In December 1958 the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre Company toured Russia in the first major visit of a British theatrical company since the Second World War.1 It was seen as a significant cultural exchange in forging good relations between Britain and the Soviet Union and a major operation, with 28 tonnes of scenery and 350 costumes. Several performances were filmed and watched by some five million viewers across Russia. The seventy-strong company, which included Michael Redgrave, Coral Browne, Angela Baddeley and her husband Glen Byam Shaw, gave fifteen performances of various Shakespeare plays, including Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet directed by Byam Shaw and Twelfth Night directed by Peter Hall.
After two weeks in Leningrad, the company flew to Moscow, where a journalist took Michael Redgrave aside at the airport and gave him a message: ‘Guy Burgess wants to know if you would agree to meet him.’ Redgrave had not seen Burgess since Cambridge, but readily agreed. ‘I had a general recollection that he was amusing. He had a very lively mind.’ The opportunity would present itself immediately. On the first night of Hamlet, a group of British newspapermen had gathered outside Redgrave’s dressing-room when he heard a familiar voice. According to Redgrave’s own account, in swept Burgess extending both arms in greeting, ‘Oh, Michael! Those words, those words! You can imagine how they carry me back. Magic!’2 He then carried on past the startled actor and was sick in his basin. In truth, realising he was drunk, Redgrave had refused to let him in and Burgess stumbled and was sick in the next-door dressing-room belonging to Coral Browne. It was an encounter that was to inspire one of the most memorable dramas about Burgess – Alan Bennett’s drama An Englishman Abroad.
Redgrave and Burgess arranged to meet for lunch at the latter’s flat the next day, where after pâté de foie gras, the housekeeper served hare or suckling pig – accounts vary – which proved to be inedible because the gall-bladder hadn’t been removed. Then, after lunch, they went for a walk around the Novodevichy monastery, where Burgess volunteered to Redgrave that he had not intended to go on to Russia, once he had delivered Maclean to ‘a certain place’, but in spite of his wishes, he had been forced to continue his journey and ended up in Russia.3
Coral Browne separately accepted an invitation to lunch, which she enjoyed: ‘… he was not really just a bungling drunk. He had style. And apart from that incident, wonderful old-world manners’ though the food ‘was pretty foul … we ate small withered oranges which cost a pound a time. Guy did eat whole cloves, though.’ Burgess complained about his Russian false teeth and clothes and desperately asked her about people in London she didn’t know. At one point he played a record of Jack Buchanan’s ‘Who Stole My Heart Away’, whilst he waited for his late-afternoon call from his minders to allow him to leave the flat and escort Browne back to the Hotel Metropol, where she was staying.4
Before she left, Burgess asked if she would buy him some new clothes, including a single-breasted, grey chalk-stripe suit, a summer suit, and another in dark-blue flannel for his live-in companion Tolya, plus two Homburg hats – one green and one blue – with turned-up brims, from either Lock’s in St James’s Street or Scott’s in Piccadilly. Subsequently he sent his measurements together with a cheque for £6 for her to treat herself to lunch and 100 roubles, asking for a pound each of white and green wool, together with a note, ‘It was a great pleasure to gossip with you all. The Comrades, tho’ splendid in every way of course, don’t gossip in quite the same way about quite the same people and subjects.’5
Browne duly paid a visit to Turnbull & Asser in Jermyn Street and arranged the purchases, which were paid for through Burgess’s London account. He was delighted, writing to thank her for ‘all your trouble (which must have been great) and even more for your wise and happy choices. Everything fits.’ Browne volunteered to buy anything further he needed. Burgess was thrilled:
What I really need, the only thing more, is pyjamas. Russian ones can’t be slept in – are not in fact made for that purpose. What I would like if you can find them is 4 pairs (2 of each) of white (or off-white, not grey) and Navy blue Silk or Nylon or Terrylene [sic] – but heavy, not crêpe de chine or whatever is light pyjama. Quite plain and only those two colours … Don’t worry about price … Gieves of Bond Street used always to keep plain Navy blue silk. Navy and white are my only colours, and no stripes please.6
