Wednesday, 15 December
When I arrived back from China I thought, at first, that I had done with it: with it and with SACU. The emotional strain, the frustration, of my visit to that land of bigots and parrots was a guarantee against my return to it, and what, I asked myself, was the purpose of SACU? To us – or rather, to me – it seemed clear enough, when in China, that to the Chinese at least SACU has no purpose except in so far as it might be converted into a communist front organisation, and that the most we could do, if we had the time and the energy to do it, was to prevent this from happening and to keep the society in being until such time as the Chinese themselves, having outlived their Stalinist period, were willing to accept it on other terms. But would the Chinese even consider co-operating with it in the meantime? Would they not rather, in that case, seeing that it was not totally theirs, drop all interest in it and, by ignoring it, cause it to die? This indeed did seem the most probable development; and that being so, I expected gradually to drop out of a dying organisation.
However, I said to myself, I shall not drop out without testifying to the truth. The Sunday Times had telephoned to me on 18th Sept and had caught me on the airport at Copenhagen. They had asked me to write for them on my return. At that time I had given no promises. I was to be the guest of the Chinese government. Perhaps their hospitality would inhibit me from writing freely. However, after a week or so in China, I revised my view. The Chinese government, I decided, was not treating me as a guest. It is true, it was paying my expenses. But I was giving up three weeks of my time. I was submitting to all the discomforts of distant travel. I was doing this not because the Chinese government was paying the cost of my dislocation but because it had offered to show me whatever I wanted to see in China. This it had not done. It had merely imprisoned me in a group of low-grade morons, prevented me from meeting intelligent persons, and subjected me to continuous small-talk worthy of a charladies’ tea-party. For this I felt no sense of obligation. So I changed my mind, dropped my reservations, and decided to write an account of China for the Sunday Times.
After my return I wrote it with great care. I sought to express the full horror of Chinese propaganda and Chinese conformism. But at the same time I sought to show that once one had got past that barrage of propaganda, once one had seen through the language of conformism, there was a positive achievement which, at least, had to be respected. And I added that, in my opinion, China was opportunist but not, or at least not yet, aggressive. The American fears of a Chinese conquest of the world seemed to me, at present, absurd.
Having written this article and sent it to Frank Giles,1 I went up to London to report to 24 Warren Street.2 But before going there, I called on Richard Thistlethwaite.3 He gave me some interesting details about SACU. Then Dick White came to lunch at the Savile.4 We had a merry old talk, and after lunch he offered to take me to my meeting. But I thought that to arrive at the HQ of a communist front-organisation in the limousine of the Chief of the Secret Service might be indulging my sense of irony too far; so I declined, and took a taxi instead. At 2.30 I reported, and gave my account to Joan Robinson5 and Derek Bryan. It was a brief factual account; and at the end of it I confirmed that I would speak, together with Mary Adams, Robert Bolt and Ernie Roberts, at the public meeting in Church House, Westminster, on 16 Nov. Joan Robinson suggested that I should emphasise the ‘positive’ rather than the ‘negative’ side of the visit: in other words, that I should flatter the Chinese.
That was 28th Oct. Three days later the Sunday Times published my article. It dominated the ‘Week-End Review’; but when I saw it, my heart sank. A huge headline had been imposed on it, ‘The Sick Mind of China’. Of course, I said to myself, they will be furious – and rightly. Such a title bore no relation to the content of my article. It was unjust and offensive. I wrote at once to Frank Giles to protest. But of course it could do no good. It was too late. There was nothing for it but to await the reactions, knowing that those reactions would be more violent than they need be thanks to a headline which I could not defend and against which my protest would be in vain.
My forebodings were correct. The reaction was violent. However, I resolved to stand firm. My resolution was fortified by discoveries which I kept making about SACU and its real character, and the real character of its guiding spirit, Derek Bryan.
The first thing that I discovered concerned the circumstances in which SACU was founded. It seems that originally there had been a China Friendship Society which was run, more or less openly, by the communist party. But when the Russians and the Chinese parted company, the pro-Russian faction packed the general meeting and voted the pro-Chinese faction out. The pro-Chinese faction there upon abandoned an anyway discredited body and set up a new cover-organisation, SACU. They also run another society, the China Policy Group, which publishes a pamphlet, The China Broadsheet. This pamphlet is manufactured by Bryan, in his house in Holden Road, Finchley; but since SACU was founded, the theoretical (though not the real) address of the office has been changed, lest the office of SACU be blown by its apparent identity.
For Bryan, it now appears – and on him I now have an excellent source in Valerie Pearl,6 who herself lives in Holden Road and knows him well, having herself (unless I am gravely mistaken) a Marxist if not a communist past – whatever he may appear to be in metropolitan London, in Finchley is a hard communist, or at least a crypto-communist. I once said to Peter Swann,7 of the Ashmolean, who like me is a member of the council of management of SACU, that Bryan had the shifty look of a crypto; but he thought he was only permanently worried by having to run so chaotic an organisation as SACU. Now, however, I feel certain. SACU is indeed run by him – by him and Joan Robinson is my guess – but it is not quite so chaotic as it seems: it is dedicated, not indeed to communism but to Chinese communism. For Bryan, like Needham, as it seems to me, has reached his political views through his sinophil views: both are communists, or communisants, because they are sinophils, not sinophils because they are communist. Ernie Roberts, of course, is the other way round.
