Out of Section D and liable for military service, Burgess decided the best option was to try and defer his call-up by returning to the BBC which, lacking experienced staff, were only too happy to have someone with good contacts across government and especially the service departments, someone ‘who knows the working routine of the Department and the snags to avoid in dealing with the speakers and their scripts’ and ‘has to an extent not perhaps possessed by other members of the Department “the propaganda mind”’.1
On 15 January 1941, W.R. Baker at the BBC had written to S.D. Charles at the Ministry of Information, following a conversation with Burgess, ‘in the hope that you may be able to take urgent steps with the Ministry of Labour to obtain a deferment of military service for him. Meanwhile, we have decided to take the risk of bringing him back on to our staff, and he will probably begin his duties with us before the weekend.’2 He added:
I understand that there has been some reorganisation in the MI branch where he was employed, and that by agreement with his chief, Burgess can be – in fact has been – released from his duties and is free to start work with the Corporation … The work of our Home Talks Department in wartime has become very much more important, owing to the propaganda aspect of their output, and the importance of helping to maintain morale by suitably prepared and balanced programmes. In addition to general talks, Burgess will be concerned in supervising a series of talks in our Army Educational Service … I am sure that you will appreciate that there are many pitfalls and difficulties to be met in producing talks under wartime conditions, and we are extremely fortunate in finding that Burgess is available to resume his previous occupation with us, subject to our being able to secure his reservation from military service.3
The new job was a drop in salary from £600 tax free p.a. to £540 p.a. and did not qualify him for membership of the BBC permanent staff or staff pension scheme. It also carried certain restrictions. ‘You agree to devote the whole of your time and attention to the service of the Corporation … You further agree not to undertake work for any other person or firm whatsoever during the continuance of this engagement without the previous written consent of the Corporation.’4
But Burgess had little option – the new job had saved him from being called up – but it didn’t prevent him being as difficult as possible or simply inefficient. By late April he had still not signed his contract letter. ‘You have been asked five times to return your signed contract letter, the last request being my memo dated 9 April’, his personal file notes. He finally signed it on 9 May.
Burgess’s new office – he called it ‘the hutch’ – was on the second floor overlooking Portland Place, with a secretary called Miss Winkle, who insisted it be pronounced ‘Winkol’. One of his first commissions was to ask Aileen Furse, pregnant with Kim Philby’s first child, ‘to give two broadcasts to housewives on Community Kitchens from the personal point of view – i.e. how she built up the ones that she started and how they work’.5 This was for a popular programme Can I Help You?, broadcast twice a month, aimed ‘at helping ordinary listeners to solve some of their wartime problems. In particular, we try in this series to interpret official regulations to people who have difficulty with what must be an intimidating mass of official instructions to the ordinary man.’6 John Green, a BBC colleague, remembered Burgess as:
A most amusing colleague amidst the intellectual effervescence of Talks Department in those days, and throughout the war he (and Norman Luker) and I had coffee together most mornings at Yarners (by the old Queens Hall). This must have gone on for two or three years. Guy drew brilliant cartoons, which he showed us before passing them under the table at the Talks meeting in the afternoon. Sir Richard would usually see and ask for the paper to be passed up, and after a good-natured reproach, proceed with the meeting.7
Sir Richard Maconachie trusted Burgess and one of Burgess’s first tasks was to keep an eye on Maconachie’s behalf on the Religious Affairs department and, in particular, a discussion programme, Three Men and a Parson. The Reverend Eric Fenn, the assistant director of Religious Broadcasting at the time, remembered how Maconachie had ‘got it into his head that the whole of the Religious Affairs department was a nest of fellow-travellers. So he insisted that whenever we held a policy meeting, one of his own men would attend and report back direct what had been decided.’8
Burgess was therefore sent to Bristol to help produce the programme. Fenn later recollected, ‘He was scrupulously fair, entirely uninterested in what was going on, and outside the studio extremely vitriolic.’9 But Fenn thought Burgess a strange choice. ‘We knew Burgess was a spy. Whenever he was drunk – which was most of the time – he used to tell us all about it. I remember one night when he said to me, “When we get into power after the war you, Fenn, will be one of the first to hang from a lamppost.”’10
Burgess, always highly strung, now often inebriated and increasingly bolshie towards authority, was beginning to crack up under the pressures of his various BBC responsibilities and his spying. One episode, after his secretary mistakenly took home the key to his office, triggered a particularly public outburst, as his BBC file reveals. On 29 May 1941, just before 8 p.m., BBC security were called:
to interview a gentleman who was complaining in a high-pitched voice of being unable to enter his room, 316, Langham Hotel. He complained that he had been waiting for an hour to get into his room, and carried on with a long story of complaint that the doors had no right to be locked … Fortunately at that moment a Defence Patrol Officer came along, and told me he was endeavouring to obtain the master key, and would open the door as soon as he had contacted the Patrol who held the key. Mr Burgess then turned to the Patrol Officer and said, ‘Well, go and get on with it!’ in such a domineering manner that the Patrol Officer took exception and passed the comment, ‘You cannot talk to me like that. I am not a dog!’, and proceeded towards the Langham Hotel followed by Mr Burgess.11
The two went in search of the patrolman who had the master key.
