‘England’, wrote Sir David Kelly, who was British Ambassador in Moscow in the year that Burgess and Maclean absconded, was the only country in the world in which ‘the privileged classes asked of a young man not, “Who was his father?” but “Where was he at?”’ Boarding schools placed a boy more definitively than his paternity. They were intended to be character-building: they institutionalized their pupils’ loyalties, they sought to harden boys’ feelings and to minimize the softening influences of home. The answer to the question ‘Where was he at?’ told the exact means whereby the boy’s temperament had been disciplined and remade. When the teenaged Julian Amery went to Spain as a nationalist sympathizer in 1938, and jumping into a ditch to escape gunfire found himself crouched beside an effete-looking youth in the uniform of a monarchist volunteer, he greeted the stranger in French, German and Spanish without getting any response. Then the young officer amazed him by saying: ‘Kemp. Wellington and Trinity. How d’you do?’ Amery replied: ‘How d’you do? Amery. Eton and Balliol.’ They did not think of parents or family status: they did not say, ‘Peter Kemp, my father is Legal Adviser at the India Office, we live in Wimbledon’ or ‘Julian Amery, my father is Secretary of State for India, we live in Eaton Square.’1
The conventional wisdom about the formative influences on the Cambridge traitors needs adjustment. Blunt, Burgess, Maclean and Philby grew to maturity surrounded by a Stonehenge circle of frowning, stony faces: headmasters, housemasters, clergymen and family solicitors. These non-parental elders shaped the youths’ priorities, choices and resolve. Institutional influences – the boarding schools in which three of the quartet lived from the age of seven – counted for more than home in developing their characters. It was a commonplace that pupils should be hardened at school if they were to achieve anything memorable. The Victorians had, after all, redevised the English public schools to breed men who, as Cardinal Manning told the Irish, ‘have made England what it is, – able to subdue the earth’. As Derek Walker-Smith, afterwards a Conservative government minister and Lord Broxbourne, ex-pupil at a Victorian-foundation school called Rossall, said in 1931, the public schools were ‘based on the assumption that anything sufficiently unpleasant is sure to be good for a boy’.2
Each year boys isolated together at these boarding schools formed little clans. There were distinct fraternities for athletes, swots, clowns, duffers, arty types, devout Christians and those who knew themselves to be irredeemably average. The clansmen made defensive pacts together, scorned other clans and were primed for pre-emptive aggression. Fellow clansmen avoided solemn exchanges of innermost thoughts, recalled David Footman of SIS, who attended Marlborough a few years before Anthony Blunt; ‘but we liked each other, we were allies, united in our impatience of the nonsense that seemed to make so much of school life’. All children are susceptible to the influence of their schoolfellows: none more so than teenagers, and few teenagers more than English public schoolboys of the 1920s.3
The disappearance of Burgess and Maclean aroused a storm of publicity in 1951. Their reappearance in 1956, and accusations about the treachery of Philby, renewed the commotion. These squalls broke over an epoch when Marx and Freud were the two totems of the western intelligentsia. The Marxist misdirection reduced all explanations to class struggle and class guilt. The Freudian misdirection, in which the treachery of four of the Cambridge ring of five was infantilized by interpretations based on supposed familial psychodramas, stemmed from a painful historical context. Nazi ideology had categorized people by their bloodlines and family stock, and used imaginary racial traits as the justification for genocide. As a reaction, the western intelligentsia after 1945 preferred to explain human character and to understand adult choices according to psychological theories about parental nurturing, childhood environment, feelings and emotions. More than ever, in the 1960s, when American and west European students were rebelling against their parents, the treason of Burgess, Maclean and Philby (for Blunt remained publicly unidentified until 1979) was attributed to defects in their parental upbringing. Family dynamics from half a century earlier were imagined and interpreted by commentators who were uninhibited by the fact that they had never met any of the family concerned.
The litterateur Cyril Connolly belonged to a generation that treated Freudianism as a faith. ‘Politics begins in the nursery; no one is born patriotic or unpatriotic, right-wing or left-wing,’ he asserted in 1952 in his pamphlet about Burgess and Maclean. ‘It is the child whose craving for love is unsatisfied, whose desire for power is thwarted or whose innate sense of justice is warped that eventually may try to become a revolutionary or a dictator.’ The subversive rebellion of the Cambridge spies expressed their hostility to their early paternal experiences, Connolly affirmed: ‘Before we can hurt the fatherland, we must hate the father.’4
Fantasies about hateful fathers and fables of nursery politics more than ever clouded understanding after the intervention in 1968 of David Cornwell, who after serving in both MI5 and SIS had taken the pen-name John le Carré. It was under this fictive identity that he contributed a prefatory essay for a pioneering biography by Sunday Times journalists, Philby: The Spy Who Betrayed a Generation. Burgess and Maclean are ‘psychiatric misfits’ in le Carré’s depiction (ten years later Andrew Boyle followed le Carré’s misdirection, and with reductive inaccuracy entitled the chapter in The Climate of Treason on the boyhoods of Burgess, Maclean and Philby ‘The Young Misfits’). Among other suppositions, le Carré wrote of Philby’s father, who spent most of his working life abroad: ‘Kim loved the absent parent best; and even though he had marked down the parent authority of England as his lifelong enemy, Kim Philby never quite absolved it from its parental duty to protect.’ In le Carré’s view, Philby used women ‘as a consolation for a manhood haunted by his father’s ghost. When they came too close, he punished them or sent them away, either as unsatisfactory mother-figures or as the spent instruments of his expression.’ Philby’s four wives and serial mistresses, le Carré continued, were always secondary to the symbolic woman to whom he gave most: ‘Mother Russia was the boy’s absolute.’ Such fancies were shared by Leo Abse, who arranged for his fellow Labour MP Will Owen to receive immunity from prosecution in return for undergoing MI5 interrogation about his spying for communist Czechoslovakia. Abse attended the questioning, and knew the extent of his colleague’s avarice, but nevertheless gave an absurd explanation that treachery was a version of incest: ‘Owen certainly did his puny best to rape his motherland.’5
The ideas of Connolly, Abse and their ilk are obsolete, but their baneful influence persists. We now understand that DNA is as influential in character-formation as parenting. It has, for example, been evident since 1993 that chromosomes have a stronger influence in creating a disposition towards male homosexuality than psychoanalytical notions about aloof fathers or suffocating mothers. Yet writers continue to fret over the remoteness of the fathers of Blunt, Burgess and Maclean, as if most English fathers of the 1920s were not aloof and inexpressive by twenty-first-century standards. More cruelly, they indict – sometimes with harsh misogyny – the spies’ mothers for various contradictory defects: possessiveness, indifference, coddling, neglect, over-indulgence, lack of sympathy.