Nor is this all. In the days after my visit to London, I studied carefully the structure of the society and I noticed certain interesting little facts. The Council of Management, on which I sit, consists largely of harmless public figures. There are three MPs, Dame Joan Vickers,8 Jeremy Thorpe9 and Philip Noel-Baker.10 There are grave academic figures: Sir Gordon Sutherland, Master of Emmanuel College, who is Hon Treasurer;11 Pulleyblank, the Professor of Chinese at Cambridge;12 Nicholas Kurti, reader in physics at Oxford;13 Peter Swann, and myself; and there are others. But the Council of Management meets only once a quarter. More regular meetings are held by the General Purposes Committees, sitting under the sinister chairmanship of our old double-thinking friend Ernie Roberts. Some of the members of this committee are harmless members of the Council of Management – as, for instance, our old feather-headed friend Mary Adams. But there are some members of the G.P. committee who nestle only in that protective shade. They are Roland Berger, who visited our bedrooms on our last night in China and who, next day, I have now discovered, sent a telegram to SACU advising that the public meeting fixed for 16 Nov be cancelled, lest our accounts should do more harm than good, and three other dim creatures, Perry,14 Ash15 and Timberlake.16 All these, I now find, are ‘hard’ communists; and Berger is the director, and Perry and Timberlake are members, of BCPIT – the British Committee for the Promotion of International Trade: an organisation set up under communist inspiration for trade with communist countries.17 Joan Robinson, I understand, is closely connected with it. It has been proscribed by the Labour Party and denounced in Parliament as a communist body.18 There are some reasons to suspect that it may be the real paymaster of SACU.
After making these discoveries, I started looking more critically than before at the various papers I had received as a member of the Council of Management. I found that, in June, a ‘budget’ had been presented. It was an extraordinary document. For the twelve months ending in April 1966 the estimated budget was some £9000. Of this no less than £4250 was expected to come in from a ‘general appeal’ urbi et orbi,19 which however had never been launched, and another £1500 was to come from ‘advertisements’. I looked through SACU News, which incidentally is edited by Mrs Berger,20 and found no sign of any advertisements. So £5750 out of £9000 – nearly 2/3 of the whole budget – was ascribed to fictitious sources. I looked further; and then I found an interesting remark. Mrs Robinson, introducing the Budget, was recorded in the Minutes as saying that if the result of the Appeal should fall short of the expected amount, ‘certain business firms and individuals’ (unnamed) had volunteered to stump up. I felt that I could name the firms (or rather the firm) and the individuals. It seemed likely that SACU was secretly financed by BCPIT.
Soon after coming to these conclusions, I had a letter from Robert Bolt. He had seen Bryan and he now wrote to warn me of the impending party line. ‘I think’, he wrote, ‘that his argument is going to be that our closely restricted tour was the consequence of your “hostility” which the Chinese somehow “sensed” – which is ridiculous, since you weren’t hostile till made so by their treatment of us, and indeed aren’t simply hostile now …’ I soon discovered that his forecast was quite correct. Joan Robinson, in a letter to the Sunday Times, made precisely this point (‘it was wonderfully funny’, Valerie Pearl wrote to me, ‘to see the stage army moving into action in the Sunday Times’), and afterwards Needham made it in correspondence with me. But I am moving too fast. I must pause on the great day, 16 Nov, the day on which we were all (since Berger’s telegram had failed to stop it) to make our report to the faithful in Church House, Westminster.
By that day, my view of SACU was pretty clear. I saw it as a communist ‘front organisation’ managed, in effect, by a triumvirate of Berger, Joan Robinson and Bryan, using the Council of Management as a façade and actually operating through the General Purposes Committee, where the infamous Ernie Roberts could be trusted, as chairman, to follow the lead of Berger, Perry, Ash, Timberlake. I suspected that the finances of the society were guaranteed by BCPIT – whether from the profits of trade or from a concealed Chinese subsidy was not yet clear. And I had heard from Nicholas Kurti that Sir Gordon Sutherland, who is a friend of his, was furious because the ‘budget’ had been drawn up and accepted without reference to him, the Hon. Treasurer. I therefore decided, before the public meeting, to check a few facts, and for this purpose I called, in the morning, at 24 Warren Street and put some questions to Bryan.
First, I asked about the General Appeal. This, replied Bryan, had not yet been launched. When would it be launched? I asked. He told me that a meeting was to be held with ‘the Hon. Treasurer, Sir Gordon Sutherland’; but the meeting had not yet been held and clearly no appeal could be launched this year. The prospect that such an appeal would raise £4250 by April 1966 seemed to me remote. Then I asked him how it was that a telegram of congratulation had been sent to the Chinese People’s Association for Foreign Cultural Contacts on National Day, 1 Oct, in the name of the Council of Management – for this had been reported in Mrs Berger’s SACU News. He looked furtive and said that the Council of Management had voted it. I drew his attention to the Minutes which made no reference to any such proposal. (In fact it was a proposal by the General Purposes Cttee, against which Kurti had protested in writing). Then I asked to see the Constitution, of which he produced the draft (we are to vote on it at the next Council meeting). I noticed that it contained no reference to the General Purposes Cttee. So I asked whether I was right to assume that the GP Cttee was a sub-committee of the Council of Management. He agreed. Then ought not the Council, I asked, to receive minutes of his [sic] meetings? He agreed that it ought. Finally, I asked to see the Library. He was a little put out of this and apologised for its vestigial character. It was in fact a room stacked with Chinese government propaganda – those same anti-Russian pamphlets which I had seen in every Chinese hotel – and nothing else. After this I left to give a somewhat uninhibited talk on China at Chatham House.21 Then I went to the Garrick Club22 and wrote to Sir Gordon Sutherland to draw his attention to certain financial facts and speculations. At 4.0 p.m. Robert Bolt came there to tea and we planned the next move.
