When his Majesty’s ambassador to Madrid Sir Samuel Hoare first saw Tom Burns striding purposefully towards him across the room, we do not know what he thought but we can surmise that he wondered whether Burns was suited to the competing demands for delicate diplomacy, propaganda, and secret intelligence in the Spain of the Second World War. Prior to taking up residence in the Spanish capital, Hoare had been an MI6 station chief in pre-Revolutionary Russia and a senior diplomat in Rome before going on to serve as Foreign Secretary, First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Privy Seal, Home Secretary, Secretary of State for India and Secretary of State for Air.
Forty years of public service had given Hoare an instinctive wariness of outsiders. With his dark hair, suave looks and impeccable manners, the wartime embassy’s latest recruit appeared to Hoare to be someone playing the role of an Englishman without actually being one. His name, his light green-grey eyes, and fair skin suggested Celtic blood, but he also had a Latin swagger about him. The fact that Burns had been born in Chile and was a fervent Catholic further fuelled his suspicion.
Hoare, at sixty years old, was nearly twice Burns’s age. Unmistakably Anglo-Saxon in appearance and from a staunchly Anglican background, he was cut from quite a different cloth. In his own memoirs, Hoare described himself as ‘very English, very respectable, and very traditional’. According to the experts in the College of Arms, there were few families with a longer all-English descent than the Hoares. The ambassador was also well read in British military and colonial history. When addressing the challenge facing his special wartime mission – that of stopping the Germans from marching into neutral Spain – Hoare was fond of quoting a memorandum from one of his heroes, the Duke of Wellington, to Viscount Castlereagh in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. ‘There is no country in Europe in the affairs of which foreigners can interfere with so little advantage as Spain. There is no country in which foreigners are more disliked, and even despised, and whose manners and habits are so little congenial with those of other nations in Europe.’
Be that as it may, Sir Samuel Hoare’s responsibility was to keep Franco’s Spain neutral, and yet this passionate English Catholic was the man he had been sent to run his press office and win the propaganda war.
Tom Burns was born in the Chilean seaside resort of Viña del Mar in 1906, the seventh child of David Burns, a Scotsman who had gone to South America from his home in Brechin to seek a livelihood as a bank manager. His mother, Clara Swinburne, while descended from English North Country stock as well as of Basque blood, was Chilean-born and bred. The Burnses left for London after a devastating earthquake nearly killed the baby of the family before destroying the family home. My father was only six months old when the roof collapsed over him, leaving his nanny partly buried under the rubble and himself miraculously alive with his only injury a cut lip. A permanent scar left an enduring reminder of survival in the midst of disaster. Tom Burns was a cradle Catholic, owing his early spiritual nourishment to his mother, Clara.
In fact her influence in the family was so great that on her arrival in England it drew her husband away from his Scottish Presbyterianism and towards induction into a Catholic Church that was undergoing a revival across Europe, and nowhere more than in Britain. By the early twentieth century, the influence of Cardinal Newman in drawing Anglicans closer to Rome, and the literary cache of Catholic writers like Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton, brought in their wake a new generation of young intellectuals who saw in their religion the only valid alternative to chaos.
Burns’s father was austere and dedicated to his life in the City at a time when a banker was trusted as a counsellor by his customers. He was also enormously appreciative of books. He had returned from Chile with a huge library: Conrad, Dickens, Henry James, George Eliot, as well as the French classics bound in handsome editions. He was fond of making Shakespeare his main point of reference during his rare intrusions into family life. Hearing his daughters arguing in the playroom, he would murmur to himself, ‘Her voice was ever sweet, gentle and low – an excellent thing in a woman.’ Keats would occasionally come to the rescue, as when he once trod in a dog mess on the front porch and lamented, ‘I cannot see what flowers are at my feet’. Such eccentricities would mark his youngest son, turning him into something of a maverick in later life. And yet it was the mother’s deeply ingrained religion that prevailed. Like his three older brothers, Burns was educated by the Jesuits. ‘Give me a boy at seven, and he is mine for life,’ goes the old Jesuit saying. At seven Burns was sent to Wimbledon College, a Jesuit school in west London, where he began to be formally instructed in the basics of Catholic dogma as laid down in the Catechism.
Burns found himself absorbing the mysteries of a faith that had at its core the doctrine of the Real Presence. He munched on his first Communion wafer, and sipped at the chalice, fully believing that this was the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, as recited by the priest, and that the words were part of the same kind of mystification as that experienced by the apostles at the Last Supper.
Burns’s second year of Catholic schooling coincided with the outbreak of the First World War. It was a time, he would later recall, that brought him closer to his father, as the only son left at home. They played a lot of chess and pored over a large map of the Western Front, moving little flags as the fortunes of war fluctuated. Only later would the personal agonies behind such symbols touch the Burns household with brutal suddenness.
Burns, his parents, four sisters (he was followed now by Alice, two years younger) and two brothers (a third, George, was studying for the priesthood) were on holiday by the sea in Felixstowe, Suffolk, on 4 August 1914, when the life as he and his siblings had enjoyed it together – treasure hunts in the garden, tea dances, tennis parties – died. The front page of the Daily Mirror on that day was wholly taken up with a photograph of the Kaiser with his waxed moustache and wearing the helmet of the Death’s Head Hussars. By that afternoon British soldiers were already digging trenches in the garden which overlooked the sea. Burns’s two older brothers – Charles and David – enlisted in the army, while his oldest sister Dorothy left her convent school and volunteered as a nurse in a military hospital.