Undeniably parents are formative influences on their children. Miranda Carter in her biography of Blunt depicts his parents as ‘pious, austere, fiercely teetotal, anti-gambling and keen on charitable works’. Blunt, she says, was a dutiful son, who imbibed their missionary zeal for good causes, which he diverted from Christianity to Marxism. Maclean’s upbringing in a frugal, teetotal and Sabbatarian household disposed him, judged his friend and biographer Robert Cecil, to substitute the Communist Manifesto for the Bible as holy writ. Such judgements are tenable; but to exceed the evidence by attributing the mainsprings of treachery to parental influence seems banal and suppositional. The assertions of Connolly and le Carré cannot be proved, and prove nothing.6
Debased Freudian interpretations have not been imposed upon the fifth Cambridge spy, John Cairncross @ MOLIÈRE. He was born in 1913, in a cottage at Lesmahagow, a small town in Lanarkshire where his father was an ironmonger. His mother had been a schoolteacher. There is no reason, other than their relative poverty, why Cairncross’s parents have been protected from the punishing hypotheses levelled at the Blunt, Burgess, Maclean and Philby parents. Arnold Deutsch, the illegal in London who engineered Cairncross’s recruitment in 1937, wrote a psychological profile of him: ‘MOLIÈRE comes from a Scottish lower-middle-class family – religious people who because of the difficult life they lead are very hard-working … He is pedantic, industrious, zealous and thrifty. He knows the value of money and how to handle it.’ A taxi-ride with Deutsch had been the first time in his life that he had travelled by motor-cab. Deutsch found him ‘naïve and rather provincial’, but ‘very trusting’.7
To reiterate, Philby was a well-travelled married man of twenty-two, with recent experience of revolutionary street-fighting, when in 1934 he was enlisted as a penetration agent by Deutsch on a bench in the Regent’s Park. Burgess was a worldly adventurer of twenty-three when Deutsch recruited him six months later. Blunt was in his thirtieth year when in 1937 Burgess introduced him to Deutsch, who recruited him as a Comintern talent-spotter. Cairncross was twenty-three when on Blunt’s recommendation he was taken to meet Deutsch. Only Maclean could be thought callow, having turned twenty-one at about the time that he was enrolled. The ring of five took adult decisions, in an adult environment. It infantilizes the significance of their ideas, their acts and their consequences to treat them as programmed by defective parenting.
Philby was born in the Punjab on 1 January 1912. He was given the forenames Harold Adrian Russell, but was universally known as Kim. He was the only son and eldest child of St John Philby, then an official in the Indian civil service. St John had obtained a first-class degree in modern languages at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he spent an extra year studying Hindustani, Persian and Indian civil law before going to India in 1908. Valentine Vivian, the Indian Army officer who became chief of MI6’s Section V, met St John Philby at this time. ‘As a bullet-headed young Assistant Commissioner in Shahpur in the Punjab, he was singularly devoid of manners and always up against his superiors,’ Vivian reported to Guy Liddell in 1940. ‘He was strongly self-opinionated and expressed himself, often extremely capably and accurately, with such arrogance that no one had a good word for him.’ He was not unlike his irrepressibly vain cousin Bernard Montgomery, later a field marshal and the victorious commander at the battle of Alamein, who was best man at his wedding in 1910 to Dora Johnston. Her father was a railway engineer in the Indian Public Works Department.8
May Philby, Kim’s paternal grandmother, had been deserted by her drunken Ceylon coffee-planter husband, and averted poverty by opening a boarding-house in the military town of Camberley. She travelled from England to the Punjab in order to attend her grandchild’s birth. Although she returned to Surrey during his infancy, she was installed as the primary figure in his boyhood when in 1915 he was sent to live with her at Camberley. One of her three sons had been killed at Ypres in 1914, and another was killed there in 1916. She brought up her grandson from the age of three, provided his home, felt consoled by his presence and had a closer influence than his parents.
