however affectionate, as a subtle stab at his character that was the only cold revenge her pride would permit. When Nadia died, in February 1975, Peter found conflicting evidence in support of his view. Letters that Klop and Nadia exchanged, even during a long period of virtual separation, were warm and confidential but her private diary was ‘searing evidence of the moral injury she had suffered’.60
When Klop and Nadia were waiting impatiently to come to London, the British-owned Reuters news agency in the city had done its best to help. They wrote to Percy Koppel at the Foreign Office asking him to speed clearance from the British passport control officer in The Hague. Passport Control in those days performed a dual role of vetting foreign visitors and working for MI6.61
Reuters and the Wolff Bureau were nominally in competition with each other. Although independent of government both had expected to perform patriotic duties during the First World War. The rapid and reliable transmission of news and propaganda had been increasingly recognised as crucial by governments and journalists – sub-marine cabling was expensive but essential. In the aftermath of war, Lord D’Abernon, the new ambassador in Berlin, was particularly anxious that British influence should play its part in rebuilding the peace in Germany. He was concerned that reports of British policy were being filtered through the French Havas news agency in Paris and being deliberately distorted.
So, when Klop presented himself at the Foreign Office they were keen to court his favour and he did not disappoint. When he explained to them how difficult it was to recruit servants in Britain – cooks and cleaning ladies were too patriotic to work for a German – the diplomats were sympathetic and persuaded the Home Office to give a work permit to Freida, baby Peter’s German nanny.
When Klop intimated that British foreign policy would get better coverage but for the exorbitant cost of telephoning his copy to Berlin, they intervened with the General Post Office to get him cut-price calls. In return, Klop called daily at the Foreign Office and, in the words of one official ‘has been assisted to obtain authoritative statements and comments which have been transmitted without distortion’.62
But Klop was not what he seemed. He was still a German Foreign Office secret agent, in their pay and required to answer first to the ambassador and to the senior diplomats of the Wilhelmstrasse before attending to the needs of the Wolff Bureau and German newspapers. That had been decided as early as April 1920, before he set out on his Russian mission. Dr Carl von Schubert, a close ally of Maltzan and future Foreign Office Secretary of State, decreed that the London embassy did not need its own press officer and would be better off using the Wolff Bureau representative as a front man. Klop was considered particularly suitable because of his knowledge of Britain and British politics. It is not clear on what basis Klop was considered such an expert, other than his brief pre-war sojourn in London. When he eventually arrived in London it was agreed that three-fifths of his £1,200 a year salary would be paid for by the German Foreign Office. The wage was the equivalent of a fairly senior diplomat – at assistant secretary or under-secretary level – and would equate to £100,000 plus in 2013. And, like most journalists, Klop became adept at recovering his incidental expenses. Part of his rent was paid, plus a newspaper and entertainment allowance and telegraph charges for his reports. In 1923 the ambassador was complaining that nearly all his £500-a-year budget for press and propaganda went on Klop. By 1924 the bill was running at £564 for six months. On the other hand Klop’s duties were fairly onerous. He was to cultivate the British press in German interests; and provide daily digests of their reports to the ambassador and Berlin, with particular reference to politics, the economy and culture. He had to monitor magazines, political brochures and books and make comments on them; and report false stories in the London Press and suggest ways to refute them. On top of that he had to supply his agency with reports on all the major British news stories of the day. If he had any time left he was permitted freelance for other papers and he was entitled to four weeks summer holiday. But on no account was he to reveal that he was anything other than an agency reporter or that he had these obligations to the embassy.
Not surprisingly, Klop managed to ingratiate himself to the extent that he could discuss sensitive political issues with the head of the Foreign Office news department, Sir Arthur Willert, and he formed a crucial and lifelong friendship with Willert’s assistant, Clifford Norton. From their attitude it seems probable that they understood perfectly Klop’s dual role.
Norton, a clergyman’s son, educated at Rugby and The Queen’s College, Oxford, was a year older than Klop, and had served with the 5th Battalion, Suffolk Regiment at Gallipoli and in
Palestine during the First World War. He knew Klop’s home town of Jaffa: he had suffered a gunshot wound in the back during fighting there in 1917 and from 1919 to 1921 he had been a political officer, advising the Palestine High Commissioner, based for part of that time in nearby Haifa. In 1927 he married Noel Hughes, universally known by her nickname ‘Peter,’ a painter and later leading arts patron with an independent and adventurous spirit. They became close to Klop and Nadia, socialising and sometimes babysitting for the young Peter Ustinov.
Klop’s pre-eminence as the German embassy’s unofficial eyes and ears in the Foreign Office came under threat at this point from a rival journalist, André Rostin. He had been private secretary to the Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert who was president of Germany from 1919 to 1925. Like Klop, Rostin was partly bankrolled by the embassy while officially working for a trade and industry newspaper. Klop’s friend Albrecht Bernstorff, the First Secretary, had recruited him partly because of his Socialist and Communist contacts and he spent a good deal of his time at the Soviet embassy, extracting information from the ambassador Ivan Maisky and his colleagues. He also made rapid headway in British society, befriending the Duke of York’s private secretary Sir Louis Greig, and a number of senior government officials. He was remarkably prolific. In a two-month period in the summer of 1926 he filed secret reports containing information gleaned in discussions with three Soviet officials, with John Gregory, the Foreign Office assistant secretary, and with his junior minister Godfrey Locker-Lampson. Klop feared Rostin was after his job and began to badmouth him to his friends at the British Foreign Office, whispering that Rostin was in fact a Soviet agent and claiming that he was the son of a Russian Jew, Alexander Helphand-Parvus, who had masterminded Lenin’s return from Swiss exile at the time of the Revolution. Klop’s contacts duly reported this to MI5 and it is clear from the copious files on Rostin that its officers were also monitoring Klop’s activities during this period. Rostin, who had money and girlfriend problems, transferred soon after to the United States and MI5 took some pleasure in warning the FBI about his unsavoury activities.