Burgess’s career was going from strength to strength at the BBC. In his end of year report, Maconachie provides a snap shot of the young producer:
Brilliantly able, widely read and with a keen sense of humour, he’s delightful company. Has produced some admirable programmes and is always likely to do so when really interested. Seems to be rather lacking in self-confidence when faced with an awkward situation, and owing to natural impatience with routine is inclined to make slips in matters of detail. He realises this and has improved a great deal in this direction recently. Is keen on his work and with more experience will be of even more value than he is now.1
Against the backdrop of the increasing international crises, Burgess was now pressing the BBC to have a diplomatic correspondent with close access to the Foreign Office and with a room in Broadcasting House, security cleared, which could receive diplomatic telegrams. Though Burgess modestly put himself forward, nothing came of the idea. He now proposed to influence events using his mentor Harold Nicolson.2
Harold Nicolson was a regular contributor to The Past Week, in which the speaker would deal discursively with events over the previous week. He was due to broadcast on 5 September and proposed to discuss the Sudeten crisis – the previous day President Benes of Czechoslovakia had accepted the demands for autonomy by the country’s German minority. George Barnes felt Nicolson’s script, which advocated standing by Czechoslovakia to the point of going to war, and not giving in to Hitler’s demands, a policy which would have suited the Russians, should be first approved by the head of the Foreign Office’s News Department, Rex Leeper. Concerned that the talk might appear provocative at a delicate moment in international relations, Leeper showed it to Sir Alexander Cadogan, recently appointed Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, who recommended that the talk not be broadcast. Eventually a compromise was found by Nicolson agreeing to modify the talk, with Barnes ready to cut him off if he strayed across the agreed line.3
On 19 September, at the height of the Czech Crisis, Nicolson confided to his diary, ‘I am met by Guy Burgess and deliver my talk in a voice of ironic gloom. I then go to the Café Royal with Guy, where we meet James Pope-Hennessy, who is almost in tears over England’s shame.’4 Burgess’s own views on the need to stand up to Hitler were clear, informed, and influential on his mentor. He knew from his own clandestine trips between Paris and London that the British government would continue to appease Hitler and had no intention of coming to the aid of Czechoslovakia. This had been confirmed by John Cairncross, reinforcing Soviet suspicions that Britain and France would do a deal to leave Germany free to attack Russia.5
Only public opinion might change the government’s mind and Burgess had a potent weapon at his disposal – his influential current affairs programme, The Past Week. A few days after Nicolson had been muzzled, Burgess wrote to him:
from now onwards, since parliament has stopped sitting, the only talks we are having on world affairs are, in fact, yours, and I am thus able to encourage you to do (what I know you would like to do) – to discuss rather seriously and for most of the talk the various political events of the past week – i.e. to do exactly what you did in your talk about Czechoslovakia ten days ago. I hope we may meet on Monday. Incidentally, you may remember what you said to me about Hitler making a great peace speech? From one or two comments that I have heard, this does seem portentously likely, even going to the extent of coupling it with demands for a conference of the allied powers (? excluding Russia) to make a new settlement to take the place of the Treaty of Versailles for the whole of Southern and Eastern Europe, as well as the colonies.6
The likelihood of war grew more likely as Hitler demanded an immediate occupation by Germany of the German areas of Czechoslovakia. In London, trenches were prepared in parks and gas masks issued. The Soviet Union confirmed its mutual assistance treaty with Czechoslovakia, which mobilised on 23 September, followed by a partial mobilisation by France the next day. On the 26th, Britain warned Germany that if she invaded Czechoslovakia, then Britain and France would go to her assistance, and the next day the British fleet was mobilised. The world held its breath as Chamberlain flew to meet Hitler in Munich. Two days later he returned, having secured ‘Peace in our Time’.7
Though Burgess had not originally commissioned it, he had become involved in one of the most ambitious series put out by the BBC at the time. The Mediterranean was to be a multi-part series on the historical importance of the Mediterranean, broadcast on Thursday evenings from 8.30 to 9 p.m. between October and December, ‘chosen to illustrate the chronic danger of fascist aggression that formed the real background of the wars in Abyssinia and Spain’.8 It was to be anchored by the academic E.H. Carr, with other influential contributors such as Hugh Seton-Watson on the Adriatic, Arnold Toynbee on Turkey, and Sir Ronald Storrs. The series was to be introduced by Winston Churchill on 6 October. In the light of the mounting crisis, Churchill asked to cancel his talk. Burgess, who had met him socially at dinner with Venetia Montagu, telephoned him to try and persuade him to change his mind, and Churchill invited him to come and discuss it.9