Kim Philby saw little of his father in 1912–15, and nothing of him from 1915 until 1919. In 1921 the father succeeded T. E. Lawrence as chief British representative in Transjordan, and immediately proved cantankerous: as Reader Bullard, the British Consul in Jeddah, said, ‘Any scheme that someone else puts up he disagrees with. His great phrase is, “I join issue with you”, and he spends his life joining issue with someone.’ In 1923 May Philby took her eleven-year-old grandson to visit Damascus, Baalbek, Tyre, Nazareth and Jerusalem with his father. It was only on this trip, and during the year that St John Philby spent in London after resigning as High Commissioner in Transjordan in 1924, that he had the possibility of exerting direct influence on his son. His resignation was ostensibly on a point of principle, but Bullard computed that it left him with an annual pension of £700 when his age was not yet forty.9
With the security of a pension St John Philby bought his first home in England, at 18 Acol Road, in what was euphemistically called West Hampstead although it bordered the far eastern reaches of Kilburn. This was a humdrum middling district: its one distinction was a bridge club where the world-famous Acol bidding conventions were devised. Kim Philby continued to spend much time at Crossways, his grandmother’s villa in Middle Gordon Road, Camberley. The ordinariness of these houses and the shortage of ready money make nonsense of historians of espionage who write, as Oleg Tsarev and John Costello did, ‘He hailed from a background of privilege and was schooled in the establishment of Britain’s ruling class,’ before adducing as supporting evidence that in Moscow he enjoyed Worcestershire sauce and The Times crossword.10
In boyhood Philby had a convulsive stammer which blocked any tendency to his father’s fatal vehemence. He spent five years at a preparatory school near Eastbourne before election as a King’s Scholar at Westminster School in 1924, when he was aged only twelve. The school had been founded by Queen Elizabeth I in 1560 in buildings which had been the monastery of Westminster before the Reformation. It abutted Westminster Abbey, and was across the road from the Palace of Westminster. With only about 360 pupils, two-thirds of whom were day-boys, it was an atypical public school: most of the boarders returned home at weekends to families living, like Philby’s, in the London conurbation. In competitive sports, academic results and social cachet the school was not in the top bracket with Eton, Winchester and Harrow, but in the next grade with Charterhouse, Rugby and Shrewsbury. Its ethos was not barbaric. Ian (‘Tim’) Milne, Philby’s contemporary, remembered its urbanity. ‘There was room for a hundred flowers, if not to bloom, at least not to be trampled on. Eccentrics were prized, particularly if they made you laugh.’ There was minimal bullying: ‘the small boys tended to take advantage of this by taunting the larger ones, as a puppy might an Alsatian’.11
As a King’s Scholar, Philby will have received preliminary instructions before reaching Westminster. These included the rules for wearing the five stipulated types of headgear (mortarboard, top hat, trilby for weekends, straw boater and sports cap of green and blue). School slang had to be memorized: King’s Scholars were tested on arrival, and threatened with a beating if they did not know that ‘greaze’ meant crowd or scrum, ‘shagged’ meant tired, and ‘pitch’ meant apprehensive. All male servants were addressed as ‘John’, and all female servants (regardless of age) as ‘nymph’. Masters’ nicknames had to be learnt by rote too: Chuff, Preedy, Coot, Cissy, Puppy, Poon, Tubby, Beaker. One annual school tradition was the ‘pancake greaze’ on Shrove Tuesday, when a cook tossed a pancake high over a beam in the Monk’s Dormitory, and the boy who emerged from the brawl with the biggest piece of pancake was rewarded with Maundy money (coins specially minted for the monarch to use as alms). The King’s Scholars had a more lethal ceremony, ‘Declams’, in which four tables were piled atop one another: each junior boy had to clamber to the top of this tottering edifice and there declaim a four-line Latin epigram of his own composition while being pelted with tennis balls. Shortly after Philby left Westminster, ‘pancake greaze’ and ‘Declams’ were abolished as too violent.12
Philby was a polite, neat, private, self-reliant, fastidious pupil. He won school prizes and scored high marks without cutting a figure in the school. His enthusiasms were for Beethoven, Arsenal football club and Tallulah Bankhead. Milne, who was caned only once at Westminster, doubted if Philby ever was. Philby was not forced to join the Officer Training Corps (OTC) or to play sports in his final year (previously he had boxed for the school, and fielded at cricket: ‘I wish I could report that his regular position there was third man, but I think he was more usually to be found at deep extra cover,’ recalled Milne). The lurid tale that at school Philby had ‘buggered and been buggered’ is a nasty invention. Overall he had scant reason for resentment. When he fled to Russia in 1963, he left his wife in Beirut but took his Westminster scarf with him. Nor did the school repudiate Philby entirely: when a new boarding-house was founded in 1997, pupils were consulted about which famous Old Boy should be commemorated in its name. Many voted for Philby: the school authorities however preferred the name of Milne’s House, after Tim Milne’s uncle A. A. Milne, the creator of Winnie the Pooh.13
Attendance was compulsory for daily morning prayers in Westminster Abbey and two services on Sunday: Philby, like other pupils, will have sat through up to 1,500 services during his time at the school. The sermons by the headmaster, the Reverend Harold Costley-White, were remembered as ‘foggy and elliptical’. In his sing-song voice, Costley-White accentuated syllables in an arbitrary way in the forlorn hope of making his commonplaces sound pensive and sincere. His mellifluous remarks were often thoughtless contradictions. When asked about the Book of Kings, he replied: ‘It is amazingly interesting, my friends, and perhaps what you might call extremely boring.’ Compulsory chapel attendance was the rule at all similar schools during this period, although it receded in Cambridge colleges during the 1920s (partly because, with the rise in student numbers, few college chapels were large enough to accommodate all members of the college).14
