At a dinner in Oriel in October 1981 Trevor-Roper was presented with the Festschrift in his honour, History and Imagination. During the speeches his successor as Regius Professor, the military historian Michael Howard (b. 1922), who had been taught by him as an undergraduate, explained that the subject of his own contribution to the volume, ‘Empire, Race and War in Pre-1914 Britain’, had been a second choice. Originally he had written an account of the exploits of the double agent in the Second World War, ‘Garbo’. Having used restricted sources, Howard had been obliged to seek clearance to publish the essay, even though Garbo’s activities had already been revealed in print more than once.To his astonishment permission was refused, and he was even asked if he had used a typist not on the approved list. Howard gave a jocular description of the episode before presenting Trevor-Roper with a bound copy of it, labelled ‘Confidential Annexe. Top Secret Ultra’.
Suddenly the Chancellor, Harold Macmillan, rose from his chair. In tremulous indignation he declared that he had never in his life heard so shocking a speech. Howard’s frivolity, he continued, was characteristic of a deplorable irrresponsibility in current attitudes to security matters. ‘We are living’, Macmillan warned the guests, ‘in a period of peril comparable to that of the 1930s.’ Howard, who was taken aback by the old man’s vehemence, confided to Trevor-Roper that Margaret Thatcher had told him of her regret that the Ultra secret had been published. She had been got at, Howard inferred, by ‘new morons’ in the intellgience services, who in panic after the Blunt affair were resisting disclosures of any kind.
Peterhouse, Cambridge
My dear Michael
I am deeply indebted to you for your splendid essay on Garbo,1 which I shall treasure as a bibliographical rarity of great value; but I am also doubly indebted, because the absurd veto of our old friends has given me two essays from you, and I have now read the second also.2 It too is a marvellous work, which I have read with great pleasure and instruction. I have often been impressed by the disagreeably imperialist, racial and anti-semitic utterances of our compatriots in the late Victorian and Edwardian period, and, particularly, by the fact that such utterances were evidently quite un-self-conscious and normal. Winston Churchill, for instance, in his early letters; or the private correspondence of respectable officials in China, which became familiar to me when I was working on Sir E. Backhouse; or perhaps above all, the anti-semitic poems or allusions of Hilaire Belloc. You have put all these into a coherent context and drawn out their implications (and limits). I found your essay most interesting; and although, of course, I regret that Garbo was suppressed, I rejoice that, in consequence of that suppression (from which I, at least, have not suffered), I have been able to read a second essay by you. Many, many thanks.
I am still very perplexed by the extraordinary volte face of our Old Friends1 over your book2 (and that essay). Clearly they are lunatics. I consulted Dick White about the position, and he confirms that they have retreated into idiot secrecy. It looks as if the period in which reason prevailed was limited to the period when those services were dominated by the ‘amateurs’ of the War and that now that those amateurs have, by effluxion of time, retired, we are back in the days of the hopeless old professionals, the Menzies, Vivians and Cowgills3 redivivi,4 who are taking their vicarious revenge. I can see it all: for a whole generation the professionals have hated us, and yet also feared us because we were, in Graham Greene’s phrase, of the ‘untorturable class’:5 academics, public figures of one kind or another; therefore we could not be silenced or disciplined. But now our class is almost extinct, and the new heads of those Services have no personal ties with us; so they can close their empire over their docile subjects. I find this very depressing, for my opinion is that even the best of the grandees of that world—even those who were most exposed to the outer world, owing to the war—were gradually reduced to conformity with the persecution-mania of all Secret Services: how much more so those who were never ventilated!
I am thinking of republishing my little book on The Philby Affair, with (if you agree) an Epistle Dedicatory to you.6 Would you allow that? I am truly shocked by the crabbed folly of the security services in banning your work, and would like to refer to it, if I could do so without embarrassing you. I am shocked also by our dear P.M.’s acquiescence in their folly. I suppose they said to her, ‘Look! see what has happened as a result of your candour about Blunt! We now have these allegations about Hollis.1 Please keep your mouth shut in future, or the whole Service will be demoralised …’ My own view is that she ought not to have been so candid about Blunt then, and ought to have been firmer against the Security Services now. But I am not, alas, her adviser.
I read, and entirely agreed with, your letter to The Times.2 Do keep on in this course!
yours ever
Hugh
PS. Must I read Benjamin Kidd?3