Bryan had asked us to meet in Church House an hour before starting-time. I had been prepared to come half an hour early and could not adjust my programme at the last minute; for I had promised to call on Princess Coocoola of Sikkim at 6.0.23 So I had asked Bryan what was the preliminary business. ‘To fix the order of speakers’, he had replied. ‘Oh, in that case it is easy’, I had said: ‘my vote is for alphabetical order – always the best and least invidious.’ I had deduced that he had not liked this (it would in fact give the last word to me), but I had been firm. Now I told Bolt that I was convinced that the Administration would want Ernie Roberts to speak last. He agreed that we should insist on the alphabet, and promised to hold out until I arrived.
In due course I arrived. ‘Coocoola had given me champagne and I was feeling in confident mood; but I was determined to be prudent and moderate. I found Bryan and Mrs Robinson in the committee room, together with the three speakers to whom I came as a fourth, and K. W. Wedderburn,24 who was to be our chairman. Also there was Berger, who of course had no locus standi; but as in Pekin, he was auch dabei.25 The argument about order of speaking was still going on. Bolt was being firm for the alphabet; Mary Adams preferred the alphabet; I added my voice to theirs; and Wedderburn, as chairman, voted with the majority. But Ernie Roberts, in his soapy voice, declared that he had good (but apparently unavowable) reasons to speak last, and Joan Robinson, stating that ‘the alphabet is a very artificial thing’, supported him, and Berger supported her. We would not yield. Thereupon Joan Robinson tried a fast one. ‘Well’, she said confidently, ‘it seems clear that the general view is that Mr. Roberts should speak last’. However, she did not get away with it. We declined to agree. In despair, Berger intervened en maître.26 He snapped that Roberts must speak last. Still we, being the majority, and the parties concerned, would not yield. Meanwhile it was 7.30 and the faithful were waiting in the hall. We could not disagree for ever. Finally, the deadlock had to be resolved by casting of lots. When we went in, the order of speaking was, Mrs Adams, myself, Roberts, Bolt. This proved a very good order. I had anyway resolved to be brief and unprovocative. Ernie Roberts was corrupt and his speech was mere feeble propaganda. Bolt, in the closing speech, was excellent and said all that I would have said as well as exposing Ernie’s tricks. But the real events of the evening were not the set speeches: they were the noises from the floor.
From the beginning the audience had shown its mood. Every time that my name was mentioned – and it was mentioned pretty often – there were boos and hisses, and the boos seemed to get louder, and the hisses shriller as the evening wore on. Xandra, who had rashly come to the meeting, found herself sitting in the middle of the anti-Trevor-Roper claque and almost had to join in the boos and hisses in order not to be lynched by her neighbours as a blackleg. Even the moderation of my own speech did me no good: I noticed that Joan Robinson, who sat next to me, did not even simulate a perfunctory clap when I sat down. In question-time the anti-Trevor-Roper parts became even more vocal, especially since Bolt defended me against gross misrepresentation. Finally, a crisis was precipitated by my most outspoken enemy, Joan Robinson.
It began at 9.55 – the chairman having stated that the meeting must be over by 10.0. Joan Robinson, having chosen her moment well, rose to her feet and read a letter from Needham the gist of which was to deplore my article and indeed me. I did not mind this. I felt that I had expressed my views in the Sunday Times, publicly, and he had every right to reply publicly. His language was civil. But when Joan Robinson had finished reading, a man rose in the hall and demanded to know how I contrived to remain a member of SACU after writing such an article. It seemed to me that if anyone was to answer such a question, it was I; but before I could answer, Joan Robinson was on her feet. On behalf of all those present, and all members of the society, and 650 million Chinese, she publicly apologised for ‘Professor Trevor-Roper’s bad manners’: bad manners, I understood her to mean, in criticising the Chinese.
I was furious. I at once said to Wedderburn, aloud, that it looked as if the meeting was to end on an offensive personal note, and I requested him to suspend the closure. He at once agreed. Meanwhile pandemonium broke out in the hall. Hitherto there had been an anti-T-R group but no pro-T-R group. Now the pro-T-R group suddenly revealed itself, clamouring to be heard. I waited for the chairman to allow someone to speak but he firmly forbade all speech from the floor. I had not intended to speak – I was still clinging to the vestiges of my carefully maintained moderation. But now there seemed to be no alternative. I had demanded an extension. The extension had been granted. The chairman forbade anyone else to speak. So what could I do but fill the gap? As I rose to my feet, I savoured the delicious irony of it. Mrs Robinson had fought tooth-and-nail to prevent me from having the last word. Now, by her own action, she had forced me to have the last word. Obviously, I said to myself, I must seize the opportunity turns suddenly thrust upon me …
At that moment I felt the fatal symptom. First the veins opened like sluices. Then a sudden refreshing flush of blood coursed through them. I felt the ebullition of Coocoola’s champagne. Then came that brisk snap near the aorta; and after that I knew nothing, or perhaps I merely cared for nothing. All I could afterwards remember was the sensation of words rolling out of my month, loud, unambiguous and infuriating. What they were, I do not know. When I sat down, the whole place was in uproar. Several people came up and congratulated me. Among them were Stephen King-Hall27 and Isaac Deutscher28 – an enjoyable pair. A reporter from the Manchester Guardian asked me if I would now resign from the society.29 I replied: ‘never resign; always wait till you’re kicked out’. Meanwhile the table covered with Chinese propagandist literature was deserted. The begging-bowl received no alms. No one joined the society. And Xandra and I escaped by taxi to the Savoy Grill for a late dinner. Robert Bolt came separately to join us: we had agreed that we should not go away together, lest any suspect collusion.