The future philosopher of aesthetics Richard Wollheim and the future diplomat Brian Urquhart, who were King’s Scholars at Westminster in the mid-1930s, recalled the opportunities for bracing political discussions: debates in the back seats of the coach taking them to football, in which Peter Ustinov, son of the MI5 agent known as ‘Klop’, and Rudolf von Ribbentrop, son of the Nazi Ambassador in London, disputed the justice of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Anti-militarist pupils formed a school society, the United Front of Progressive Forces, known as Uffpuff. Rudolf von Ribbentrop used to be driven to school every morning in a plum-coloured Mercedes-Benz limousine. On arrival, the chauffeur would alight, give the Nazi salute and shout ‘Heil Hitler!’ as he strutted through the medieval arch into Little Dean’s Yard. Urquhart organized an ever-swelling group of boys who gathered each morning to laugh and jeer. The German embassy protested to Costley-White, who summoned Urquhart and said he would be expelled for ‘insults to a friendly power’. Urquhart saved himself by remembering the headmaster’s talent for missing the point. He told Costley-White that the Mercedes-Benz was plum-coloured (plum being the colour reserved in England for the royal family’s Daimlers). ‘My dear boy,’ the headmaster replied, ‘why didn’t you tell me this before?’ The diplomatic protest was rejected, and Ribbentrop was told to arrive at school on foot.15
Political activism was unknown in the Westminster School of Philby’s time, although there were many lessons in the power games of adulthood. The masters, like their pupils, were embroiled in feuds, jealousies, alliances and stratagems. Wollheim recalled John Bowle interrupting a history lesson when he saw the French master walking outside in the yard. ‘There goes Claridge,’ he said, as he opened the mullioned class-room window. ‘Spit whenever you see him, boys, like this!’ And Bowle expectorated across Little Dean’s Yard. Bowle’s political hero was Frederick II, the thirteenth-century Holy Roman Emperor who was excommunicated by the Pope. Philby may have absorbed his taste for excommunicants from Bowle.16
Mutual antipathy flourished between Philby and the Reverend Kenneth Luce, who was housemaster of the King’s Scholars. Admirers thought Luce was a fine earnest Christian, while his detractors sneered at his sanctimony. Philby evaded confirmation by telling Luce that he had not been baptized. He cannot have been impervious to the annual Armistice Day ceremony when the King’s Scholars gathered at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. But he was always indifferent to beauties of English landscape and architecture: the Abbey seemed a remnant of Gothic barbarity, and the services like the entrails of disembowelled superstition. Dreary, complacent preaching made him receptive to Marx’s view that Christianity was a futile sham which upheld class privilege. A quarter of a century after leaving Westminster, when Philby had children of his own, he showed an invincible hostility to them learning the abracadabra of religious dogma.17
English Christianity after 1918 had the spiritual equivalent of a vitamin deficiency: parishioners were numbed in their reflexes, and enfeebled in belief. Ninety thousand people panting for the kick-off at the Wembley cup final might sing ‘I need Thy presence every passing hour’, but they did not mean it. Churchgoing declined. There were 28 million baptized, 8 million confirmed and 2.75 million communicant members of the Church of England in 1927. Baldwin was the only inter-war Prime Minister with conventional religious faith. Lloyd George and Bonar Law were agnostics, Chamberlain was a Unitarian and MacDonald belonged to the Union of Ethical Societies. ‘As we move away from the War, we are able to see its real magnitude,’ reflected Hensley Henson, the Bishop of Durham, on Armistice Day of 1922. ‘What a full-flowing spring of malediction it was! All our present perplexities seem to run back to it. We are at our wit’s end [sic] to know how to regain the positions from which it swept us … the War has given the coup de grâce to the Church of England.’18
Fewer people found the Incarnation and the Resurrection credible. ‘We shall never get over Christianity, yet not two in a hundred of my acquaintances thought a future life worth discussing,’ Vansittart recalled of ‘the early post-Christian era’ of the 1920s. Polite agnosticism characterized the decade as much as muscular Christianity or evangelicalism had been the orthodoxy of previous generations. ‘Sin’ became a joke-word for many. Hell and theories of eternal punishment were dismissed as inventions to frighten people into behaving well. Prophecies and miracles were treated as if they were fungoid hallucinations. ‘Our Lord Jesus Christ’ became merely the supreme example of a good man. This change in attitude was as momentous as any event in English history since the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity. It resulted from the convergence of several influences: eighteenth-century scepticism; nineteenth-century Darwinism; disbelief in the verbal inspiration of the Bible; a new materialism which discredited ideals of personal service; and the bellicosity of many clerics during the 1914–18 war which seemed to deny the gospel of the Prince of Peace.19
Equal to all these influences was the blatancy of Christian sexual hypocrisy. How else can one explain the success of two bestsellers of 1921, Robert Keable’s novel Simon Called Peter and Somerset Maugham’s story ‘Rain’? Keable was a Cambridge graduate who had resigned holy orders to write his autobiographical novel. It describes a prudish army chaplain who loses his faith in the carnage of trench warfare, visits a brothel and eventually goes to bed with a nurse who gives renewed meaning to his life. The book sold 600,000 copies during the 1920s, and had over sixty reprints. Arthur Winnington-Ingram, the peevish Bishop of London, prevented its dramatization on stage in 1925. The novel ‘scandalised the clergy’ by depicting a fornicating parson questioning his faith, and devalued ‘all we have ever taught about self-control [and] chastity’, the Bishop complained to the theatrical censors. He imagined taking friends to see a production: ‘any nice girl would, I think, be sick at seeing any man and a woman emerge from the bedroom where they had spent the night, in their night-dresses’. Comparably, Maugham’s ‘Rain’ offers an unforgiving picture of what was to become a stock type, a sexually repressed, punitive Protestant clergyman. In this case, a self-deluding vicar cuts his own throat after raping the prostitute whom he has been persecuting with callous moralizing. The story resonated with readers, for it inspired three Hollywood film versions between 1928 and 1953, with Gloria Swanson, Joan Crawford and Rita Hayworth cast as Sadie Thompson.20