Charles survived, invalided out after being injured, and returned to his medical studies, but David, an officer in the Black Watch, was killed in Flanders during the third Battle of Ypres, on 1 October, 1 day short of his twentieth birthday and six weeks before the Armistice of 1918.
The Burnses were enthusiastic letter writers from an early age. During the last weeks of his life, David wrote regularly to his youngest sister, Alice, who was a nine-year-old schoolgirl at the time, writing letters home that barely hinted at the horrors of the sodden trenches and the killing fields beyond. In early September 1918, he wrote with darkening humour: ‘Thank you very much for your interesting letter and the drawing of me in a gas mask. I will do my best to gratify your desires for a Hun helmet but at present I’m afraid the nearest I’ve been to the wily Bosche is when he comes over and bombs us like he did last night.’
Burns (then aged twelve) was with his sister Alice and their mother when the telegram bearing the news of David’s death arrived. After opening it, Clara sat stunned in the hall, with the paper in her hands, silenced by shock, and waiting for her husband to return from his job in the City. She told her children to restrain their tears and to mourn silently. ‘There was no more plotting of little flags on the map,’ recalled Burns many years later. ‘Our war was over. Quite soon it was for everyone and they went mad with joy so that an awful irony was added to our empty world.’
Days later a Roman Catholic chaplain wrote to say that David had taken Holy Communion a few days before being first wounded in the leg and then shot in the head by a German machine-gunner. His regimental commander commended him for his skills as a runner and his bravery in the line of fire. Then David’s adjutant, Tim Milroy, returned from the front and married Burns’s second sister Clarita. Later Tim introduced his younger brother Bill to Alice, and they too eventually married. Burns’s faith in God was rekindled, and he would long treasure, with a mixture of worship and trepidation, the enduring memory of his beloved and heroic brother, an awkward role model of selfless sacrifice in the line of duty, cut off in the flower of youth.
Burns was fourteen when, two years after the end of the Great War, he went to Stonyhurst College, a leading Catholic boarding school in the north of England also run by Jesuits. Stonyhurst considered itself unique, with a history of its early founders beginning in exile during the Elizabethan persecution of Catholics, the first boys drawn from recusant homes near Blackburn, Lancashire. While firm in its Catholicism, it was a school that also drew its identity from its loyalty to the British state. Thus, near a centuries-old room full of original portraits dedicated to the Stuart royal lineage the Reformation had interrupted, was a memorial to more than a thousand old boys who had died for King and Country, six of them decorated with the Victoria Cross.
Burns’s best school friend Henry John, a son of the painter Augustus, was a soldier of sorts, but not in any traditional sense. John was infused with an adventurous and polemical spirit that flourished in the spirit of enquiry that some Jesuits teachers encouraged among their students, most notably a sage called Fr Martin D’Arcy. Under his tutelage the two boys developed a fondness for theology and a belief that in their faith lay the key to confronting the materialism of the prevailing culture. They chose to become militant evangelisers.
With the encouragement of their teachers, Burns and John spent their holiday time at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park. There, mounted on soap boxes, the young crusaders expounded various ‘truths’ of their Catholic doctrine amidst much heckling from the largely agnostic crowd.
With the end of schooldays came a sense of a bigger world and an even greater longing to be part of a universal Church capable of transforming the experience of it. John was persuaded by his Jesuit mentors to further his religious studies in Rome as a step towards joining the order himself. He was about to make his final vows when Burns suggested they take a journey together, away from the rigours of life near the Vatican. By boat, train and camel, the two friends travelled to Libya and Tunisia in search of the troglodytes who lived below ground level, and of the Ouled Nail, belly dancers of legendary sensuality. They discovered remnants of the troglodytes in countless caves dug into the sides of vast craters near Togourt, and shades and phrases of St Augustine amidst the stones of Carthage.
For the two friends, the journey proved to be the parting of the ways. John returned to England where he embarked on the final stages of his training for the priesthood. Despite securing the necessary academic qualifications, Burns decided against applying for Oxford or Cambridge, believing that it would mean a financial strain on his parents and a postponement of a more challenging world beyond British shores that he was anxious to discover.
Thus, with ‘an open mind and a small purse’, he decided to pursue his studies in France, and one day in 1924 caught a train to Paris to seek out the vibrant intellectual life of French Catholicism that was then flourishing on the Left Bank. He had just turned eighteen. In Paris, Burns rented a room in a ‘sleazy hotel’ in Montparnasse before immersing himself in the writings of French Catholic philosophers who boldly proclaimed the dawn of a new era of social and spiritual transformation. They ranged from the neo-fascism of Charles Maurras’s Action Française to the neo-Thomist theology of Jacques Maritain, politically on the left if still opposed to its agnosticism, and proclaiming instead the imminence and immediacy of God in all things.
It was in Paris that Burns dabbled in the bohemianism of the Left Bank bookshop Shakespeare & Company, the meeting place for aspirant American writers, and shared a mutual if platonic infatuation with Gwen John, sister of Augustus, mistress of Rodin and lesbian lover of Maritain’s sister-in-law. Burns and the much older Gwen – his best friend’s aunt – spent much of their time maintaining their tense relationship in intimate conversations, when not writing letters to each other about their common faith.
