by John Preston
‘At the end of the afternoon we said, “Thank you very much. We hope you had a nice time.”
‘The children said, “Yes, yes, but we’re very disappointed.”
‘Christine and I looked at each other. “Oh dear, what happened?” we asked.
“You’re not wearing tiaras.”
‘We were completely nonplussed. At first we couldn’t work out what they were talking about. Then we realized that must be how people thought we lived.’
At around the same time, a mother came to the house to pick up her daughter, who was playing with Christine. ‘The doorbell rang and I opened the door. There was this woman and with her she had another daughter – a little girl of about six. What made the most impression on me was the expression on this little girl’s face as she stared through the door. It was literally as if she was green with envy. I’ve never forgotten it.’
The little girl might have been less envious if she’d known what life inside Headington Hill Hall was like. Always a draconian father, Maxwell became an even harsher disciplinarian after Michael’s crash – as if setting more rigid boundaries might minimize the danger of any other tragedies befalling them.
‘He did have a very warm playful side to him,’ Ian Maxwell recalls. ‘Whenever he would go abroad he would bring us back wonderful presents. I remember when we were little, he would turn all the lights out, get down on all fours and pretend to be a wolf chasing us around. At the same time he was also a very emotionally remote, rather disapproving man. I always felt I had to court his approval. You could never do small talk with the old man. Either something was of consequence or it wasn’t. On the whole my mother protected us from him; she shielded us from his displeasure or his disappointment. But I think all of us were scared of his anger – of the way he could turn at any moment.’
Mealtimes were a particular trial. As they sat around the dining room table, each child in turn would be assigned a topic and expected to talk on it for several minutes. At the end Maxwell would offer his verdict on their performance. ‘We’d have to talk on things like “What are the most important things that have happened this year, and what are our predictions for next year on both the global and the personal level?” He always expected us to make speeches. If there was a birthday, everyone had to make a speech. If a professor came to lunch, the same thing would happen.’
As far as Isabel Maxwell was concerned, watching the direction of her father’s gaze as it passed around the table was like following a lighthouse beam. ‘I used to dread it stopping at me. Then he would ask some question and I’d go, stutter, stutter, stutter, and try to give him the answer I thought he needed. It would be terrifying. I remember once Ian brought a friend of his home from school and Dad asked him some question. The boy went, “Well, um . . .” And Dad says, “Um? That’s mental laziness. Start again.” The boy tried to speak, but he just couldn’t. It was excruciating; he probably became a damaged person for the rest of his life.’
One thing that roused Maxwell to an even greater pitch of fury was any suggestion of slacking at school. ‘We lived in mortal fear if we got a bad mark. Then he would say in front of everyone else, “What the hell happened to you? You’re so obviously lazy and careless. Where did it all go wrong?”’
Nor were these the only consequences. ‘Dad always beat us if we’d been lazy or inattentive,’ remembers Ian. ‘Or if we’d lied – that was another beating offence. He would beat us with a belt – girls as well as boys – and then afterwards you would have to write him a letter saying how you were going to be different in future.’
Constantly, Maxwell drove his children towards self-improvement. If they ever wanted an example to aspire to, he would hold up his mother as a beacon of industriousness, self-sacrifice and almost everything else. Before they sat exams, they were always given a mnemonic to commit to memory – WWHW. It stood for What? Why? How? Where? Armed with this formula, Maxwell believed, they would be able to answer any question they were set.
Like the self-made Jay Gatsby, the central character in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, he had a mania for compiling ‘to do’ lists. These, he insisted, would lend both structure and meaning to their lives. All of them – including Betty – had to pay special attention to what he referred to as ‘The Three Cs’: Consideration, Concentration, Conciseness. It made no difference that Maxwell’s own powers of consideration were shaky in the extreme – as was his grasp of conciseness. Whenever he felt Betty was being long-winded, he would bellow, ‘Next!’ Later, she pointedly added a fourth C to the list: Courtesy.
