Jack Hewit had spent time in Germany, first with the Army Theatre Club and then as a sergeant in the Counter Intelligence Bureau, before going on to work for the Nizam of Hyderabad in India. At the end of 1947, he returned to London, engaged by a firm of petroleum engineers in Baltic Street called Head Wrightson Processes, as a temporary typist and later as an office manager in the buying department. Burgess had always felt guilty about the way he had treated him. ‘I entirely agree with what you say about Jackie,’ he had written to Pollock during the war, when he’d had a brief fling with Hewit. ‘It is only lately that I have realised how unhappy I make him at times when we’re together. It could never have been the thing … But he made me realise what life cld be – and now he seems to have performed the same miracle for you where I failed. Please send me his address (which I have lost) I want to write blessing him. He has a horrible life.’1
Burgess, often torn between his neediness and desire for sexual freedom, had repaired his relationship with Hewit, who had claimed, ‘I’ve only ever been in love once in my life’ – with Burgess.2 He later remembered how ‘Guy did lovely things. When I was in Germany, ankle-deep in mud, hell, suddenly the post arrived and a box from Fortnum and Mason. There was a bottle of Jicky eau de Cologne …’3
In 1947 Burgess had moved to a new flat, taking over from his colleague in the News Department, Richard Scott, at £150 p.a., and was joined there by Jack Hewit in February 1949.4 No. 3 Clifford Chambers, 10 Bond Street, just off Piccadilly, was on the third floor of a Victorian building reached by narrow, dark stairs covered with a thin, greasy carpet. It consisted of a small hallway tiled in black and white, and two bedrooms, a kitchen and lavatory. The main room was decorated like Chester Square in Burgess’s favourite colours of red, white and blue. White walls and paintwork, red carpet, blue curtains lined with white, a blue-covered settee, two blue armchairs with red cushions, and a large divan covered in red, with blue cushions.
Jack Hewit remembered that ‘in the corner there was a very old harmonium on which Guy would play and sing hymns and bawdy versions of “The Eton Boating Song”, and a version of “La donna è mobile”, which started off, “Small boys are cheap today, cheaper than yesterday”. There was also a record player and several records. His favourite at this time was one I had given him called, “Life gets tedious, don’t it”.’5
However, as Jack Hewit noted:
The loo in Bond Street was the focal room. Situated to the left of the front door, it was painted white and furnished with bookshelves, on which were copies of his favourite books, and a Toulouse La Trec [sic] lithograph of Yvette Gilberte. It was beautifully decorated with pink carpet. Damask wallpaper, pink (what other colour?) blush carpet. No loo seat cover. I wanted to get one, but Guy wouldn’t let me. There was a chandelier from a Portobello Road stall. It had drops which fell down. An ashtray, a box of cigarettes, a box of mints. Guy used to go in at 8.15 and come out at 10. He read the newspaper there, and later his books, in the loo.6
Just around the corner from the flat was Churchill’s, a gentlemen’s club providing the rich and famous with nubile young ladies, many of whom went on to marry into the aristocracy. The club had some 27,000 members and, with its ceilings draped in pleated satin, was a favourite of young officers from the Brigade of Guards and film stars such as Errol Flynn and Terry-Thomas. It had close links with the south London gangster Billy Howard and would later be patronised by the notorious Kray twins. It featured a floorshow with singers and dancers, as well as the more immediate attractions of alcohol and hostesses, who collected cocktail sticks to show how much money they were owed and made private arrangements to engage in after-hours assignations. Burgess quickly became a member and would often drop in for a drink and chat. It proved to be a useful venue for entertaining his contacts – and then compromising them.7
Micky Burn remembered that at the end of January 1948 Burgess came to dinner at his flat in Connaught Square and ‘got almost hysterical because I chanced to put on a recording of Tchaikovsky’s Symphonie Pathetique. “Oh God, Micky, not THAT symphony.”’ In the corridor he tried to kiss Burn, now married, who refused. ‘“Don’t be so pompous.” Then he said that if ever I wanted a room in which to be unfaithful, he had one he could lend me. I remember thinking that if I ever did, and I did now and then, it would not be anywhere of his. I had ceased to trust him, though spying had never entered my head.’8 Shortly afterwards Burn saw him in Piccadilly Circus, ‘very conspicuous in his camel-hair coat, obviously looking for a man. It was a notorious place and I thought he was running a big risk. So I tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Don’t be such a fool.” Guy said, “Are you the police?” Anyhow I got him away and he took me to the Reform Club for a drink instead.’9
Burgess was continuing to see his old circle of friends. Every Monday evening he would go to a music hall with the same small group of friends, most notably Guy Liddell and David Footman, and he would often see Dadie Rylands at the Reform Club. ‘He was a scallywag but very good company, literary, well-read, clever,’ recollected Rylands. ‘He was engaging. He always had some scandal to tell – who was having an affair with whom, what parties had been going on’ but also ‘unscrupulous and keen on the bottle. I don’t think he cared about the truth.’10