For the next fortnight the repercussions rolled in. Mrs Berger denounced me in SACU News. In the General Purposes Committee, Ash demanded my expulsion. From the faithful in their local cells the same demand poured in. But I knew I was safe. Bryan admitted to Valerie Pearl that, for all my crimes, I would do more good than harm inside the Society – which seemed perhaps a sinister observation; and Mrs Robinson wrote me a postcard which did not indeed offer a word of apology for her onslaught, but firmly commanded me to stay. I replied with an indecent sea-side postcard, telling her that I had received so many fan-letters that I was thinking not only of staying but also of running against Ernie Roberts for the chairmanship of the General Purposes Cttee. And I wrote a longer and graver missive to Needham explaining my position and standing firmly in it.
The truth is, I can’t help liking Joan Robinson. She is, or seems to me to be, a kind of romantic anarchist, a rebel against authority, perhaps against her parents’ world (she is the daughter of General Sir Frederick Maurice:30 compare Michael McCreery).31 I infinitely prefer her to Bryan: Bryan who, within a fortnight, was telling Valerie Pearl that, though an enemy of the People, as a matter of fact I was quite right, and who was denouncing, as the real enemy, his old ally Ernie Roberts not for being but for so obviously seeming to be a twister! Bryan, Valerie says, is ‘a very able politician.’
In the month which followed the famous meeting, information, or indications, continued to come in to improve my knowledge, or idea, of SACU. I was involved in correspondence with Needham, with Sutherland, with Kurti. Needham took up the argument long ago adumbrated by Bryan and destroyed in advance by Bolt, viz: that I had been ‘hostile’ to the Chinese from the start. He announced that he would read my letter and his answer to the Council of Management on 13th December. I replied that my letter was personal to him and was not to be divulged. Sutherland told me that he had resigned long ago as Treasurer – in writing to Bryan on 28 June. (And yet on 16 Nov. Bryan was still pretending to me that Sutherland was Treasurer, and nothing had been said at the meeting of the Council of Management on 18 Sept!). Kurti gave me further evidence of Bryan’s duplicity. Thereupon I wrote to Bryan and gave notice that, at the meeting of the Council of Management on 13 Dec., I wished to raise three subjects: our visit to China, finance and the constitution. I was determined either to expose, or to bring to order, the finances and the General Purposes Committee. In order to do this, I wrote also to Jeremy Thorpe, and when he proved an ally, I authorised him to show my letters to Dame Joan Vickers.
While thus preparing for battle, I suddenly learned that a branch of SACU was being founded in Oxford. A meeting had been held in Norham Gardens, to which I had not been invited. The next step was a lecture with slides, by a Dutch medical couple called de Haas,32 on Friday 3 Dec. in Nuffield College. I decided to go, in order to see what was afoot. The organisation was in the hands of Raymond Dawson,33 university reader in Chinese, and it seemed that Bryan, by-passing the three Oxford members of the Council of Management (Kurti, Swann and myself), had got in touch with him direct. He afterwards told Valerie Pearl that Dawson was an excellent man, an ally against Trevor-Roper in Oxford.
The lecture by the Ehepaar34 de Haas was pathetic. They had spent three weeks in China visiting hospitals. They were entirely uncritical and simply repeated the well-worn propaganda themes.35 I don’t think they made any converts. The audience consisted mainly of middle-aged Oxford citizens. As the lecture had been on the last Friday of term, there were practically no undergraduates, and I don’t think that the silver-collection yielded much. Next day I got a letter from Dawson. He apologised for the standard of the lecture and asked if I would give the opening lecture to the Oxford branch of SACU next term, on 11 Feb. Hearing that he was seeing Bryan in London tomorrow, I hastily wrote back accepting before Bryan could warn him off. Afterwards I spoke to Dawson on the telephone. He said that Bryan was demanding 75% of all local takings for HQ in return, presumably, for HQ’s services in providing lecturers like the de Haas. I urged him to yield to nothing since the Council of Management is meeting next week. He had not realised –i.e. had not been told – that Kurti, Swann and I are on the Council of Management. He told me that he had grave reservations about Bryan and was doubtful about SACU from the moment when he heard that Bryan – whom he had known as an undergraduate at Cambridge – was its secretary.36 He had not liked the propagandist tone of SACU’s official documents. We agreed to keep in touch.