Before Philip, then aged sixteen, went on a trip to the States, Maxwell wrote him what even by his standards was an unusually formal letter: ‘You may find it helpful for me to set out the aim and purpose of your visit.’ Five single-spaced, closely typed pages followed. Under the section headed ‘Gaining Experience And Having A Good Time’, they included the advice: ‘You must plan meticulously your days and your entire programme. This is not only because good planning means good discipline but so that you can get the most out of the time available . . .’
This was followed by another section titled ‘How To Make Friends Amongst Young And Old’ – something that was best accomplished ‘By being genuinely interested in people, their problems and experiences; by avoiding selfish and provocative acts and postures; by being considerate and helpful as well as being interested in one’s conversation; by being clean and well turned out.’
But there was one subject that was scarcely ever discussed around the dinner table, or anywhere else. All the time Michael was lying unconscious in his hospital bed just half a mile away. ‘Sometimes Philip would try to bring it up, but I think it was just too painful for my father to go there,’ Ian remembers. ‘He was haunted by it. Haunted that he couldn’t do anything about it. Haunted that he couldn’t bring his son back.’
Then, on 27 January 1968, almost exactly seven years after his car crash, Michael Maxwell died of meningitis. He was twenty-one. ‘For seven long years I had sat at his bedside,’ Betty wrote. ‘Hoping and praying at first that he would recover consciousness, and then gradually accepting that his brain had been damaged beyond any reasonable recovery. I would sit there beside my sleeping prince, remembering the bright, exceptionally gifted and considerate child who had now grown into manhood without knowing it.’
As she sat by Michael’s bed, Betty had often wondered whether any part of him still existed – and might continue to exist. ‘Since Michael’s brain was no longer with him or with us, where was it? In limbo? It was the greatest challenge yet to my faith and I had no one to help me.’
Michael’s funeral was held at the local Anglican church, St Andrew’s in Headington. Afterwards the family gathered in Maxwell’s and Betty’s bedroom at Headington Hill Hall. ‘I think he wanted us all to share our memories of Michael,’ Ian recalls. ‘But he couldn’t; he just burst into tears. We were all overcome, both by the funeral and by the sight of this big alpha male being so distressed. I’d never seen him like that before and it made a huge impression on me.’
Somewhere in the back of Maxwell’s mind must have been the thought that history was repeating itself in the cruellest possible way. He had set out to re-create the family he had lost by having nine children, just as his parents had done. Two of his siblings had died in childhood, leaving him with six brothers and sisters. Now the Maxwells were also left with seven children.
Betty organized both Michael’s funeral and the erection of his gravestone in the churchyard, on which she had inscribed his name and dates, and, in a veiled reference to Maxwell’s Judaism, a quote from St John’s Gospel: ‘In my father’s house are many mansions.’
7.
The Man Who Gets Things Done
One evening, shortly before he left their house in Esher to move into Headington Hill Hall, Maxwell went to supper with their neighbours, a family called Davie. Their son, Jonathan, then a boy, remembers how his father and Maxwell used to play tennis together,
something they continued to do despite his father being convinced that Maxwell cheated on a regular basis.
‘After we’d finished eating, Bob stood in front of the fireplace with a glass of wine in one hand and a cigar in the other. He had an important announcement to make, he told us.’
The Davies waited expectantly.
Maxwell turned to Jonathan’s father. And then, in the same solemn tones as before, he said, ‘Dick, I want you to be the first person to know that I’ve decided to become Prime Minister.’
On 3 November 1964, Robert Maxwell, the newly elected Labour Member of Parliament for Buckingham, stood up to make his maiden speech in the House of Commons. Like all venerable institutions, the Commons has its own particular way of doing things. Traditionally, newly elected MPs are expected to wait several weeks, even months, before making their maiden speech. They are also advised to keep it short and stick to a single subject.
This, however, was not one of those occasions. To general astonishment, Maxwell gave his maiden speech on the first day of the new parliament – something that had never been done before. ‘It is with a great sense of humility that I rise to speak here for the first time,’ he began. But humility didn’t stop him from talking at length on a wide variety of topics, including working conditions in the brick industry – very poor – and provisions for sewage disposal in his constituency – even worse.