If clergy in the pulpit had preached against cant, national pride, social injustice, economic disparity and backward thinking they would have done their duty better than in urging submission to the status quo. They fussed about ‘necking’ in shadowy ‘cinema palaces’ or fulminated over mixed swimming in the Serpentine, but from the great issues of the time they fled. The puritans ensured that Sunday in every town and city, even London, resembled a neat and hushed cemetery, in which one met only flitting ghosts. The prudery was such that Wollheim was threatened with expulsion from Westminster after he had painted the naked breasts of women in watercolours for an art competition: the trigger for righteous rebuke was the ink dots at the centre of the breasts; these scant acknowledgements of nipples could only excite hateful salacity, groused the headmaster. The efforts at sex education of the muscular Christian who in 1929 succeeded Luce as housemaster of the King’s Scholars were touchingly inept. ‘I say, fellows,’ he would say after evening prayers, ‘are you troubled by dirty thoughts?’ Hearty public school chaplains keeping a straight bat in the pulpit bored dull pupils and infuriated the clever boys. ‘Religion played little part in our lives, and the average sermon in chapel was stuff for ribald comment,’ recalled David Footman. In 1936 he published a novel about a soldier with the Victoria Cross who becomes a confidence trickster because of the post-war spiritual dearth: the tragedy of bishops and schoolmasters, Footman felt, was that they lacked the moral courage to give a better lead.21
After his London furlough year of 1924, St John Philby settled at the port of Jeddah, where he held the local sales agencies for Marconi, Unilever and the Ford motor company. In 1930 he converted to Islam as a way of ingratiating himself as an unofficial adviser to the king, Ibn Saud. His real religion, judged Reader Bullard, was ‘a simple dualism in which the spirit of darkness is represented by His Majesty’s Government’. By 1940 Ibn Saud recognized that the scorn which Philby heaped on British war efforts against Hitler was ‘mentally deranged’. Lord Lloyd told Harker that Philby was ‘a brilliant lunatic’, Sir Alexander Cadogan thought him ‘a crank’, and Guy Liddell, having been advised by a diplomat that Philby was ‘a nasty piece of work’, summarized the FO view as: ‘in Mr Philby’s world there is only Mr Philby. Loyalty and disloyalty are only words to him.’22
An otherwise helpful biography published in 1973 opens with the declaration: ‘Kim Philby grew up in a climate of moral arrogance which armour-plated him for life against the assaults of doubts.’ Its authors claim that his every major adult decision ‘betrays the imprint of the father’. St John’s rumbustiousness overshadowed ‘the childhood of his gentle-natured son, and it is questionable whether Kim ever fully emerged from it’. The months in 1924 between twelve-year-old Kim’s departure from his Eastbourne school and his arrival at Westminster were ‘a summer of intense indoctrination’, they wrote. ‘St John took this promising child and pumped him full of his special brand of self-righteousness,’ which was the making of a traitor.23
These assertions are wrong. Any paternal influence was spasmodic and remote. The spiritual vacuum of the 1920s influenced Philby’s mentality more than the rowdy nonconformity of his father. He was not a pliable character who could be stamped with someone else’s impression. As an adult he enjoyed deceit. A successful betrayal gratified him. He liked covert work, arcane influence and equivocation. In all this he was the opposite of his father, who never shied away from truth-telling in its most aggressive, open, implacable and arrogant forms. The older man relished publicity, courted controversy and sprang headlong into confrontation. The younger man’s undercover life was the antithesis.
The second of the Cambridge spies, Donald Maclean, was born in May 1913. He was the third of four sons of Donald Maclean, a Cardiff solicitor who had been secretary of the city’s Chamber of Commerce before his election as a Liberal MP in 1906. The records of the Registrar General provide social statistics to place – in general and limited terms – the Philby, Maclean and other families of the Cambridge spies. The sealed files of the Inland Revenue yield none of the more significant data on their money. The distinctions of attitudes and prospects between the hereditary ruling orders, the gentry, the official and officer classes, the learned classes of lawyers and clergy, the expanding professional classes, and the varieties of business families were sharp and at variance with one another. It is bad enough to blur them, but worse to forget that these semi-defunct conventions were a less vital force than family income, which was what kept both individuals and families alive. To give total attention to class stratification when assessing the Cambridge spies is like trying to understand foxes by studying a dead mask and brush hung on a wall as a trophy. To understand the living creatures one must go to a fox’s den and spy on the vixen sheltering, feeding and frolicking at home with her cubs.
Maclean’s boyhood home was at 6 Southwick Place close to Paddington station. It was a better address than Acol Road, but unfashionably north of Hyde Park. ‘Paddington wasn’t smart, but the street had an independent air,’ the youngest Maclean son, Alan, recalled. The father served temporarily as leader of the parliamentary Liberal party in 1919–20, after a general election in which most of its frontbench leaders had lost their parliamentary seats. There was not a single ex-Cabinet minister available to take the post, which went by default to Sir Donald Maclean. He could neither dominate nor inspire colleagues, but he kept liberalism alive in parliament during the hectic illiberal opportunism of the Lloyd George premiership. Opponents recognized that he was dutiful and plucky: his manners were unassuming but a trifle smug. Robert Vansittart called him ‘prosaic’. He died of a heart attack, induced by overwork as Minister of Education in the National Government, in 1932. The newly widowed Lady Maclean opened a jolly little shop called the Bee in Church Walk, a winding alley off Kensington High Street. There she sold pretty and comfortable wool garments made by amateur knitters, and stylish straw hats, and had a hundred different jigsaw puzzles which customers could borrow like books from a lending library. Donald Maclean helped to scrub and redecorate the Bee before its opening.24
In 1926 Maclean went as a pupil to Gresham’s School at Holt, on the Norfolk coast. This was a school with rare liberal credentials. Science had priority on the curriculum; Greek was ignored; there was minimal fagging and beating; there were neither privileges for senior boys nor colourful caps to distinguish successful games-players; few bounds were set on pupils roaming outside the school grounds. Gresham’s headmaster James Eccles was a prude who bustled about the school in a pompous way carrying an armful of books. He interviewed every pupil after his arrival, adjured each of them to promise to avoid indecency or swearing, and to report any other boy who transgressed. Pupils resented this system of informants and developed an easy facility in evading surveillance.