The visit had been a poignant reminder of what he had left behind almost eight years earlier. Redgrave’s wife Rachel Kempson remembered how, ‘He would ring me in the hotel bedroom every morning and talk for about a quarter of an hour, saying how wonderful it was to hear an English voice.’7 He had become quite friendly with the cast, whom he saw perform several times and had met at a party given by Ralph Parker. In particular, he had taken a shine to Mark Dignam who played Claudius and was a communist, whom he described as ‘an angel’ and whom he had instructed to tell the British embassy that if they needed any introductions to Russians, Burgess was happy to oblige.8 On the day the company left, Burgess came to see them off. As they drove away from the Hotel Metropol, where they had been staying, Redgrave noticed he was almost in tears. ‘Write to me,’ he said, ‘it’s bloody lonely here, you know.’9
When Harold Macmillan, now the Prime Minister, visited the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in February 1959, Burgess told Harold Nicolson that he was ‘able to give advice at a suitable level’ and remembered how he had once spent an evening with him at the Reform, where Macmillan ‘had listened – as who could not as it was my club – to my rantings’. And to Stephen Spender, he confided, ‘I was able to be a good deal of help to Macmillan during his visit. I wrote a report that he was in favour of friendship and should be trusted, whereas all the others wrote that he was a dangerous reactionary.’10
Burgess used the opportunity of the visit to reiterate his desire for safe passage to see his sick mother, enlisting a host of former contacts to make his case, including Sir Patrick Dean, now Deputy Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, who had accompanied Macmillan, telling him, ‘I will not make embarrassments for Her Majesty’s Government if they don’t make them for me. I will give no interviews without permission. I was grateful in the early days that Her Majesty’s Government said nothing hostile to me. I, for my part, have never said a lot of things that I could have said.’11 The implicit threat was there.
He also rang Randolph Churchill, who was on the delegation as a journalist, and asked to see him. Randolph Churchill later wrote that Burgess appeared in his room in Moscow’s National Hotel, introducing himself, ‘I am still a communist and a homosexual.’ To which Randolph replied, ‘So I had always supposed.’12
The government now began to look seriously at whether anything could be done if Burgess, whose passport had expired in 1958, chose to travel to Britain. The Attorney General Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, reviewing the evidence against Burgess, concluded there was not enough evidence to prosecute him for spying under section one of the Official Secrets Act and only technical offences under section two had been committed. On 17 February the Cabinet discussed Burgess and thought it might ‘be advisable to require him, if he presented himself at a British port, to establish his identity and to prove that he had not become an alien by acquiring Soviet nationality’.13
David Ormsby-Gore, who now had Hector McNeil’s job as Minister of State at the Foreign Office, reported to the Cabinet on 25 February, ‘We cannot hope to obtain legal proof that Burgess has committed any treasonable act while in the Soviet Union or any seditious act … Indeed if he knew how little evidence we had, he would be more likely to be encouraged than deterred.’14
The following day the Foreign Office informed the Moscow embassy they were not to extend any travel facilities to Burgess and hoped he didn’t put the issue to the test. ‘The Cabinet considered the question of Burgess this morning. They were advised by the Attorney General that there are no (repeat no) grounds on which Burgess could be prosecuted by the Crown if he returns to this country. Nor are there any means of preventing him from returning if he is determined to do so.’15
Burgess seemed to be aware of the weakness of the case against him, writing to Harold Nicolson:
I won’t go into long details about the so-called ‘evidence’ of which you write except to say (what I know is the case) that so nervous are the authorities of what might happen if I come back that they drop deep hints to selected persons known to be in touch with me that there is evidence for a case. In private, I know that the authorities say to each other (as a senior British ambassador said to a friend of mine, not knowing he was a friend), ‘The trouble is we don’t know what we could do if he came back. There is no evidence.’16
But Burgess was pragmatic. ‘I am bound to take into account that a case might be drawn up by the authorities I mention and to fight it would incur publicity and calling as witnesses all sorts of good friends to whom I have done enough harm already.’17
