In the autumn of 1936, Burgess met a young man who was to be his on-and-off lover and general manservant for the next fourteen years. Jack Hewit had been born in Gateshead in 1917, the son of a tinsmith working for the Coke and Gas Company, making and repairing gas meters. His mother had committed suicide when he was twelve by swallowing aspirin in a park and he had come to London in 1932, working first as a page-boy and then a telephone operator at Ilchester Chambers, a hotel in St Petersburgh Place, Bayswater, before becoming a dancer. At five feet seven inches, however, he was too short to make a regular living as a chorus-line dancer and he had picked up only the odd job in provincial theatres.
Hewit later recollected:
When I first saw him, although then I didn’t know who he was, he was sitting in a car outside the stage door of the South London Palace, a rundown theatre in the Walworth Road in South London, where I was appearing in the chorus of a twice-nightly version of No, No, Nanette. I wondered what this very good-looking man was doing there. I thought maybe he’s waiting for one of the girls in the show, so, being nosy, I waited inside the stage door to see who it was he was waiting for. I was very attracted. Then one of the boys came down from the dressing room and went out and straight into the car, which then drove off. The next day I asked Douglas, the boy who had gone off in the car, who the handsome stranger was. A friend from the BBC, he said. ‘Keep your eyes off.’ The man in the car was Guy.1
Shortly afterwards Hewit was in a pub popular with homosexuals, The Bunch of Grapes, in the Strand, but generally known as ‘The 45’ from its address, where he was picked up by a man who suggested Hewit accompany him to a party. The two men walked the few hundred yards to a side door in Whitehall:2
There were about twenty people, all men, plenty to drink, but nothing to eat, alas. Brian Howard and Anthony Blunt were there, though I didn’t know them then. Suddenly I spotted the person who’d been waiting for Douglas. He came over while I was being cornered by a vast man called Rudolf Katz and said, ‘Is this old bugger pestering you?’ Katz moved off, I said I must go, and Guy said, ‘I’ll give you a lift, if you wait a minute’ … we drove to Chester Square where Guy had a flat and that was the beginning of it … he drove me to a coffee stall on the Embankment, where I had a meat pie and a cup of tea, and then to Chester Square. He lived on the top floor of a tall house opposite St Marks. We went to bed together for the first time.
That was how I met Guy Burgess and that was the start of a relationship which was to last some fourteen years. I didn’t move into Chester Square right away, I kept my room in Oxford Terrace, but I used to go to Chester Square every day. It got to be a sort of routine. I would tidy the place, see that his shirts had buttons on them, brush his clothes, which were always crumpled and covered in cigarette ash, and look after things generally. He was the untidiest man I have ever known … In the beginning, our relationship was more like manservant and master.3
In turn, Burgess, who called Hewit ‘Mop’, tried to interest him in literature, encouraging him to read Jane Austen and Mrs Gaskell, though attempts to politicise him came to nothing, with Hewit claiming he couldn’t afford to be a socialist. With £700 a year from a Canadian trust fund, Burgess could afford to be generous and would buy Jackie clothes, including a suit from Hawes and Curtis.
Burgess had always had a thing for working-class men and Jackie remembered how ‘He wore me like he wore a badge. I was Jackie Hewit from Gateshead-on-Tyne … but it didn’t stop him taking me everywhere. One night he gave me an Old Etonian tie to wear, telling me to tell people I was at College … He assumed that no one you would meet would have been at College. We both went out with OE ties – of course, no one asked.’4
Though Hewit didn’t move into Chester Square until 1937, he did all the domestic chores and cooking:
I was a keen cook. Guy liked kedgeree or shepherd's pie, nursery food. I’d make shepherd's pie, using smoked eel that Guy would get from Fortnum’s. He had his own dish, which he’d make when he decided to have a day in bed. First he’d order a dozen bottles of red wine from the Victoria wine shop. He’d put a kipper or smoked haddock and baked beans with oatmeal or rice, all in the same pan, and cook it up. It smelt horrid, but he’d say, ‘This is the sustenance I need for the day – go away!’ Then he’d stay in bed with all the papers, his books and cigarettes and his pot of stuff, which had no name, drinking red wine all day.5
Hewit also had to organise him. ‘He never opened letters. No bills, no bank letters. I always had to open them and tell him when they had to be paid. The letters at the flat were always bills – his own personal mail went to the [Reform] club. The telephone, gas, electricity – and Coutts – never opened. The phone was often cut off, if I didn’t pay it. He was a great telephoner, he never stopped. We had a lovely number Regent 1530.’6
Though Burgess now had a regular partner, it did not curtail his sexual exploits and the men often fought. ‘He was the most promiscuous person who ever lived. He slept with anything that was going and he used to say anyone will do, from seventeen to seventy-five.’ Hewit added, ‘He didn’t have a type, but I suppose they had to be attractive and come from a working-class background … If anyone invented homosexuality, it was Guy Burgess.’7
Goronwy Rees was later to write:
Side by side with his political activities, Guy conducted a very active, very promiscuous and somewhat squalid sexual life. He was gross and even brutal in his treatment of his lovers, but his sexual behaviour also had a generous aspect. He was very attractive to his own sex and had none of the kind of inhibitions which were then common to young men of his age, class and education … In this he was unlike his friends at Cambridge, who were nearly all homosexual, but a good deal more timid than Guy, a good deal more frustrated, and a good deal less successful in their sexual adventures … At one time or another he went to bed with most of these friends, as he did with anyone who was willing and was not positively repulsive, and in doing so he released them from many of their frustrations and inhibitions.
Burgess’s cartoon of an unknown boy.