A month later, the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, was due to give an important speech on foreign policy in which he planned to announce that the new Soviet Premier, Alexei Kosygin, would be visiting the UK early in the new year. Before Wilson had a chance to speak, Maxwell once again rose to his feet. MPs from both sides of the House shouted at him to shut up. Maxwell ignored them. He spent the next nineteen minutes giving an exhaustive analysis of the shortcomings of the Foreign Office: ‘I am extremely disturbed that it is not implementing speedily or energetically enough, recommendations relating to the need for our diplomats to do a great deal more to promote British exports,’ he declared.
In a desperate attempt to make Maxwell sit down, his fellow Labour MPs began tugging at his jacket, but to no avail. Meanwhile, Wilson sat there glowering. By the time Maxwell wound up, it was too late for either of the London evening papers to carry details of the Prime Minister’s speech. That evening Richard Crossman, Labour’s Minister of Housing and Local Government, described what had happened in his diary: ‘It was absolutely disastrous,’ he began.
Maxwell would always claim that he became a Labour MP purely through conviction, that the combination of his mother’s influence and his loathing for the British Establishment made him a natural socialist. When he was interviewed by the selection committee of the Buckingham Labour Party, he told them, ‘I come from a very humble farm-labouring family and would rather cut off my arm than betray my class.’
But once again there was rather more to it than that. After the Davie family had recovered from their shock at being told that Maxwell intended becoming Prime Minister, Jonathan’s father, Dick, asked him a question. ‘My father said, “I’m very flattered to be the first person to know that, Bob, but do you mind my asking which party you are going to be supporting?”
‘Bob said, “Well, of course I’m Conservative, but I’m not a member of the Establishment, so I’ve got to become Labour.”’
In the 1959 General Election, ‘Captain Robert Maxwell’ as he was called on the ballot paper – unlike other enlisted soldiers he’d clung doggedly on to his wartime rank – was narrowly beaten by the Conservative candidate, Sir Frank Markham. Throughout the campaign, Markham never missed an opportunity to remind people about Maxwell’s origins, telling them the Labour Party hadn’t been able to find a candidate in the whole country, let alone Buckingham: ‘They had to go all the way to Czechoslovakia!’ After conceding defeat, Maxwell refused to shake Markham’s hand. Instead, he loosed off a final message to his supporters: ‘Long live socialism and victory!’
Five years later, in October 1964, he tried again. This time he dropped the ‘Captain’ in case it smacked of elitism. There were other changes too. Normally he was driven around in a maroon Rolls-Royce by his chauffeur, Brian Moss. But after giving the matter some thought, Maxwell decided this too sent out the wrong message; perhaps a less flashy form of transport might be more fitting.
‘I used to drive him down in the Rolls from London,’ Moss recalls. ‘And then another driver would meet us on the Buckinghamshire border in an old Rover.’
Midway though the campaign, Maxwell swopped the Rover for an equally ancient Land Rover. In a largely rural constituency this seemed sure to boost his man-of-the-people credentials – even if Maxwell’s Land Rover had been fitted out with a desk and specially cushioned seats, as well as a shag-pile carpet. Occasionally, he would drive himself, but this brought hazards of its own. Just before election day, Maxwell was arrested by the police after another driver – a man called Edward Cole – spotted his Rolls-Royce weaving back and forth across the road.
At the time, Maxwell was on his way to Buckinghamshire, where his Land Rover and chauffeur were waiting at the county line. ‘He swerved and then bent over to his left,’ testified Cole when the case came to court. ‘For a few seconds I didn’t see him at all, then he got up again and put his left hand to his face.’ In his hand was what appeared to be a small black box.
‘Maxwell,’ Cole told the magistrate in an appalled voice, ‘had been shaving while he was driving.’ At the time he was estimated to have been travelling at around 90 mph.