It remained a lonely life, only enlivened by ‘chance’ meetings with foreign visitors. Patrick Reilly, who served in the embassy until August 1960, recalled, ‘Once he accosted a newly arrived American admiral, who was wearing a brand new Old Etonian tie, saying how interested he was to see that they had been at the same school. The admiral, much embarrassed, explained that he had just bought the tie in the Burlington Arcade, because he thought it pretty.’18
Revealingly, when Paul Robeson, a former lover of Coral Browne and hero of Burgess, was taken ill in Moscow in the spring of 1959 and had to spend a month at a sanatorium, Burgess confessed to Browne he was ‘too shy to call on him … I always am with great men and artists. Not so much shy as frightened … tho’ I know that he is as nice as can be …’19
Burgess was now in regular touch with various journalists and enjoying the mischief he could make. Robert Elphick, Reuters correspondent in Moscow from 1958-62, remembered ‘Burgess at various parties in a grey suit, rather stained and baggy, and wearing an Old Etonian tie. He had usually had too much to drink but was lucid.’ Elphick once asked him if it had all been worth it. ‘“Well, we all make mistakes,” he replied.’20 The Observer journalist, Edward Crankshaw, saw Burgess several times on a visit in January 1959 and reported to the Foreign Office:
I had better say at once that I had not been with him long before I understood what I had failed to see before. B’s brilliance and charm … I have never known anyone who flaunted his homosexuality so openly: whether he did this in England others will know. But he neither bullied one nor bored one with it. And once I got accustomed to this stage atmosphere I liked him much and finished up by being deeply sorry for him, although at no time did he exhibit self-pity or ask for sympathy. Only for the opportunity to talk and talk and talk …21
Crankshaw told them that Burgess had 500 roubles a month, a ‘Boy Friend’ who was ‘a priest at the Novedevich Monastery who was 6 foot, youngish and wholly repellent – v handsome in a horrible way – and corrupt to the core. B is quite obviously head over heels in love with this monster though he did not say so. I went to an evening service and watched B when he was looking at this priest. B’s face was radiant and he was clearly transported with delight.’22
He remembered Burgess’s ‘normal drink is 200 grams of vodka with 200 grams of tomato juice in a large glass. At our first lunch we drank five of these shockers as well as a good deal of chianti … Burgess said Maclean liked laughing at himself but could not bear it when others laughed at him. Burgess always did laugh at him. He, Burgess, on the contrary found it almost impossible to laugh at himself, though he tried very earnestly, but did not mind being laughed at by others.’23
Crankshaw continued that though still anti-American ‘Burgess’s politics are not his best point’ and noted his ‘endlessly pacing up and down the room when he talks’ and ‘he boasts of blackmailing virtually Peter Thorneycroft into having his furniture sent out from England … The man is half dotty, not actively vicious … The whole situation is the sort of personal tragedy that can only be ended by death.’24
At the beginning of 1959, the Canadian freelance journalist and film maker Erik Durschmied, then in his late twenties, obtained Burgess’s number from a junior diplomat at the British Embassy and rang Burgess, who invited him over as long as he brought some whisky. Armed with two bottles and some car magazines, Durschmied went to Burgess’s flat. ‘A tired-looking man, run down like the building he lived in. He was not what I had imagined a super-spy to look like. On hunched shoulders he carried a worn-out tweed jacket over a good-quality white shirt, which had endured too many washings with Russian detergent. A bow tie, baggy pants and a pair of Church’s brogues, worn down on the heels, completed his outfit. But his eyes were something else: there was such deep sadness in them. Pools of despair. A man who had given up hope.’
Burgess agreed to be interviewed for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s programme Close-Up and a suitable location was found – the snow-covered graveyard of an abandoned monastery near his flat. The nine-minute interview, which was only broadcast in Canada and rediscovered in 2011, revealed very little. Burgess, clearly half-drunk, continued to maintain he was not a spy, he had come to Russia as a ‘tourist’ and that as ‘an extreme socialist’ and Marxist he was delighted to be living in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. ‘What is life like?’ Durschmied asked off-camera.
‘“Life?” There was a long silence. He stared through the window and focused on a point in time and space, some three thousand miles from Moscow and several years ago. “My life ended when I left London.”’25