About the same time – Sunday 5 Dec – Kurti, Swann and I met by arrangement in the Ashmolean. Kurti was outraged by the puerility of the de Haas lecture. Swann reported that he had been to a SACU week-end party to lecture on Chinese art. He had come back in the train with two girls, one French, one English, both devôtes of the Party, or at least the movement. But that had not stopped them from admitting to him that it was a relief, with his lecture, to get away from politics. So it seems that SACU Chinese cultural meetings are heavily political. This is confirmed by the minutes of the last meeting of the General Purposes Committee which now, for the first time, as a result of my pressure, are being circulated to the members of the Council of Management. There I read not only that Mr. Ash had moved my expulsion from the Society (a proposal which it is not within the powers of the GP Cttee even to discuss) but also that someone – Ernie Roberts presumably – urged the addition of five more Trades Union sponsors, of whom one is a known communist (Lawrence Kirwan)37 and two others are fellow-travellers. This was agreed by the Cttee, which had been attended by the whole gaggle of fellow-travellers plus the ridiculous Mary Adams.38
But it is not only the minutes of the GP Cttee which are now being circulated. On Saturday 11th Dec I received a letter from Pulleyblank, the Professor of Chinese at Cambridge, whom I don’t know at all but who is also a member of the Council of Management. He sent me, for information, a copy of a long letter which he had addressed to Bryan, being his comments on my correspondence with Needham of which copies had evidently been ‘circulated’ by Bryan. Circulated to whom? I naturally asked myself – for this was the correspondence of which I had explicitly and in writing forbidden Needham to circulate my part. I had not even been informed that it was now being ‘circulated’. I asked Kurti if it had been circulated to him. It had not. But afterwards Mary Adams admitted that it had been ‘circulated’ to her. I can only conclude that Bryan had it circulated to those members of the Council of Management who, he thought, would be brought over to his side by such documents – and would not tell me. If so, he has miscalculated. Mary Adams still natters her outdated platitudes from Bryan’s pocket, but Pulleyblank has come out firmly on my side. He also asked Bryan to place his views before the Council of Management – to all of whom, no doubt, he supposed that the correspondence had been ‘circulated’. This, needless to say, has not been done.
So we come to Monday 13 Dec, the day of the Council meeting. I had luncheon with Roderick MacFarquhar,39 the editor of the China Quarterly, and Ivan Morris,40 chez Solange in Wardour Street (it is part of a plot to bring Ivan Morris to Oxford). They told me that Raymond Dawson is very sound and confirmed my view of Bryan. I asked MacFarquhar if he would come and speak to the Oxford SACU. He said No: the Chinese govt refused him a visa to visit China, so he would not go out of his way to oblige their British agency. He spoke highly of Pulleyblank, and of his courage in coming out on my side, since he too was dependent on Chinese goodwill for a visa. I told them the true history of SACU, which diverted them. I said that, having agreed to be a sponsor, and having thereby appeared publicly as a supporter of the society and perhaps led others into it, I could not quietly slide out of it: my divorce, if it were to come, must be as public as my marriage. But before contemplating divorce, I must make a serious effort to make the marriage work; so I was fighting to keep the society to its avowed purpose. ‘Do you think you will succeed?’ they asked, incredulously. I had to admit that I did not: how could a miscellany of distant amateurs, busy in their own field, meeting only once a quarter, hope to control an organised, devout party? However, I said, I would try; and then, if I failed, I would go out carrying with me as many of the non-communist sponsors as I could. Like Samson, I would bring the pillars of the temple down with me.
The meeting of the Council of Management was at 5.30, in the House of Commons. Sutherland was not there, but Pulleyblank unexpectedly was. Once again, I was determined to be moderate. I wrote out the words ‘Moderation! Moderation! Prudence! Prudence!’ on a piece of paper and kept in front of me as a standing guide to speech. I began, when the minutes had been read, by questioning the reference to Sutherland which implied that he was Hon Treasurer. Bryan wriggled hard, but I obliged him to admit enough facts to damage him in the eyes of all. Then we settled down to the draft constitution and Kurti pointed out that there was no reference to the General Purposes Committee. We wrote it into the constitution as a sub-committee of the Council with additional members, to be nominated by the council. The administration wanted them to the co-opted, but we scotched that. We also fixed their tenure at one year (subject to reappointment). This was a good beginning. Then we turned to finance. We appointed Horsley,41 a Hull business-man, and Kurti as joint treasurers. We blocked the issue of the appeal on the grounds that we had not been admitted as a charity and that it was imprudent to launch an appeal to the public when our own finances were so questionable that our Hon. Treasurer had resigned. We then went into the actual finances – very different from the ‘budget’ of June. The balance sheet showed from £2800 I think (I am writing all this from memory) from ‘donations’. It was explained to us that some donations from business firms were necessarily anonymous owing to the danger of black-listing. We said that anonymity might be admissible in public but that every member of the Council of Management must be in a position to know the source of any donation above £20. Thereupon Ernie Roberts lifted his plaintive, sanctimonious, hypocritical voice. ‘I’m a democrat’, he whined, ‘I don’t like privilege. If 19 members of the Council of Management are to have a right to know, I want every member of the society to have the same right: anything else is privilege, undemocratic, undemocratic …’ Of course the crook really meant that he wanted equality of ignorance, not equality of knowledge: the 19 members of the Council were to be kept as ignorant as the society; only the administration was to know the true source of our funds. But we swatted him down, as we also swatted down the proposal that the limit for secret donations be raised to £100.
Altogether it was a good day’s work. Provided we can work it, we now have a constitution which does not allow the obvious tricks. But I hardly hope that ‘we’ can work it: I fear it will be worked by ‘them’: the constant, central devotees of the ‘movement’. The meeting lasted 2½ hours. At 8 o’clock Pulleyblank had to rush to Liverpool Street for a train. I was sorry: I would like to have talked to him. Instead I went and dined at the Beefsteak, returned late to Oxford, and next day set off to Chiefswood where I am writing this account.
Incidentally, about three weeks ago, I received a letter from a Mrs Collier in Edinburgh (her husband is a well-known fellow-traveller) asking me to be a sponsor of the China-Scotland society which aims, it seems, to tell the Chinese about Scotland.42 I enjoyed the thought of anyone trying to interest those smug, self-contained oriental bigots in Lallans poetry, bogus tartans and the battle of Bannockburn. I also enjoyed the evidence of Scottish backwardness. Just at the time when the devôts of SACU were clamouring for my expulsion, here and their Scottish equivalents asking for my patronage. I replied prudently saying that I would be glad to sponsor their society if possible, but that as they would not expect me to sponsor it without first knowing what I was sponsoring, I would like to know about (a) its constitution, (b) its finances. Since then I have had no further communication from Mrs Collier.