However, it wasn’t so much Maxwell’s car, or his driving habits, that concerned people so much as his background. Whenever he gave a speech, hecklers would bellow out the same old refrain: ‘You’re a bloody foreigner!’ Maxwell’s reply never varied either: ‘If I am a foreigner, so is the Duke of Edinburgh,’ he told them. ‘He too was born abroad, but from what I can tell he seems to be quite popular.’ Then, in a voice tremulous with indignation, would come the knockout blow: ‘I chose this country. Did you?’
By the time Maxwell been found guilty of dangerous driving and fined £25, he had become the new MP for Buckingham – winning the seat by a margin of 1481 votes, a swing of 3.3 per cent. Among the first to offer their congratulations when he arrived at the House of Commons was the Jewish Chronicle. They called to let him know how delighted they were to have another Jewish MP.
‘I’m not Jewish,’ Maxwell told them, and put the phone down.
As he soon proved, his maiden speech was just the beginning; there was a lot more where that had come from. All this was too much for the Conservative MP Edward Du Cann. Infuriated by the new MP’s bombast, he complained, ‘I have never heard anybody make so many speeches as he has in the last two days.’
Nor was Du Cann the only one feeling the strain. Trying to find an explanation for Maxwell’s behaviour, Richard Crossman put it down to the thickness of his skin. ‘I don’t suppose there’s anybody who is less aware of the impression he creates,’ he wrote, ‘and it’s no good trying to warn him. He wants to shine.’ Perhaps the sharpest observation of all came from a member of the Buckingham Labour Party: ‘What you have to understand is that Captain Maxwell needs to be needed.’
Having become an MP, Maxwell had reclaimed his rank: from now on, he would always be ‘Captain Maxwell MC’. Yet it would take more than a Military Cross to save Maxwell from ridicule. ‘Who is the biggest gasbag in the Commons?’ asked the Sunday Express’s ‘Crossbencher’ columnist. ‘Who else but handsome, debonair, 41-year-old publisher Robert Maxwell. Seldom a speech is made by anyone else without Captain Maxwell popping in to interrupt. After only four weeks in Parliament already he is becoming one of its biggest bores.’
But still: Maxwell ploughed on, heedless of convention, politesse or people tugging at his jacket. Over 700 years Parliament had witnessed blowhards of every persuasion, yet no one quite like him had ever been seen, or heard, before. As Harold Wilson sat waiting for a chance to deliver a speech of his own, he wh
iled away the time by keeping a tally of how often Maxwell stood up to speak. In the course of less than ten months, it came to more than 200.
Others, though, were very taken with the new arrival. The Conservative MP Sir Gerald Nabarro, an exuberantly mustachioed hanger-and-flogger, thought Maxwell set an admirable example. What impressed him most of all was the size of his family. Writing in his News of the World column, Nabarro prophesied that Edward Heath, recently elected leader of the Conservative Party, would be the first unmarried occupant of 10 Downing Street since Arthur Balfour sixty years earlier.
While Heath’s sexual orientation has long been a source of speculation, few bachelors have ever been quite as confirmed as he was. None the less, Nabarro was hopeful that even now he might find a suitable match: ‘Personally, to make the man and image complete, I would like him to carry a beautiful bride over the threshold to share his occupancy with him. Many well-known politicians are notably philoprogenitive. For example Mr Robert Maxwell (Labour Buckingham) has four sons and four daughters. Of course, any connection between the size of family and party political activities is entirely circumstantial. But no politician is complete without vigorous progeny and a happy home life.’
Helped by Betty, Maxwell proved to be a hard-working and conscientious MP. In the 1966 General Election, he was re-elected with an increased majority – his election slogan was ‘The Man Who Gets Things Done’. Taking him at his word, his fellow MPs decided to hand him a notoriously poisoned chalice.
Shortly after the General Election, Maxwell was appointed chairman of the House of Commons Catering Committee. At the time the catering arrangements in the House of Commons were a shambles. Whatever their political leanings, MPs all felt able to agree on one thing: the food was disgusting. There was also remarkably little of it. As much as a third of the catering supplies, it was estimated, were being stolen by the staff.