What was the public school code which nature’s rebels strove to defy or subvert? Governors, headmasters and housemasters saw the task of these boarding schools as preparing boys for the hierarchies of adult life. Pupils were trained to obey rules without complaint. Sir John Masterman, a crucial figure in MI5 during the 1940s, recalled of his Edwardian boyhood: ‘My own school-days were not mournful, for I shunned eccentricities – indeed I was almost obsessively anxious to conform to expected standards and to do the right thing.’ A housemaster at Eton, writing a reference in 1919 for his pupil Arthur Reade, whose adult life was to be dogged by the suspicions of MI5, gave him ‘a perfectly honest testimonial of moral character’ but warned of unamenable opinions. ‘Here he was not popular among his fellows, for he was undoubtedly a prig, crude in his views and more than crude in his readiness to air them. And they were not the views that recommended themselves to conservative schoolboys. He thought it his business and privilege to be a “free-thinker” in the midst of a society that thought, if at all, in fetters.’25
If loyal conformity to school rules conduced to group satisfaction, individual self-assertion did not. The imaginative vitality of a few inspirational schoolmasters enriched their pupils’ lives, but the majority were sententious men who kept anxious control of their pupils by virtue of a regime based on mindless regulations and violence. Few boys were fools, especially about the pointless school ideal of manliness isolated from sexual activity. Pupils could look solemn, and mock inwardly, at schoolmasters whose idea of sex education was to tell pupils: ‘If a man takes a man into a corner of the room and talks to a man, a man shouldn’t listen.’26
Maclean’s clan chief at Gresham’s was a pupil called James Klugmann. His father was a London merchant dealing in rope and twine, who had been born in Bavaria and had married the daughter of an importer of tea and coffee named Rosenheim. ‘Kluggers’, a year older than Maclean, was chubby, bespectacled and bookish; he won school prizes, but was a dud at games; his tone was quiet, observant and amusing. He felt isolated at Gresham’s as ‘the clever oddity’, and provoked the school authorities by calling himself communist. He had scant notion of what communists believed or did, but started reading texts so as to be convincing in his new role.27
Klugmann and Maclean thrived in earnest, intense schoolboy discussions about the purpose of life, and contributed argumentative pieces to school magazines. Maclean’s family creed respected penance and martyrdom, and deprecated the indulgence of personal pleasures and desires; but under Eccles’s insipid, fretful preaching the boy lost all reverence for biblical teachings. He left the school primed by Klugmann to accept new doctrinal authority. It is unlikely that, outside school, the two friends saw much of one another. The benefits of compartmentalizing what is important, and keeping it remote from home life, was a valuable lesson of boarding school existence. To reveal one’s closest friends to one’s family, like confiding one’s secret ambitions, was to court the possibility of humiliation. Neither boy exposed at home what mattered to him most. Despite the distance kept between them outside Gresham’s, the ideas which were swapped there shaped Maclean’s political direction.
Another early influence on Maclean, Burgess and Blunt proved as formative of their temperament as Marxist writings. From early manhood Maclean had a favourite book: Wilfrid Scawen Blunt’s Diaries 1888–1914. His wife described it as his ‘bible’, and took a volume in her luggage during her clandestine flight to join him in Russia in 1953. Burgess, too, as an adolescent was smitten by the diaries and inspired by the diarist’s riotous path to perdition. Anthony Blunt was a first cousin twice removed of Scawen Blunt (not, as is often repeated, his great-nephew). He was attracted by the avant-garde dissidence of which his parents disapproved.28
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt was a landowner, poetaster, philanderer and self-obsessed hedonist. He championed anti-colonialism, loathed industrial capitalism and wrote in a retort to Rudyard Kipling that the white man’s burden was the burden of his cash. His hostility to the British military occupation of India, Ireland and Egypt led to his short-term imprisonment. He impressed Burgess and Blunt, and inspired Maclean, by repudiating the sham-history that assumed the uniqueness and even genius of the British Empire. Patriots averred that this empire had distinctive origins, nobler purposes and a superior destiny to those of the European imperial forerunners, Spain and Portugal. They discounted the way that English colonialism had emulated the sixteenth-century conquistadors and seventeenth-century Dutch licensed trading companies in their administrative methods and repressive rule. They treated English expeditions to the East Indies, to the Caribbean and South America as heroic and beneficent rather than as, in twenty-first-century terms, the forays of neo-liberal bio-prospectors using slavery and violence to seize precious resources from indigenous peoples. Scawen Blunt’s writings and actions made Maclean, Blunt and Burgess into insurrectionary adolescent anti-colonialists years before undergraduate study-groups drew them in early manhood to communism. The trio tended, in their rejection of English nationalism and exceptionalism, towards the conclusion of Kenneth Andrews, the great historian of maritime trade and exploration, that ‘the involvement of England in the process of European overseas expansion was a natural consequence of her integral role in the commercial, political and cultural life of Europe’.29
In the first quarter of the twentieth century the public schoolboys’ code, instilled by their masters, became petrified as sacred tribal custom: ostracism became the penalty for the slightest deviation in voice, manner, clothes or ideas. Maclean’s outward respect for the cult leaders was convincing. ‘He was a boy of the best type, and his moral character and conduct were exceptionally good,’ reported Gresham’s acting headmaster when asked by the Foreign Office Selection Board for a character reference. ‘I always found him entirely trustworthy, reliable and thoroughly sound.’ After eleven years of boarding school, Maclean was camouflaged in amenability.30
Guy Burgess was the most privileged of the Cambridge spies. He was born in April 1911 at Devonport, where his naval officer father was stationed. There was money on his mother’s side from a small family bank in Portsmouth, and from investments in the utility companies that supplied gas and water to that naval port. Burgess was the only one of the Cambridge ring of five to have a rural childhood, for in 1922 his family settled at West Lodge, in the pretty Hampshire village of West Meon. West Lodge was the home of rentiers, not gentry. It was a low, square Georgian villa with five bedrooms and eight acres of pleasances – flowerbeds, shrubberies, a walled kitchen garden, paddocks and woodland. There were neither hunters in the stables nor shooting-parties in the coveys. The Burgesses were not the people for county committees or the magistrates’ bench.