I forgot to mention that, during the Council meeting, Mary Adams, Ernie Roberts and I had to make short statements about the visit to China. My statement that our movements were closely controlled brought Ernie to his feet. ‘Not at all, not at all!’ he cried in his toadying, querulous voice. We were perfectly free. Why, ‘we were allowed to go to lunch with the British chargé d’affaires …’ I told him, rather sharply I fear, that I did not need such ‘allowance’. I fear that Bryan did not enjoy this exchange. His view is that Ernie lets the side down by too openly betraying his fellow-travellers.
1 Frank Giles (b. 1919), Foreign Editor of the Sunday Times 1961–77 and Editor 1981–83.
2 The address of SACU’s London office.
3 Richard Thistlethwaite (1917–1985) was educated at Bootham, the Quaker boarding-school in York, before matriculation in 1935 at the Queen’s College, Oxford, where he was Lady Elizabeth Hastings Scholar and obtained a first in PPE in 1938. He was awarded a Laming Travelling Fellow at Queen’s in 1938. He served as a District Security Officer in Palestine during the 1940s; then as the Security Service’s first liaison officer in Washington DC; was apparently posted to Singapore, 1955–59; then headed its Anti-Communist section in London or was head of operations in London. Elected to the Athenaeum in 1964, many of his letters were written on club notepaper, and T-R sent his replies to Thistlethwaite there. After retiring from MI5, Thistlethwaite was assistant registrar of the General Medical Council, 1971–72.
4 Sir Dick White (1906–1993), Director General of the Security Service (MI5), 1953–56 and of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), 1956–68.
5 Joan Robinson (1903–1983) studied economics at Girton College, Cambridge, where she came under the Marxist influence of Maurice Dobb. Lecturer in the economics faculty at Cambridge, 1937; elected a fellow of Newnham College, 1962; professor and fellow of Girton College, 1965; the first woman to become an honorary fellow of King’s College, 1979. The Nobel economics laureates Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz both encountered her in Cambridge in the mid-1960s: Sen found her ‘brilliant, but vigorously intolerant’; Stiglitz, who was her pupil for one ‘tumultuous’ term in 1965, found that she did not brook contradiction.
6 Valerie Pearl (1926–2016) was daughter of a Labour MP, and a doctoral student of Christopher Hill’s. T-R helped her to recast her dissertation into her first book, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution: city government and national politics, 1625–43 (1961). In the mid-1960s she was a lecturer at Somerville, but was not appointed to a fellowship because of her insistence on living, for family reasons, in Barnet rather than Oxford. She was a frequent correspondent of T-R’s, co-editor of the festschrift presented to him in 1981, and ended her career as principal of a Cambridge college.
7 Peter Swann (1921–1997) established the Department of Eastern Art within the Ashmolean Museum in 1963, and was responsible for buying major works of Chinese art before the Cultural Revolution.
8 Joan Vickers (1907–1994) was elder daughter of Winston Churchill’s stockbroker. She trained as a Norland nanny, rode well to hounds, and when she wanted to go into politics sought Churchill’s advice. He advised her to wear a pretty hat and to join the London County Council. She did both. After defeating Michael Foot at Plymouth, Devonport in 1955 by 100 votes, she held that marginal constituency until, after boundary changes, David Owen ousted her in 1974. She sat in the House of Lords 1975–90. A formidable figure, the only woman of her generation to speak in Commons debates on the armed forces, she owed her successes to determination rather than charm. She sported a severe blue rinse, and enjoyed being nicknamed ‘La Truite au Bleu’ at the Council of Europe. When she espoused the cause of prostitutes, Lord Hailsham dubbed her ‘the non-batting captain’. She was one of the first women parliamentarians to visit the PRC, and chaired the non-Marxist European-China Association.
9 Jeremy Thorpe (1929–2014), President of the Oxford Union 1950, MP for North Devon 1959–79, Leader of the Liberal party 1967–76.
10 Philip Noel-Baker (1889–1982), Lord Noel-Baker 1977, was a Labour MP who held senior ministerial posts in 1945–51. Stuart Hampshire was briefly his civil service assistant after the war. Awarded the Nobel prize for peace in 1959.
11 Sir Gordon Sutherland (1907–1980) was wartime secretary of the Unexploded Bombs committee, Director of the National Physics Laboratory, 1956–64, an expert on infrared spectroscopy and Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, 1964–77. He had a fine collection of Chinese porcelain. His visit to the PRC in 1962, as a member of a Royal Society delegation, strengthened his admiration for the Chinese people and their culture. He discouraged Derek Bryan from approaching Charlie Chaplin and Spike Milligan to be sponsors of SACU lest it bring ridicule on the society.
12 Edwin Pulleyblank (1922–2013) was a Canadian who spent three wartime years at Bletchley Park, where he learnt Japanese. He was appointed lecturer in classical Chinese at SOAS, 1948, and professor of Chinese Studies at Cambridge, 1953–66. He visited the PRC in 1954 as adviser to a Labour Party delegation. ‘Pulleyblank is an excellent man but inarticulate, as he admits; and of course all professional sinologists are paralysed by fear of being excluded from China if they express themselves too rashly’ (T-R to Kurti, 8 April 1966, Kurti papers H937).