On his return to London a year later, Burns revived his public-speaking assignments proclaiming the revival of pan-European Catholicism; he would later compare proselytising to the work of a ‘secret agent in a foreign land, carried out with a mixture of excitement and dread of self-betrayal’. Enlisted by the Catholic Evidence Guild, an organisation of lay volunteers, Burns campaigned with the missionary zeal he had learnt from the Jesuits, convinced of the truth of his faith, and happy to take on hecklers.
They included equivalent fanatics from the Protestant Alliance and the Rationalist Association. ‘With their bowler hats and mackintoshes and loud rasping voices, I imagined them as KGB men,’ Burns later recalled. The Guild had been founded in 1918, the year after the Russian Revolution.
It was through the Guild that Burns met his first employers, an Australian called Frank Sheed and his English wife, Maisie Ward. The couple were not only street-corner evangelists, but also ran a successful family publishing firm. Burns carried publishing in his blood. His great uncle James was a Catholic convert who had published the works of Newman under the imprint Burns & Oates.
While there was no family succession to the firm because James Burns’s son became a priest, Tom Burns had always revered the memory of his great uncle and dreamed of one day bringing the Burns family back into the business. Burns cut his own literary teeth as a commissioning editor before a prompt promotion to manager with Sheed & Ward, whose owners had identified the commercial potential of the growing Catholic revival and its engagement with the mainstream of literary and political debate.
Soon after joining the publishing house, Burns pulled off a coup, securing the rights in 1926 to Belloc’s A Companion to H.G. Wells’ Outline of History. The book formed part of a heated debate between Belloc – one of the literary icons and father figures of the Catholic revival – and Wells, the atheist who gave utopian visions precedence over spiritual realities.
Burns had first met Belloc when he was still a schoolboy. He had read Belloc’s The Path to Rome and then written to the author for advice on how to cross the Pyrenees on foot, the subject of another book in which he combined a Catholic instinct for pilgrimage with an explorer’s love for adventure through travel. Belloc had responded to the young man’s enquiry by inviting him to a meeting at the Reform Club. There he drew sketch maps of mountain paths and recommended an inn on the Spanish–French border for accommodation.
Within minutes of entering Spain, Burns found himself hopelessly lost in the mountains. He lacked a compass, and Belloc’s instructions proved an inadequate reference point for the plethora of paths which seemed to straggle in all directions. Burns followed a path that ran parallel to a stream and eventually came across what he took to be a guardian angel – a woman leading a donkey laden with firewood, on her way to the nearby village. There, as the sun dipped behind the mountains, Burns found a religious procession forming, led by a priest wrapped in a golden chasuble and protected by a canopy under which he held a large communion host in a monstrance.
Burns picked up a candle and accompanied the other men of the village as they walked slowly behind the priest through the cobbled streets, in a murmured litany of hymns and prayer. It was the feast of Corpus Christi, one of the great events of the Catholic calendar. And on this, his first visit to Spain, Burns was enthralled by the folklore and the strong undercurrent of mysticism which he had felt was blended as nowhere else.
He spent the rest of his time in the Pyrenees travelling through nearby villages with a troupe of performing dogs and their owners. Their most popular act had a terrier dressed up as a priest witnessing a wedding between two other dogs dressed as bride and groom. The central joke had the ‘bride’ repeatedly straying from the marriage service and collapsing on a nuptial bed with her hind legs in the air, before being pulled back to the ceremony by the ‘priest’. Thus did Spain unravel itself with its unique blend of piety, sensuality and anarchic irreverence. Reflecting on that period in his memoirs, Burns identified a foreshadowing of critical moments in his life by intimations that were not recognised as such at the time, but which came to find a place in a pattern as the years went by. He called his schoolboy Pyrenean adventure the first Spanish prologue.
After Belloc came other ‘names’ which Burns attracted to his growing publisher’s list. The Catholic literary icon G.K. Chesterton offered Burns a book of verses, Our Lady of the Sorrows, and later a book of essays. On the rare occasion that G.K. was neither on a ritual drinking binge with Belloc nor cloistered with his wife at their house in Beaconsfield, Chesterton invited Burns to take a taxi ride with him through central London. As the cab passed the Cenotaph, G.K. cut short their conversation and in silence raised his hat to salute the memorial to Britain’s war dead. Like the portraits of the old Stonyhurst boys who had won the VC, the image of Chesterton’s tribute would for ever remain in Burns’s memory as an example of how English Catholics could both defend their faith and be loyal patriots at the same time. G.K. had been one of Burns’s idols during his schooldays and was to remain so for decades, his writing – so it seemed to his young publisher – as light and dexterous and timeless as a coracle.
And yet perhaps the most innovative if controversial of Burns’s early stable of authors was Eric Gill, the woodcutter and sculptor whose writings and works of art came to have a defining influence on numerous Catholics during the 1920s and 1930s. Burns was seventeen when he visited Gill for the first time, the sculptor’s junior by twenty-four years, but the gap seemed to narrow as they found common ground on matters of faith and art. Gill and his family were living in a community of other artists and craftsmen first at Ditchling, in Sussex. They later moved to Pigotts, near High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, where Burns became a frequent visitor as publisher and friend. ‘Pigotts came to be a weekend home-from-home for me,’ Burns later recalled. ‘In those years one was alert to everything that life had to offer, negotiating a minefield of ideas and emotions in a no-man’s-land between opposed trenches: those of my faith and those of the world outside. Pigotts seemed to me a safe billet if ever there was one.’