On Saturday 1 October, Burgess drove down to Churchill’s country home, Chartwell, twenty miles south of London, in his open-top Ford V8. Burgess’s account of his meeting with Churchill was one he told often and differently – to his biographer, Tom Driberg, he claimed to have been met by the statesman in the garden with a trowel, whilst in an earlier recorded version, he simply stated the butler had taken him to Churchill’s study. Churchill showed Burgess a letter from Benes asking for his advice and assistance. ‘What advice can I return?’ he asked Burgess rhetorically, to which the young man, then still in his twenties, replied, ‘Offer him your eloquence. Stump the country. Make speeches. Awaken people to the issues at stake.’10
Energised, Churchill then told Burgess he wanted to give him a book ‘to celebrate this conversation, which has sustained me’.11 It was a collection of his recent speeches, Arms and the Covenant: While England Slept. In the flyleaf he wrote: ‘To Guy Burgess from Winston S. Churchill to confirm his admirable sentiments. September 1938’, adding that if war broke out and Guy brought him the book, he would remember the conversation and find a job for him.12
The meeting was to be a high point of Burgess’s life. The two men talked alone for hours, united by their common opposition to the policy of appeasement; and Burgess felt he had been taken seriously by a politician he respected. That evening, on Ascot Hill notepaper, Burgess wrote to Churchill with his own analysis of the situation:
Dear Mr Churchill,
I’ve put the broadcast position officially on another sheet. I cannot help writing more personally to thank you for the way you received me today and for your book and the inscription. The one unfortunately is already historic for the world, the other will be for me. I feel I must in the situation we now find ourselves, and since I myself try to feel as a historian (I was a scholar at Cambridge, where I taught for a while), put what I feel on paper to you who listened so sympathetically this morning and on whom, as I see it, so much now depends … Traditional English policy since the reign of Elizabeth, the policy of Marlborough, of Pitt, of Eyre Crowe, of Vansittart, has been blindly set aside to suit the vanity, the obstinacy, and the ignorance of one man, no longer young. We shall be told he has saved the peace, that anything is worth it. This is not true. He has made war inevitable and lost it …
Reviewing Hitler’s rise to power, Burgess continued:
He has tried Force once – and it failed. The Hitler-Ludendorff putsch. He has never forgotten the broken shoulder & the fear of that fiasco. Hitler uses force only against fear, he has been right in that till now, for the odds were against him. Soon they may be against us. That is the simple truth of this crisis – he took what he thought he could get … What is to be done? … you alone have the force and authority to galvanise the potential allies into action … The guarantee of the new Czech Frontier must be made absolute & gun tight … the French must reaffirm the Franco-Soviet pact & Russia must be induced to do this by the promise of consultations with us … I’m sure you will not have read as far as this – if you have and would be prepared to meet again I wish you’d get your secretary to drop me a line. I’m in the London telephone book – or at the BBC. With all wishes for your success. Yours very gratefully, Guy Burgess.13
Back at the BBC on Tuesday, Burgess reported to Barnes in an internal memo:
Mr Churchill complained that he had been very badly treated in the matter of political broadcasts and that he was always muzzled by the BBC … He went on to say that he imagined that he would be even more muzzled in the future, since the work at the BBC seemed to have passed under the control of the Government. I said that this was not, in fact, the case, though just at the moment we were, as a matter of courtesy, allowing the Foreign Office to see scripts on political subjects.
Burgess had scrawled below, ‘The point is W.S.C. seems very anxious to talk.’14 On 23 November Harold Nicolson recorded in his diary:
I go to the Reform to have a talk with Guy Burgess, who is in a state about the BBC. He tells me that a technical talk by Admiral Richmond about our strategic position in the Mediterranean (which had been definitely announced) was cancelled as a result of a telephone message from Horace Wilson to the Director-General. This has incensed him, and he wants to resign and publish why. I urge him to do nothing of the sort.15
This was the second time within a month that the BBC had tried to thwart him. Increasingly frustrated by government interference and censorship, Burgess handed in his resignation, which Maconachie was not unhappy to receive: ‘… he is capable of excellent work, but his successes are spasmodic, and, as he admits himself, he is very unmethodical and forgetful. I recommend that his resignation be accepted, and understand that in his case only a month’s notice is required.’16
But Burgess’s move was not simply pique and on a point of principle. His BBC personnel file on 11 January reported his last day of BBC service: ‘Resigned. To undertake MI activities for the War Office.’17
Burgess had finally secured himself a full-time job in British intelligence, the first of the Cambridge Spies to do so.