13 Nicholas Kurti (né Miklós Kürti, formerly Karfunkel) (1908–1998): see Introduction, pp. 39–40.
14 Jack Perry (né Isidor Perisky) (1915–1996): see pp. 23–5. He was, like Deng Xiao Ping, an ardent bridge player: in the 1990s he sponsored the Lords and Commons annual bridge match, and chaired the Chinese Bridge Federation.
15 William (‘Bill’) Ash (1917–2014) had been educated at Highland Park High School, Dallas. In 1934, as an intern journalist, he saw the bullet-ridden corpses of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. After graduating from the University of Texas (Austin) in 1938, he became a railroad hobo, enlisted in the Royal Canadian Force in 1939, piloted RAF Spitfires in 1941–42, was shot down over France in 1942, and spent three years trying to escape German captivity. Steve McQueen’s character Virgil Hilts, ‘the Cooler King’, in the 1963 film The Great Escape is reputedly based on Ash. After the war Ash studied Marxism with the Birmingham professor George Thomson, before going to Balliol in 1946 to read PPE. He worked for the BBC external services in India for four years during the 1950s, but was eased out under political suspicions. He then became a novelist and radio dramatist (remarkably he adapted The Golden Bowl for radio). In 1968, after the CPGB rejected his application for membership, he and Reg Birch co-founded the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) (CPGBML). ‘Thought to be a hard-core crypto-communist operator, but I don’t know enough to say whether this is true or not,’ Trevor-Roper noted in 1966. Dacre 13/3, List B [May 1966].
16 Percy Timberlake (1916–2004) read PPE at Hertford College, Oxford. In wartime he was a Ministry of Information official and RAF education officer; but was perhaps debarred from post-war employment as a civil servant by his political affiliations. He joined BCPIT as Berger’s assistant in 1953. In 1954 he organized the 48 Group of businesses willing to flout the trade embargo on mainland China. Seven years later the Security Service rated him ‘a secret member of the Party’.
17 T-R mistook the name of the British Council for the Promotion of International Trade. It was an offshoot of the communist World Peace Council, and solely interested in developing business relations with communist countries, with the exception of Yugoslavia.
18 A Labour MP, Harold Davies, who was well-travelled in south-east Asia, had asked the Foreign Secretary in 1953 whether BCPIT ‘was a Communist front organization’. Anthony Eden’s parliamentary reply stated: ‘It is public knowledge that a number of the members of the council are (or were until recently) either members of the Communist Party or closely associated with bodies which are generally recognized to be Communist “front organizations” and are proscribed by the Labour Party. The fact that some highly respectable persons are concerned with it is a measure of its success as a “front” organization. These members in fact provide the “front”’ (‘Trade Organization a Communist Front’, The Times, 19 November 1953, p. 12).
19 Latin: to the city and the world.
20 Nancy (‘Nan’) Whittaker (1914–1998), who was Berger’s second wife, was summarily dismissed – as politically suspect – from her first job, in the Bank of England, in 1940. After working in the Ministry of Information during the war, she transferred to the peacetime Ministry of Fuel and Power. On the basis of telephone checks on her, John Cuckney reported: ‘Nancy BERGER is very likely responsible for collecting the Party registration forms from civil servants’ (NA KV 2/4237, serial 259z, 6 April 1951). In the 1960s, as London representative of the New China Press Agency, she attended daily Foreign Office briefings. She wrote books on nutrition, women’s status and children’s rights.
21 T-R’s talk (entitled ‘China Today’) was given to a general meeting at Chatham House (the Royal Institute of International Affairs). No transcript was made.
22 T-R had been elected to the Garrick in 1965, but resigned his membership after joining the Beefsteak in 1966.
23 Princess Pema Tsedeun Yapshi Pheunkhang Lacham Kusho (known as Coocoola) (1924–2008) was the daughter of the eleventh Chogyal of Sikkim. In 1941, at Lhasa, she married the governor of the Tibetan city of Gyantse. With her low, clear, musical voice and delight in good talk about the arts and politics, she was the equivalent in Lhasa to Lady Colefax in London. When travelling the bandit-ridden trade route between Tibet and Gangtok, with her small children crammed in windowed boxes on mules, she rode with a rifle across her shoulder and a revolver in her pocket.
24 Kenneth William (‘Bill’) Wedderburn (1927–2012), Lord Wedderburn of Charlton 1977, sat on the Council of SACU. He had been Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge 1952–64, and was Professor of Commercial Law at LSE, 1964–92. He advised the Labour Party on employment law and industrial relations. He joined T-R as a FBA, 1981.
25 German: also there.
26 French: as master.
27 Stephen King-Hall (1893–1966), Lord King-Hall 1966, compiled the first Admiralty manual on cruiser tactics. After serving as a torpedo lieutenant on Royal Navy ships of the China squadron, 1921–23, he wrote Western Civilisation and the Far East (1924) and The China of Today (1927). King-Hall resigned as a naval officer to become a researcher at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (1929–35). He tried to educate public opinion as a BBC broadcaster and by starting the King-Hall Newsletter in 1936. He was an MP, 1939–45. He predicted in 1961 that before 2000, ‘the Chinese People’s Republic will be the most powerful nation (militarily and industrially) in the world’. Soviet Russia, the United States, and perhaps Japan and India would ally against ‘the common menace of a China whose ambitions may include control over large areas of Central Asia, South-East Asia and the Indian sub-continent’ (Sir Stephen King-Hall, Our Times 1900–1960 (London: Faber & Faber, 1961), pp. 332, 334).