By the early 1930s Burns was living in Glebe Place, off the King’s Road, Chelsea, near his friend Harman Grisewood, a BBC announcer who was destined to rise high in the Corporation. A contemporary of Evelyn Waugh at Oxford, Grisewood’s cocktail parties were immortalised in Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies as those given in ‘basement flats by spotty announcers’, although the author may have also been thinking, less generously, of John Heygate, a BBC news editor he held responsible for the break-up of his first marriage to Evelyn Gardner. A letter survives from this period giving a sense of how Burns enjoyed life outside his working hours. It is written by Grisewood to David Jones, the Welsh artist and writer whom Burns had befriended at Eric Gill’s and added to his growing Catholic network. While the subject of the letter is the advice Grisewood wants to give Jones about book writing, the BBC man struggles to concentrate in the presence of Burns, who appears to be in a state of woman-induced euphoria: ‘… Tom is dancing a tremendous dance and his room strewn with rejected white ties, and enigmatically, fragments of a charming crystal necklace’.
By the early- to mid-1930s several of the generation that had celebrated a cult of youth in the 1920s as a band of pleasure-seeking bohemians had become increasingly dispersed. But if, as D.J. Taylor has put it, something of the ‘original spark’ had gone out of the Bright Young Things, turning the one-time fanatics of the party-going scene into jaded veterans, the Catholics among them still seemed to flourish in a network that managed to accommodate both success and spiritual anxiety.
While Burns pursued his publishing career, building up an impressive list of authors, his best school friend Henry John was thrown into emotional turmoil by the intense, if platonic, friendship he had formed with his mentor Fr D’Arcy and his struggle to cope with the obligations of celibacy imposed on his training to be a Jesuit priest. In 1934 John abandoned the Jesuit order and embarked on a series of doomed affairs with women. By the summer of 1935 John had fallen in love with Olivia Plunket Greene, one of the more enduring survivors of the Bright Young Person society.
A complex personality, Plunket Greene had left a trail of shattered loves behind her, including Evelyn Waugh, and continued to attract men like moths to a light. She mirrored the young John with her tortured mixture of repressed sexuality and religious faith. The girl who was happy to party, get drunk, and tease her suitors to the brink of intercourse was also the girl that claimed to have visions of the Virgin Mary urging her to a life of chastity.
That summer, Plunket Greene rejected John’s plea that they should sleep together with a letter insisting that she could not enter an ‘immoral’ relationship with him. Soon after receiving it, John swam out to sea off the coast of Cornwall and drowned. His body was washed up two weeks later, having, as his father Augustus put it, ‘suffered the attention of sea gulls’. Burns, one of Olivia’s enduring male friends with whom he shared an unconsummated mutual attraction, refused to accept that he might have committed suicide as others believed.
While assuming a sense of guilt in the sorry affair – it was he who had introduced Henry John to Plunket Greene – Burns would later claim that by the mid-1930s his friendship with his best old school friend had cooled somewhat. ‘Henry had given much more than joy to my youth, but his last years had disclosed a chasm between us and had filled me with foreboding,’ Burns wrote in his memoirs.
These were halcyon years before there were even rumours of war, with a packed diary of cocktail parties, debutante balls and nightclubs. Burns discovered that he was on an informal hostess register, much in demand for his dashing looks, intelligence, manners and skills as a dancer. When not dressing up in white tie and tails and taking a debutante to her ball, Burns would drink several whiskies from his personal bottle at one or other of his habitual night dives the Gargoyle, Hell and the 43, where the lights were low, the music less controlled, the women looser.
It was on one such night that Tom Burns and Evelyn Waugh got to know each other in a nightclub of dubious repute. The fact that Burns had some foreign blood in him, and had not gone to Oxford, marked him out as different from the undergraduate friends Waugh had stuck with since public school. But they shared friends in common they had come to know independently from each other. Both men cultivated extensive contacts in the literary world and had learnt to comport themselves in patrician circles. Waugh and Burns shared a snobbism that attracted them to and filled them with admiration for the English upper-class. They were also both fascinated by matters of faith. According to Burns, when he met Waugh the author – then close to conversion to Catholicism – saw himself as a man who had joined a regiment ‘with traditions and rules which he never questioned’. As someone who had taken to the soapbox in defence of the Catholic faith, Burns respected such loyalty.
Burns and his circle of Catholic friends contemplated the emergence of communism, and the spread of industrialism, and feared the erosion of the sacral in daily living, an alienating period in history which threatened to undermine civilisation itself. The challenge was to shake up the Catholic Church and its members in a way that might increase their relevance and their influence in modern society.
A key battleground for the reform movement was the media, so it was perhaps unsurprising that Burns should single out the Tablet as a target for a takeover. The Tablet was an intellectual Catholic weekly which, under the ownership of the Catholic Primate of Great Britain, the Archbishop of Westminster Cardinal Bourne, had adopted an editorial line that Burns regarded as ‘sectarian and puritanical, pompous and parochial’. As Catholicism entered the 1930s, Burns coordinated a thinly veiled campaign of criticism of the magazine, attacking in particular the theologically conservative editor, Ernest Oldmeadow.