It was an unsettled life and Burgess talked of leading a more conventional life, with marriage and children. He was good with children because, in many ways, he was a child himself. His brother Nigel had two sons – Anthony and Simon, who had been born during the war – and Anthony remembers how his Uncle Guy taught him to draw perspective and stairs.11 Goronwy’s daughter, Jenny Rees, remembered Burgess visiting the family, then living in St John’s Wood, next door to Louis MacNeice, just after the war:
Guy was very keen on cooking, and one of his ‘signature dishes’, as I think they would be called now, was soufflé omelette. When he came to see us, there was always a lot of excitement. My sister, Lucy, and I shared a bedroom on the top floor, but could always hear sounds of clinking glasses, raised voices and merriment coming from the kitchen, as Guy and my mother, watched by my father, got together to prepare their supper. We would creep down the stairs in our pyjamas and sit, looking through the banisters, to see what was going on. Part of the art of making a good soufflé omelette is to flip it up into the air, making sure that it returns to the pan, which often involved gymnastics. In Guy’s case, this often involved accidents, too. And I remember once spotting the remains of an omelette stuck quite high up on the kitchen wall, while I ate my breakfast following one of their livelier evenings together.12
‘He dropped hints that he was thinking of getting married, and once at least he professed to have decided on the bride,’ Goronwy Rees later wrote, ‘though I think that the lady in question would have been surprised and perhaps alarmed to know that she had been selected as Guy’s intended victim.’13 His old school-friend Michael Berry later remembered how he ‘met Guy and his fiancée as we both stepped off the train at Paddington, and we shared a taxi as far as his flat in Bond Street, where they both got out. I cannot remember the date, but, at a guess, I should say it was 1947 or early 1948, because I remember mentioning to him a book I had written at that time.’ Burgess claimed it was an ‘experiment’ and Berry never saw or heard of the young woman again.14
Who was the fiancée? A number of names have been put forward. Burgess was attractive to women, who wanted to mother him and clean him up, and he had several heterosexual affairs. Burgess certainly discussed marriage with Peter Pollock’s sister Gale, and Margarita Sagrado, a friend with whom he had a shared love of crosswords, was in love with him. Nigel Burgess, interviewed in 1985, said his brother ‘used to say he would marry Clarissa during the war. He told his mother that.’15 Dadie Rylands remembers Burgess bringing Clarissa Churchill down one weekend to stay with his parents in Devon and introducing her as his fiancée – this may have been the trip where Michael Berry saw them – and the actress Fanny Carby separately claimed Burgess was engaged twice – once to Clarissa Churchill, and once to the daughter of a well-known politician.16
Clarissa Churchill’s relationship with Burgess was certainly closer than she has remembered – a number of contemporaries recollect them being very friendly and there are constant references to her in the letters to Peter Pollock – but it is hard to believe that it extended to getting married. Anthony Blunt, when interviewed by MI5 officer Peter Wright, said that ‘Burgess was tasked by his Soviet controllers to wed Clarissa Churchill, to ensure him perfect cover for his espionage activities’. Burgess was ‘appalled by the task’, not least because James Pope-Hennessey ‘had become infatuated with her … One evening he arrived at Burgess’s flat with a revolver, threatening to shoot them both before attempting to commit suicide.’ The mystery of the relationship remains.17
Burgess, always prone to depression and insecurity, claiming to have lost interest in politics, talked of leaving the Foreign Office and becoming the motoring correspondent of Country Life. Rees was surprised by this. ‘I had always felt that Guy’s political interests, whether misdirected or not, were the most important part of him, and that if they died, the most valuable part of him would die with them; it was as if by abandoning them he was betraying himself.’18 It was something Micky Burn also noticed. ‘Guy Burgess was immensely political. If he was to become martyred or notorious at all, it must be for something not merely personal, involving a fine or a short spell in jail, followed by odd jobs on the BBC, or occasional reviewing for the New Statesman for the rest of his life. It must have to do with great historical conflicts and Weltanschaung, and be as upsetting to as many people in authority as possible. This, after a fashion, he achieved.’19
Rees was intrigued to ask if he had given up his activities as a Russian agent. Burgess at first didn’t reply, then refused to discuss the matter and finally relapsed into sullen silence. Rees, keen to ‘put an end to the doubts and suspicions’ which had troubled him for many years, then provoked his friend, claiming he had kept a written record of their 1939 conversation and deposited a sealed copy with his lawyer. Burgess, becoming agitated, ‘asked angrily why on earth I had done anything so foolish, begged me to destroy the document and said that if it were ever made public it would not only put an end to his career at the Foreign Office, but prevent him from following any other’.
Rees, sensing real fear, was perturbed. Rather than putting an end to his suspicions, ‘they had been strengthened to a point at which one conclusion seemed to be unavoidable’.20