However he would not wait for the keys to be obtained and started to break his door down with a fire extinguisher – he has done a lot of damage to the door, made the extinguisher useless, and swamped all the carpet with liquid. Myself and my two Patrolmen are of the firm opinion that Mr Burgess had had too much to drink and his behaviour was objectionable in the extreme.12
The next day Burgess was seen by George Barnes and told to apologise. ‘I said that the importance of the papers which he wanted did not justify him either in being rude to the officers or in taking action into his own hands by trying to raise the fire alarm and to break down the door.’13
On 4 June Burgess apologised, but gave his own version of events, pointing out that the previous month he had raised concerns about locked doors at the Langham, complaining it was a fire risk, that it was difficult for speakers after 6 p.m. to enter the building, and it had taken almost an hour to locate the master key. Burgess was on notice only months after returning to the Corporation.14
An internal memo of 9 June noted, ‘There is no previous record on Burgess’s file of any behaviour of this kind, though in fact we know his conduct was not altogether satisfactory when he was in our service before (see my memo of 10 January 1941 … I recommend that he should be severely reprimanded, required to make a written apology which would be shown to those concerned, and to pay for the damage, and warned that if there is any further trouble he will be terminated.’15
The episode doesn’t appear to have blotted his copy book, because at the beginning of June, he was mooted for the post of European Liaison Officer, as ‘he certainly has a first-class mind and an unrivalled political knowledge’.16
For two weeks in the middle of June Burgess was away on compassionate leave – it’s unclear exactly why – during which Germany suddenly invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June. The BBC thought there would be a new interest in Russian matters and on his return Burgess was asked to come up with ideas of possible speakers and subjects. The result was a memo ‘Draft Suggestions for Talks on Russia’, which, amongst many disclosures, showed his knowledge of Russian literature, perhaps gleaned from friends such as Isaiah Berlin, Moura Budberg and Alexander Halpern.
‘I have had several informal conversations with John Strachey and Professor Bernal and one or two people at the M of I and the Foreign Office, but what follows is not intended to be in any sense a worked-out scheme’, he wrote. He agreed there should be something on War and Peace as:
An illustration of great Russian literature and topical, the crossing of Beresina, Kudenov, Borodin, the burning of Moscow, etc … There is also the famous hunting scene, which is probably the most beautiful description of old Russia and which was Lenin’s favourite passage in Tolstoy … Modern literature: The obvious name here is Zoschenko. This man’s satires are extremely popular in Russia today … There are also young Soviet writers, such as Nicholai Tikhonov and Ilya Ehrenburg.17
He had further suggestions for science and culture, adding rather disingenuously, ‘Dr Klingender, Dr Blunt are possible speakers on art – neither are communists. Christopher Hill (a Fellow of All Souls) is a communist, but is also probably the best authority in England on Russian historical studies.’18 In fact the Marxist art historian Fred Klingender, an active communist at the LSE with John Cornford, and mutual friend with Anthony Blunt, had been under Special Branch observation for many years.19
There were suggestions for speakers on economic planning, Soviet foreign policy, ethnic nationalism, where he put forward ‘John Lehmann, who has written a certain amount of interesting stuff on Trans-Caucasia for the Geographical Magazine and should be safe on this topic.’ Burgess was subtly using his broadcasting position to shape public opinion towards the Soviet Union.