The conflict between Burns and Oldmeadow was a sparring match that needed a specific issue of major principle to develop into open warfare. The spark that lit the fuse was the publication in 1932 of Evelyn Waugh’s novel Black Mischief. The book was widely acclaimed, but Oldmeadow found its comic treatment of African politics and social mores, particularly a thinly disguised parody of Roman Catholic teaching on birth control, morally reprehensible and unworthy of someone who had recently converted to the Catholic faith. On 7 January 1933 Oldmeadow wrote a review of Black Mischief in which he proclaimed the novel ‘a disgrace to anybody professing the Catholic name’.
Two weeks later, on 21 January, Waugh was able to rely on a powerful counter-attack. Planned and executed by Burns, it drew on an alliance of prominent Catholic laymen and clergy who put their names to a letter to the Tablet accusing Oldmeadow of exceeding ‘the bounds of legitimate criticism’ with remarks that amounted to an ‘imputation of bad faith’. Within three years, in January 1936, Burns had organised a buyout of the Tablet, putting it under secular Catholic ownership and replacing Oldmeadow as editor with Douglas Woodruff, an old Oxford friend of Waugh’s and a leader writer at The Times.
It was partly under Burns’s influence that Waugh followed up Black Mischief with a biography of the Catholic Elizabethan Jesuit martyr Edmund Campion, with the royalties going to the Oxford Jesuit college Campion Hall, whose then master was Burns’s old schoolteacher Fr D’Arcy.
When the book was republished in 1961, Waugh reflected that ‘we are nearer to Campion that when I wrote of him’. He drew an analogy between cruelty shown to Catholics in Tudor England, and the even greater ‘savagery’ committed by communist regimes of Eastern Europe against their Catholic subjects. To that extent Waugh’s description of a Church forced underground and priests becoming martyrs foreshadowed the pro-Franco stance he, Burns and many other Catholics were to take during the Spanish Civil War.
Before its outbreak in July 1936, Burns had befriended another author, Graham Greene. The two had met for the first time in 1929. Burns had just finished reading The Man Within, Greene’s third novel and the first to be published. Of that first encounter Burns would later write: ‘Graham leapt into my landscape like a leprechaun, as it seemed to me: witty, evasive, nervous, and sardonic, by turns. He stood out in the company we both kept in those days, which was mainly of publishers and authors, joyfully joined in plans and projects. Nothing was stereotyped, nothing predictable, for the world as we knew it was free – little knowing of the bondage to come.’
It was at about this time that Greene remarked that his political progress thus far in his life had been ‘rather curved’. That was perhaps an understatement for the shifting political loyalties he had shown during and since his university days. He had supported the Conservative Party at Oxford before toying with joining the Liberals, joined the Communist Party ‘as a joke’ in 1925, volunteered as a special constable to help break the General Strike of 1926, before in 1933 becoming a member of the Independent Labour Party, whose chairman had accused the Labour Party of being counter-revolutionary. At the time of Greene’s joining, the ILP’s newspaper the New Leader had begun printing letters by Leon Trotsky, a first step along a path that was to see it backing, along with George Orwell, the Trotskyite POUM (United Marxist Workers Party) in the Spanish Civil War. By 1938 Greene, who had converted to the Catholic faith in 1926, a year before his marriage to Vivien Dayrell-Browning, had been persuaded by his friend Burns to write his first article for the Tablet.
Three years earlier, in the summer of 1935, Burns had paid his second, and similarly providential, visit to Spain. He was answering an invitation from two of his best friends, the writer Barbara Lucas and her academic husband Bernard Wall, Stonyhurst old boy, to join them on their honeymoon in Pamplona for a small holiday of wine, tapas and a bullfight starring Juan Belmonte.
The bullfighter had already achieved some international notoriety thanks to Ernest Hemingway’s popular novel Fiesta. In the 1930s Belmonte was already a veteran, close to the end of his career. He had come out of retirement to shore up his dwindling finances. The legend had returned. Hemingway had written that no real man had ever worked as close to a fighting bull as Belmonte, which is why the uninitiated were advised to see him as soon possible before he was killed. Burns had dreamt of meeting Belmonte, alive.
The opportunity came when he least expected it. Shortly after the Walls had left London for Spain, Burns received a telegram from Pamplona. It was from Barbara and it was a cry for help. Three days into their honeymoon, the young newly-weds were still struggling to consummate their union fully. Barbara beseeched Burns to come and join her and her husband as quickly as possible and act both as mediator and counsellor. Burns initially felt awkward, although his long-standing friendship and loyalty to both Barbara and Bernard prevailed. As he later recalled, ‘To be a gooseberry to a loving couple was not my idea of fun or duty. But the summons was clearly heartfelt.’
Burns enlisted the support of his mutual friend, René Hague, Eric Gill’s son-in-law. Taking first the ferry from Folkestone to Boulogne, and then a third-class train ride south, Burns and his companion crossed the Pyrenees. They had barely left the platform and begun to make their way from the station to the Walls’ hotel, than they spotted a poster. It announced that Belmonte was bullfighting the following afternoon in the nearby town of Logroño.
Belmonte had killed more than a thousand bulls in his career, but as he grew older he insisted that his bulls should not be too large, and not too dangerously armed with horns. But that afternoon he ventured deep into the bull’s space, his glittering suit touching the black hide, his prominent jaw jutting in defiance. There were moments when he drew away, and seemed, as Hemingway had seen him, ‘utterly contemptuous and indifferent’ to what the crowd expected of him. By this stage in Belmonte’s career many of his fans thought him ‘past his sell-by date’ – getting old, and losing his nerve. But Burns saw only an artist in the sand, confronting death head-on. Thus began a curiously un-English passion for bullfighting that would remain with him for the rest of his life.