Burgess started as a pupil at Eton in 1924. His housemaster, Frank Dobbs, was cryptic in speech, but tolerant and cultivated: he went to the trouble of resuming contact with his most notorious pupil after Burgess had re-emerged in Russia in 1956, and sent terse, sympathetic letters for the solace of an exile. Other Eton housemasters, too, created enclaves of spacious civilized inquiry; but generally the school’s inmates, like most people, exaggerated the importance of whatever was local or national. Modern European history was considered a hopeless subject for schools, with the result that nothing was taught about Europe except for patriotic accounts of wars with France and Spain, and of the struggle to protect other liberties from the influence of the Bishop of Rome. The demotion of modern European ideas is conveyed by an Etonian’s remark that French language and literature were so meanly valued in the school that their teaching was entrusted to Frenchmen. Popularity was the chief ambition of boys at any boarding school. To achieve this, so Cyril Connolly argued in his memoir of Eton, they needed nonchalance, charm, fortitude and moral cowardice, and to hide their intelligence as ‘a good tailor hides a paunch or a hump’. Deceptive powers were requisite for popularity. While conforming to the assumptions of their little clan, uttering its war-cries and skirmishing with its enemies, boys like Burgess mastered the craft of silent dissent from the group voice.31
Burgess’s father, who died in September 1924, had intended him for the Royal Navy. Three months after his father’s death he left Eton for Dartmouth Naval College, where he was to train as a naval officer. Dartmouth cadets in the 1920s endured martinet rules, constant shouting and perpetual menaces. Everything was done at top speed, by the clock, and in strict time with everyone else. Cadets were forbidden to address a cadet in a year above or below them. ‘Everyone was forced into a mould; there was a discipline of iron, and a requirement of absolute efficiency, which pardoned no faults and forgot no weaknesses,’ according to Masterman, who was a Dartmouth cadet some years before Burgess. Threats of violence ruled the place. There were savage beatings for minor infractions, such as talking after lights out.32
Although Burgess was an incorrigible scamp, he learnt at Dartmouth to accept discipline and to dissemble his feelings. His dependable punctuality, so essential for a spy keeping rendezvous and the one orderly element in his chaotic adulthood, may have been instilled by the naval college’s obsession with drill and timing. He began to learn how to lead colleagues. The Daily Mail’s claim in 1956 that he had been expelled for theft was an easy slur that the newspaper knew would be hard to disprove. The likeliest reason for Burgess leaving Dartmouth in 1927 is that he decided against a naval career, convinced his mother that he should leave and engineered his departure by persuading a medical officer that his eyesight was too weak for navigation.
He returned to Dobbs’s house at Eton, where he prospered. Some contemporaries remembered him as self-confident: others as insecure, and therefore too ingratiating. At Eton, if not Dartmouth, he will have enjoyed his first sexual experiences, which involved, in the phrase of his fellow Etonian Anthony Powell, ‘a lot of manual labour’. His name was linked with that of David Hedley, a tall, sturdy blond, who was a King’s Scholar, an able classicist, who won his colours playing rugby in the first XV, was a captain in the Eton Wall Game, a tennis champion and rower, edited the Eton College Chronicle and was elected a member of the most privileged and select of the Eton societies, Pop (from which Burgess had been excluded when he was proposed as a candidate). In addition to sexual tussles with Burgess, this sporting and academic prodigy had a romantic attachment to the young Citroën motor-car heir A. J. (‘Freddie’) Ayer; but when Hedley embraced Ayer and told him that he loved him, Ayer felt embarrassed and could not respond physically. Hedley had later importance in the development of the Cambridge spies: it seems that the hooligan ransacking of his undergraduate rooms in Cambridge by Hawks’ Club hearties was a factor in Maclean joining the CPGB.33
During Burgess’s last year at Eton, his widowed mother Evelyn (‘Eve’) Burgess married John Bassett, a lieutenant colonel in the Royal Berkshire Regiment, who had been awarded the Distinguished Service Order and Légion d’honneur during the European war. Bassett’s position as man-of-the-house at West Lodge was recognized with an entry in Who’s Who, which he retained when the Bassetts moved to Ascot in 1932. As further confirmation that Burgess’s background was notable, but not consequential, Bassett was deleted from Who’s Who after 1941 when, because of paper shortages, a quarter of the less significant entries were deaccessioned and never restored. The Bassetts had by then moved to a villa, Oakhurst, at East Woodhay in Berkshire.
Burgess excelled in history, which was taught at Eton with stress on the personalities, powers and foibles of great men. He treated the subject as if it was a gigantic gossip column in which everyone was somehow related and many had sonorous names. Rebellious radicalism was combined with nostalgic Toryism. Knight errantry and squalor were opposing attractions for him. He later told Murray Gladstone, a camp Etonian employed in the duty-free department of Selfridge’s, to whom he sub-let his Old Bond Street flat in 1950, that when young he had faced a momentous decision: ‘whether to be a great Christian or a communist’.34
Anthony Blunt was born in a Bournemouth vicarage in September 1907. The prevailing temper of his parents’ household was of puritanical piety, social duty, missionary zeal and good works. His father was a Church of England clergyman whose undoubtable intelligence was cramped by his narrow emotional outlook. His mother’s family had generations of service in the administration of India. At home her skimping made life unnecessarily spartan. Fires were kept low, lightbulbs had dim wattage, chairs were hard. She scolded her sons if they showed signs of softness. The eldest of the Blunt sons said that their family was ‘emotional, sentimental, gullible’.35
In 1912, when Blunt was aged four, his father was appointed chaplain of the Anglican community in Paris. St Michael’s Church stood a few yards from the British embassy, and the Ambassador Lord Bertie of Thame attended services, but Stanley Blunt was not adjunct to the embassy and ministered to a diverse group of English residents in the French capital and its suburbs. Like many clergy, he had a theatrical vanity, and played to the diplomats and smart visitors in his congregation, but the claims of some writers that Blunt’s family had moved in an exclusive Parisian set were fantasy. The family lacked the money, style and inclination for smartness. For two years Blunt attended a Paris day school, where he became proficient in French. In 1921 his parents returned to London, where his father was given the cure of souls in the parish of St John the Evangelist, Paddington. This was a small but prosperous parish, which included Southwick Place, where the Maclean family lived (although they were Presbyterians rather than members of the Church of England).36