Such affairs did not last for long; but Guy had the faculty of retaining the affection of those he went to bed with, and also, in some curious way, of maintaining a kind of permanent domination over them. This was strengthened because, long after the affair was over, he continued to assist his friends in their sexual lives, which were often troubled and unsatisfactory, to listen to their emotional difficulties and when necessary, find suitable partners for them … One could not help wondering whether the services he performed for his friends were genuinely given, as they themselves believed, out of altruism, or whether they were the result of some conscious or unconscious wish to dominate.8
There seemed to be another element to his success, apart from his boyish charm, attested to by two of his former lovers. James Lees-Milne recounted how Stuart Preston ‘told me Guy Burgess was endowed with an asset which had to be seen to be believed. It was the secret weapon of his charm. Anyone so endowed could get away with murder, and he did. “Yes,” I said, “but surely not with every sort of man.” “Every sort of man,” S said. “He was surely very grubby,” I said. “Very,” he said.’9 Whilst Brian Howard confided to Harold Acton ‘that his equipment was gargantuan – “What is known as a whopper, my dear” – which might account for his success in certain ambiguous quarters.’10
‘Burgess found lovers in every social category,’ wrote his Soviet handler. ‘He had a strong preference for lorry drivers and other working men, whom he habitually paid for sex. He liked their company and would cross-examine them mercilessly about how they were coping with the Depression.’11 What is interesting is that despite his desire to dominate and control in life, according to a long-term lover, in lovemaking he preferred the passive role, ‘he wanted the female role in sex … to be fucked’.12
Hewit could not address Burgess’s sado-masochistic tendencies, which were often indulged on trips abroad. In August 1937, for example, Burgess was amongst a group that included Brian Howard, who went to Salzburg, where the whole party dressed up in lederhosen with ‘Brian lashing Guy all the way down the table with purple-paragraph whips. Brian used Guy by alternately laughing with him and then lashing out to smash him. Sitting there at the head of the table, he was like the driver of a ten-mule team, his cracking whip lashing out all down the table, encouraging some, crushing others. To Guy, above all, Brian was unsparing, but Guy loved it …’13 Burgess’s promiscuous sex life, however, caught up with him. In January 1937 he had contracted a bad dose of syphilis and had to be hospitalised for a painful course of mercuric chemotherapy, regarded as the only effective treatment at the time.14 The following year Burgess’s doctor Pierre Lansel wrote a medical certificate to the BBC stating that ‘Mr Guy Burgess has been to see me this afternoon and I suggest that he … have a holiday considering the state of his nerves.’15 The background was that he had been arrested and charged with soliciting at Paddington Station. As members of his Chester Square coterie told each other, half amused and half fearful for themselves: ‘Guy’s met his Waterloo – at Paddington Station!’16
The plaintiff had claimed that a suggestive note had been pushed under the partition of the cubicle he was in. Burgess responded with his usual combination of panache and hauteur that he had been minding his own business reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch, when someone had passed him an indecent note. All he had done was glance at it and send it back. He was cleared after an examination of the handwriting, but the episode had triggered a nervous breakdown, and it was felt prudent he leave the country. He spent the first part of his convalescence staying with Blunt at the Hotel Recamier in the Place St Sulpice in Paris, before he moved on later in the month with his mother and Blunt to the Miramar Hotel in Cannes.17
It was there that he met the seventeen-year-old Peter Pollock, whom Hewit was to describe as ‘ravishing … the most beautiful boy I have ever seen’.18 Pollock, the part-heir to an engineering company, Accles and Pollock, had just left public school and was staying with his widowed grandfather in the same hotel. ‘He was blown away by me. So was Anthony,’ remembered Pollock, ‘but Guy got there first.’ Burgess and Pollock immediately began a love affair, even though the inexperienced Peter ‘had not realised that this sort of thing went on after school’.19
It was to be the beginning of probably the most important of Burgess’s many love affairs and Pollock would often stay at Chester Square. Pollock later admitted that he had not enjoyed sex with Burgess, but he ‘adored all the people he could pour into my lap – all the people I’d read about – Ros Lehmann and E.M. Forster. And I was fascinated by his brain. He was the best conversationalist I ever knew, apart from Francis Bacon.’20
On 8 April Dr Lansel wrote again to the BBC, explaining that Burgess would not be returning from his convalescence in the south of France in the near future:
Mr Guy Burgess’s mother, Mrs Bassett, came to see me today on her return from the south of France, where she has been looking after her son. She informs me that he is better, but she did not think him well enough to return just yet. He is still in a very nervous state and suffering from insomnia.21
Burgess was, in fact, now back in Paris, where he was to remain until the end of April. On 9 April, on Hotel Ritz notepaper, he wrote to Rosamond Lehmann, who was in the city with her brother John, talking at a conference organised by the Société des Intellectuels Antifascistes. He was sleeping most of the day and deeply upset about the political situation, admitting to ‘the most appalling political schizophrenia … I am spending half my time here and half with Eddy Pfeiffer (see enclosed cutting from Populaire, which I boastfully send all round) helping to form French Cabinet. I’ve known about Daladier for 1½ years – there may I think be trouble … I’ll be back when I’m well. At the moment London and people seem impossible.’22
There was more to Burgess’s extended sojourn in France than his nerves. On 11 March German troops had marched into Austria and two days later the country had been annexed. By taking himself off to Paris, Burgess had been able to obtain from Pfeiffer a detailed account of the French Cabinet’s discussions and the positions taken by its various members with regard to action against the Anschluss – information he immediately passed back, not just to Moscow Centre, but also to his new employer – British intelligence.