It was while Burns was repairing the initially dysfunctional Wall union that news reached them of war in Abyssinia. The Italians had nursed a grievance against Ethiopia since their ignominious defeat there in 1896 by Emperor Memelik II, an alleged descendant of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. After a phoney war lasting several months comprising military skirmishes over waterholes and other disputed territories, and impotent diplomatic protests, Italian troops attacked in force in October 1935. With the fortieth anniversary of the earlier humiliation approaching, Benito Mussolini, Il Duce, had set his sights on a new Roman Empire in eastern Africa, joining Ethiopia with Eritrea and Italian Somaliland.
One witness to the Italian attack was George Steer, the South African-born correspondent for The Times. In an article for the Spectator Steer described Ethiopia as the ‘last African Empire to be invaded by a white Power, when feeling against the colour bar is rising all over Africa’. He warned that the subjugation of Ethiopia risked lighting a fire ‘throughout the African bush’. In his articles Steer painted a stark contrast between the poorly equipped but brave Ethiopians (they fought mainly with rifles, swords and spears) struggling against the brute, well-equipped force of a fascist military machine, using any means it thought necessary to achieve victory, including the deliberate bombing of civilians to demoralise the enemy.
Such a perception was not shared by the network of Catholics that Burns had gathered around him. Burns’s first meeting with Waugh had taken place just after the writer had returned from his first visit to Abyssinia where he had reported on Haile Selassie’s coronation for The Times. Waugh’s accreditation with The Times, to file on spec, had been partly facilitated by Burns’s close associate Douglas Woodruff after his approaches to several other newspapers has been turned down. It was the experience of that first trip to Abyssinia that helped forge Waugh’s friendship with Burns and led to their first joint publishing venture.
Returning from his latest journey to Spain, Burns got back in touch with Waugh. The novelist was at the time actively courting Laura Herbert while anxiously awaiting news of his petition to Rome for annulment from his first wife, Evelyn. The process was proving tortuously slow, and threw him into bouts of depression. The emotional quagmire which drew in the two friends still revolved round their shared involvement with the Herbert sisters. While Waugh was focused on marrying Laura, Burns had befriended Laura’s more extrovert and garrulous sister, Gabriel.
It was against this background that Burns, then building up his list at Longman, seized on a commercial and political opportunity, and commissioned Waugh to write a book on the Abyssinian war which he felt was guaranteed to sell well and give the Catholic perspective on an Italian venture that appalled much of the British nation.
Mussolini’s invasion had fuelled considerable media interest in the UK and elsewhere in Europe, and writers like Waugh, with a developing literary reputation and knowledge of the region, were at a premium. Burns signed up Waugh as part of a triangular deal with the Daily Mail, negotiated for the novelist by his sharp-witted agent Augustus Peters, under which Waugh would have his expenses covered and receive an equally generous payment for a series of dispatches from Abyssinia.
The journey produced the second of Waugh’s non-fiction books on Abyssinia, Waugh in Abyssinia. Burns had decided on the title, thinking the pun on the author’s name was clever, punchy and, most important, marketable. Waugh had wanted to call it A Disappointing War. So he told his friend and biographer Christopher Sykes: ‘Tom [Burns] as a professional publisher knew that a title that suggested disappointment would unquestionably result in disappointing sales.’ Waugh, strongly encouraged by his publisher, portrayed his experience of Abyssinia as a clash between civilisations, with the Italians representing the cause of socio-economic progress, and the locals, barbarism. Sykes saw in the book the influence of the Old Catholic lay patriarch Hilaire Belloc, who saw in Mussolini, like Napoleon, the personification of benevolent power and greatness.
When the book was published at the end of 1936, the British public and Europeans in general were taking sides once again – this time over Spain. While the context was one of a civil war, the arguments revolved around similar issues, with the British and French governments signing up to a policy of non-intervention, and Italy, Germany and Russia getting militarily involved on opposing sides. Catholics once again tried to influence the agenda, this time portraying General Franco as the force of Christian civilisation intervening to stop Spain sliding into the grasp of atheistic communism.
In the early hours of 11 July 1936, a light passenger aircraft took off from an airfield in Croydon as part of a covert operation that was to unravel into the start of the bloodiest civil war in modern history. On board the Dragon Rapide were Luis Bolín, the London correspondent for the right-wing monarchist Spanish newspaper ABC, and two glamorous nineteen-year-old English girls, Diana Pollard and her friend Dorothy Watson, posing as tourists on a flight to the Canary Islands.
Bolín was just one of several players in an elaborate conspiracy to draw into a military uprising General Francisco Franco, at the time military commander of the Canary Islands. To ensure his joining in the coup against Spain’s civilian government, the main army conspirators and their civilian allies arranged for a small plane to fly from England, pick up Franco and then take him to Spanish Morocco where the rebel forces were gathered.
Money for the operation was put up by Juan March, a Spanish millionaire from Mallorca who had made his fortune in tobacco smuggling and arms deals during the First World War. March was a close friend of Franco. He had also established ties with British intelligence through Alan Hillgarth, the British consul in Palma, Mallorca’s capital. It was March who helped transfer the necessary funds for the hire of the Dragon Rapide – £2000 – into an account held in the Fenchurch Street branch of Kleinwort Benson & Sons, a merchant bank in the heart of the City of London.