28 Isaac Deutscher (1907–1967) joined the outlawed Polish communist party in 1927, but was expelled in 1932. He fled Warsaw for London in 1939. Ten years later he published a biography of Stalin, whom he praised for equipping Russia with atomic piles instead of wooden ploughs. Three acclaimed volumes on Trotsky followed (1954–63). After the Sino-Soviet split, his writings supported Moscow against Peking.
29 The Manchester Guardian had been renamed as the Guardian in 1959. Its editorial offices had moved to London in 1964.
30 Major General Sir Frederick Maurice (1871–1951) was Director of Military Operations at the War Office, 1915–18, co-founder of British Legion 1921, and Principal of the Working Men’s College in London, 1922–33.
31 Michael McCreery (1929–1965) was a renegade Etonian whom T-R had liked as a Christ Church undergraduate in the early 1950s. They remained in remote but friendly contact until 1962–63. McCreery, whose father was a general, worked for the CPGB from 1956. Two years later he began teaching at London’s North-Western Polytechnic, where the Principal failed to get him dismissed on political grounds. In 1963 he founded the Committee to Defeat Revisionism for Communist Unity, which strove for the dictatorship of the proletariat, mass revolutionary mobilization and liberation struggles on Albanian and Maoist models. The CPGB suspected that his magazine, Vanguard, was funded by Berger (NA KV 2/4251, serial 797a, Lascar Top Secret, 21 May 1964). He was killed by cancer, April 1965. His brother Charles was a friend of T-R’s stepson James Howard-Johnston in the 1960s.
32 Jacob Hendrik (‘Joep’) de Haas, Professor of World Health at Leyden University, and his physician wife Hermana de Haas-Posthuma visited China in 1964, 1967 and 1971. They published their findings in ‘Sociomedical Achievements in the People’s Republic of China’, International Journal of Health Services, vol. 3 (February 1973), pp. 275–94. Their other publications were on infant mortality and paediatrics.
33 Raymond (‘Ray’) Dawson (1923–2002) was elected an exhibitioner at Wadham College, Oxford in 1941. Invalided from wartime service as a RAF navigator, he took a Japanese language course at the School of Oriental and African Studies in 1945 before returning to Oxford in 1948 for the Honours School of Classical Chinese. He was appointed Spalding lecturer in Chinese at the University of Oxford in 1957, spent six unfulfilling months in China in 1958, and was Fellow of Wadham, 1963–90 (thereafter emeritus). Under the name of ‘Setsquare’ he composed crossword puzzles for the New Statesman.
34 German: married couple.
35 An ex-CPGB member of the Oxford branch reported: ‘People like the good, dear de Haas’s are no good here. The poppycock talked by people like that sounds ridiculous to the people listening, who are students of the subject’ (SOAS, Peggy Garland to Derek Bryan, 26 April 1966).
36 Bryan had matriculated in 1932 at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he read modern languages.
37 Lawrence Kirwan (1910–2000) joined the Labour Party in 1931 as a communist infiltrator. He was leader of a communist cell within Reuter’s news agency in London at the time of the outbreak of the Korean War. After being dislodged from Reuter’s, he ran the Hungarian News and Information Service in London: ‘Of all the English language publications of the so-called “people’s democracies” issued in London, New Hungary, edited by Lawrence Kirwan, is perhaps the best-produced technically and the most servile politically’ (The Newsletter, 2 August 1958, p. 197). President of the National Union of Journalists, 1966.
38 On 7 December Maurice Bowra wrote to Isaiah Berlin: ‘I have had a slightly ghoulish dinner with the Trevor-Ropers, in Oriel. I could not make out whether the main dish was goose or mutton. Poor Xandra was in a tizzy the whole time and more than usually inconsequent, while Hugh boasted of his rudeness to the Chinese while he was their guest in Peking. They would soon see through him’ (Bodleian, Ms Berlin 246).
39 Roderick MacFarquhar (1930–2019) read PPE at Oxford, edited The China Quarterly 1959–68, was non-resident Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford 1965–68, Labour MP 1974–79, Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University 1986–92. His many works include The Hundred Flowers Campaign and the Chinese Intellectuals (1960) and China under Mao: politics takes command (1963).
40 Ivan Morris (1925–1976) gained his BA at Harvard, and his doctorate from SOAS. He was an interpreter sent to Hiroshima after the nuclear bombing, and held faculty posts at Columbia University 1960–73. T-R’s plot was apparently successful, for Morris was elected as a fellow of St Antony’s College 1966.
41 Alec Horsley (1902–1993) got a third-class degree in PPE at Worcester College, Oxford (1924), of which he became an honorary fellow in 1981. After a spell with the Colonial Service in Nigeria, he joined (in 1932) his father’s Hull-based company, which imported Dutch condensed milk for wholesale. He expanded this into a conglomerate known successively as Northern Dairy and as Northern Foods. As a Quaker, he joined CND and the Committee of 100 on their formation; supported prison reform; and was a benefactor of the Department of Peace Studies at Bradford University. Thistlethwaite thought him ‘politically naïve’.
42 Elsie Collier was the first secretary of the Scotland–China Association, which was founded in 1966. She resigned when a few years later she and her husband Johnny (d. 1998) went as teachers to Guangzhou. They were co-authors of China’s Socialist Revolution (1974). Like SACU, SCA members opposed the CPGB’s support of Moscow against Peking after the Sino-Russian fissure.