Some months previously Blunt had gone as a prize scholar to Marlborough College. The school, which had been founded in 1843 to educate the sons of clergymen, was ‘not a rich man’s school’, said the old Marlburian Footman. Classrooms were icy cold. Beds were stiff. Boys were kept hungry, with stale bread, watery bread-and-milk and perhaps a small kipper or sausage for breakfast; the only warm meal was at lunchtime, when the food was scanty and foul. Footman suspected that the ‘low diet’ was intended to reduce the sexual libido of pupils. He listed two benefits from his four years at Marlborough. ‘My tendency to show off was quickly and drastically trimmed. It was good for me to have my self-confidence lopped: I could so easily have become over-pleased with myself.’ Marlborough also taught him to doubt the pompous pronouncements of higher authorities. For the rest of his life he was an ironist about leadership. Like other Marlburians, Footman left the school still a ‘muddled adolescent with little sense of purpose, little capacity for sustained effort, little self-confidence and a bundle of inhibitions’.37
Marlborough’s headmaster Cyril Norwood was a profuse writer on English boarding school management. He insisted that caning was not felt to be a degradation by his pupils, and provided a quick, effective way for prefects and house captains to quash ‘uppishness’ and insubordination. He was blind to senior boys’ abuse of their powers to thrash other pupils. The shrill anxiety expressed in Norwood’s writings about adolescent sexuality was as unpleasant as that of the clergyman in Maugham’s story ‘Rain’. Footman found that his Marlborough masters were divisible into two categories: ‘potential enemies, to be evaded and outwitted, and potential figures of fun, to be warily exploited’. One housemaster’s idea of sex education was to tell pupils: ‘You might find some white matter exuding from your private parts. Don’t worry about it. It’s only a sort of disease like measles.’38
Blunt did not have a hot bath for five years, which may explain his adult need to take two hot baths a day. Instead, he had to wash in a ‘tolly’, the school name for a hip-bath. A school custom required that pupils had to upend and pour the dirty water over their heads when they had finished washing. The sight of Blunt’s white skin and skinny body reminded boys of a candle: hence his school nickname ‘the Taper’. Until the age of sixteen Marlburians spent their days, when not toiling in classrooms or competing on sports fields, in a vast barbarous barn known as Upper School. It had a hoodlum culture overseen by six prefects chosen for their sporting prowess and armed with canes which they swished on the backsides of smaller boys. ‘The only law was a jungle law of force,’ recalled one victim, ‘and the special sufferers were the individualists.’ For three years Blunt lived in fear that he would have to undergo the ordeal of ‘basketing’ in Upper School, although it appears that he never did. This involved an unpopular boy being stripped almost naked, having ink and treacle poured over his head, being shoved into a big wicker basket heaped with filthy rubbish and then hoisted with ropes to the ceiling beams. The master-in-charge was always forewarned of an imminent basketing so that he did not commit the solecism of inadvertently interrupting the fun.39
Blunt, who was hopeless at sports, had two miserable years at Marlborough before he began to devise avocations and find affinities. Another clergyman’s son, with whom he shared a study, recalled: ‘I don’t think he was physically beaten up, but certainly he was made to feel a misfit, a pansy, and so on.’ His housemaster Hugh Guillebaud mistrusted boys who preferred books and ideas to sports and actions, and deplored the reproductions of paintings by Matisse and Rouault hanging in Blunt’s study as indecent. He liked it even less when, in 1924, Blunt and two other pupils founded the Marlburian magazine The Heretick. In it they railed against the patriotic teaching of history, competitive games, the OTC and philistinism.40
Just as Maclean forged a defensive pact with Klugmann, so Blunt was allied in an entente cordiale with Louis MacNeice (the son of a bishop). Both youths rejected military heroics, colonial pioneers and the ‘divine mission’ of the British Empire. They decried Kipling and Elgar. They tried to be subversive in every way, Blunt recalled, ‘but we were rebels within the law, and we were careful enough and clever enough to carry out our crusade without ever infringing the rules of the school’. This taught him lessons of subterfuge for the future. MacNeice in his memoirs described Blunt as ‘the dominant intellectual’ of Guillebaud’s boarding-house, with ‘a precocious knowledge of art and habitual contempt for conservative authorities. He was very tall and very thin and drooping, with deadly sharp elbows and the ribs of a famished saint; he had cold blue eyes, a cutaway mouth and a wave of soft brown hair falling over his forehead …’ He preferred objects to people. He thought it low to talk politics.41
The two friends spent interminable hours in Socratic disputes, gossip and ribaldry. They parroted the fashionable highbrow idiom, such as ‘too devastatingly baroque’, and aped the camping of Oxford aesthetes by bowling a hoop around the school, and playing catch with a huge painted rubber ball on the hallowed playing-fields. During their last term in the summer of 1926, they cavorted on the Wiltshire downs, with a blue silk handkerchief floating from the strap of Blunt’s wrist-watch, and returned to school with their arms full of stolen azaleas to eat an iced walnut cake or bananas and cream in their study. On hotter afternoons they lazed away afternoons lying naked on the grassy banks of the school’s bathing place, eating strawberries and cherries and reciting Latin poetry.42
The regimes at Gresham’s, Marlborough and other boarding schools taught pupils a smooth-mannered duplicity. Boys prospered by giving outward deference to teachers and housemasters for whom they felt inward scorn. They learnt to give pleasant smiles while seeming to conform to rules which they intended to break. Institutional life, not parental influence, made Blunt, Burgess, Maclean and Philby what they were. They disliked the bullying, discomfort, injustice and surveillance of their schooling. Like their contemporary Kenneth Clark at Winchester they accepted these hardships as ‘the invariable condition of growing up’ rather than as personal attacks upon themselves. Boarding school life honed their cunning. It imbued each of them with a dislike of small-islander tribalism. Like Clark, they were emphatically not upper class in their backgrounds, allegiances, ambitions or habits. Kilburn and Paddington, or West Hampstead and Hyde Park as their families preferred to say, were not top-floor places any more than they were basement. The Cambridge spies came from the mezzanine class.43