The plane was hired by Bolín with the backing of several London-based Spaniards led by the monarchist unofficial London ambassador of the nationalist forces, the Duke of Alba, and a group of English Catholics, led by Douglas Jerrold, a right-wing Tory and publisher. While there is no evidence to suggest that Burns was directly involved in the plot, it is reasonable to assume that he was aware of it through his close friendship with Jerrold and chose to maintain its secrecy.
It was Jerrold who introduced Bolín to Hugh Pollard, a retired army officer and fellow Catholic, who was put in charge of organising the logistics of the operation, including the recruitment of an RAF pilot turned mercenary, Captain William Begg.
Of all the plotters it was Pollard who was the most intriguing; he was, according to one of his friends, ‘one of those romantic Englishmen who specialise in other people’s revolutions’. Educated at Westminster School and with a degree in engineering from London University, Pollard – whose favourite hobbies were hunting and shooting – enlisted as a trooper in the Northumberland Hussars.
Before volunteering his services to the British Army in the First World War, Pollard used his riding and shooting skills in the Mexican Revolution, helping organise the escape of the toppled dictator Porfirio Díaz in 1911. He subsequently took part in the pro-Spanish uprising in Morocco of 1913 which deposed the Sultan Abdul Aziz and placed Mulay Hafid on the throne. In North Africa, Pollard and March had a common bond, for it was thanks to the subsequent Spanish colonial presence in Morocco that the Spanish entrepreneur had added to his riches, developing a tobacco monopoly. Pollard’s duties after the First World War included at one point working as a police staff adviser in Dublin Castle, where suspect Irish republicans were interrogated. After this, his career turns somewhat nebulous, almost certainly because he became embroiled in British intelligence. In 1940, the security service MI5 began to investigate Pollard as a suspected member of the British Union of Fascists and Nazi sympathiser, only to discover that he had been enlisted as an MI6 agent after serving, under cover as a journalist, in military intelligence and government propaganda operations. Fluent in several languages, he was also the author of several military books, most notably an expert’s manual on small arms commissioned by the War Office.
Pollard was thus almost certainly a spy. Once he had been briefed on the Franco plot, he decided to give it his full support, convinced that he was serving the cause of the Roman Catholic faith. He agreed to volunteer his daughter Diana and her friend as cover. The two debutantes carried operational orders aboard the Dragon Rapide between the covers of Vogue magazine. Six days later, at 5 p.m. on 17 July, the first of a series of coordinated military risings took place in Morocco. The Spanish Civil War had begun.
The gathering storm of German territorial expansion and militarism during the 1930s, and the apparent slowness in British rearmament in the face of the threat, were the subject of passionate denunciation inside and outside Parliament by Winston Churchill. And yet when the Spanish Civil War broke out Churchill agreed with foreign secretary Anthony Eden that it was essential for Britain to maintain her neutrality in the struggle. Their shared principal motive was a strategic one and based solely in what they believed best served British interests: the wish to avoid the Spanish conflict becoming the principal battleground for a general European war.
It was just over thirty years since Churchill had last had any real interest in Spanish matters. In 1895 he had gone to Cuba in a semi-official capacity as a military observer, reporting as well for the Daily Graphic. Cuba at the time was one of the last remaining colonies of the Spanish Empire, and was in the throes of a rebellion by the islanders. He was shocked by the corruption of the colonial administration – ‘on a scale almost Chinese’ – but impressed by the professionalism and bravery of the Spanish troops and their commander General Valdez whose campaign he accompanied. The Spanish military for its part honoured Churchill – a Sandhurst-trained cavalry officer – with a medal for courage in the field.
In his dispatches, Churchill showed some understanding of the Cuban rebels’ cause but he was shocked by their military tactics which he described as that of ‘incendiarists and brigands – burning canefields, shooting from behind hedges, firing into sleeping camps, destroying property, wrecking trains, and throwing dynamite’. These, Churchill, concluded, were ‘perfectly legitimate in war, no doubt, but they are not acts on which States are founded’. He would think on the lessons of Cuba when later, at the outbreak of the Second World War, he encouraged the formation of Special Operations Executive (SOE) with its orders to set Europe ablaze.
Perhaps there was a reason for Churchill to have forgotten Spain over the intervening years when his interests had ranged from military planning in the First World War to Home Rule in Ireland. And yet the Spanish Civil War prompted memories of Cuba, the nearest the old warrior had come to seeing Spaniards at war. From the outset Churchill was careful not to criticise the military uprising. By contrast, he showed little sympathy for the Republican government, which he regarded as revolutionary in character and tainted by its record of violent industrial and agrarian militancy and anticlericalism.
On being presented to the newly appointed republican ambassador to London, Pablo de Azcárate, in October 1936, Churchill turned red with anger, muttered ‘Blood, blood, blood’, and refused the Spaniard’s outstretched hand. The perception was fuelled by the partisan reports about the summary executions of Franco sympathisers which reached him from within the Foreign Office, influential English Catholics, and, most particularly, Hillgarth, the Naval Intelligence officer serving as British consul in Mallorca who was to remain a trusted contact on matters Spanish for over a decade.
The son of a Harley Street surgeon, Hillgarth had entered naval college as a young boy, before serving and getting wounded as a Royal Navy midshipman during the Dardanelles campaign of the First World War, when Churchill had served as First Lord of the Admiralty. During the 1920s Hillgarth became a military adviser to the Spanish Foreign Legion during its confrontation in Morocco with the uprising of the Rif’s tribes. Among the Legion’s officers and one of its founders was a young major named Francisco Franco.
Returning to London, Hillgarth became part of a social network that drew together the upper classes and emerging literary figures and in 1929 married Mary Gardner. ‘A young man called Alan Hillgarth, very sure of himself, writes shockers, ex-sailor’, Evelyn Waugh had noted in his diary two years earlier.
Hillgarth had planned to spend an extended honeymoon sailing round the world in a converted Dutch schooner, but the romantic idea collapsed along with the stock market. Less rich than they had been brought up to be, the Hillgarths sailed from England to Palma, Mallorca, and there sold the boat.
The proceeds from that eventually helped them purchase Son Torella, a run-down but palatial residence and estate whose widowed absentee owner – a member of the Spanish nobility – had left for the mainland to become a nun. When the Hillgarths settled there in 1932, the house was half occupied by cows, donkeys and mules. Contraband tobacco was stored in the galleries and the olive press had been stripped of its hydraulic equipment. It took two years to make the house habitable with the help of local master masons, Mary Hillgarth’s private income and a fortunate lottery ticket in which the Hillgarths had ‘gone halves’ with a friendly Austrian barman called Joe.
Windows were glazed, bookcases carved and installed, the rooms retiled and repainted and filled with a mixture of local antique wooden furniture and portraits of the Gardner family. Apart from the attentive restoration of the house, Mary Hillgarth took special care in creating a garden that was a piece of England grafted on to the Mediterranean. The house had long-established cypresses, palms and lotus trees, planted by the previous owners to provide shelter and shade from the Mediterranean storms and hot summers. Mary planted herbaceous borders, and a thousand irises – Dutch Wedgewoods and Yellow Queens.
Son Torella was already something of an idyll when Winston Churchill and his wife Clementine visited it in the late autumn of 1935. It was a restful place – bursting with scents and colours – which contrasted with the dark shadow of German military expansion that threatened mainland Europe, and the frustration Churchill felt at having his political peers ignore his warnings. Churchill’s hopes of being brought back into government after an extended period on the backbenches had been dashed when he was left out of Stanley Baldwin’s cabinet despite an overwhelming election victory for the Conservatives to which he had contributed. Bruised and verging on despair, Churchill dealt with the resurgent ‘black dog’ of depression by taking a long working and painting holiday.
Hillgarth was by then serving as the British honorary vice-consul in Mallorca. Initially the job had mainly consisted of getting drunken British seamen out of Spanish jails, but Hillgarth had soon manoeuvred it into a ‘cover’ posting, whereby he doubled up as a spy. He adeptly exploited his position to make influential friends among the local community, and gain useful political and military intelligence on an island that was not without strategic importance as a naval base in the Mediterranean. When Churchill came to visit him he played the perfect host, letting him paint and laying on large quantities of food and drink between discussions about worrying developments on the international front and the increasingly volatile state of Spanish politics.
Hillgarth’s most immediate concern was less the threat of a war with Italy than the increasing disgruntlement many of his friends in Mallorca felt about the revolutionary politics of the Spanish left. In the traditionally deeply conservative and right-wing island, one of his key informants was the local businessman Juan March. The plot which was to involve March in financing Franco’s involvement in the military uprising was only months away.
Years later, Tom Burns – by then a long-term friend of Captain Hillgarth – would reflect on the 1930s, not without a sense of guilt pricking his conscience over the sins of omission he had unwittingly contributed to: supporting Mussolini in Abyssinia with the pact formulated by the then foreign secretary Samuel Hoare, his future ambassador in Madrid; waking up belatedly to the real evil of Hitler; and passively acquiescing in the fiction of non-intervention in Spain. ‘The rise of the dictatorships was reported in a muted and distorted fashion: an ugly development, better kept out of sight. Official compliance with broken treaties, near criminal efforts to satisfy Nazi expansionism, by offering to hand over territories that were not ours – such was the coin of our diplomacy. Rearmament, thought Mr Baldwin, would be electorally dangerous – a prospect which was apparently more alarming to him than any belligerent threat from abroad.’
By contrast, Burns reflected, only Winston Churchill had spoken out against government policy and apathy at ‘every possible opportunity’, ceaselessly exposing Britain’s military vulnerability and Nazi Germany’s growing power. And yet, despite Churchill’s formidable eloquence, he was not taken seriously. It was not just Parliament that ignored him. As Burns admitted: ‘I remember thinking that he was aggravating great dangers in the very act of denouncing them. The prospect of peace receded with each new barrage of insults and accusations hurled against Hitler. Mine was a very widely shared view among many of my friends. We read Mein Kampf, published here in 1931, with incredulity; we distrusted the outpouring of the Left Book Club and were as ignorant of German concentration camps and the persecution of the Jews as of the Gulag Archipelago and the enslavement and “liquidation” of millions of political dissenters in the Soviet Union. Partly because the protagonists of protest against these horrors were, to me, suspect witnesses, partly because my life and work were at full stretch, I did not become involved in these matters.’
As Burns admitted, such omission was not due to a lack of witnesses. During the 1930s, he met and befriended Italian, German and Russian Catholics, all of whom had managed to escape from the political repression of their countries, and come to London as refugees. They included Don Luigi Sturzo, the founder of the Partito Popolare which Mussolini had banned, members of the German centre party whom Hitler had forced out of power, and the Russian Christian philosopher Berdyaev, who had fled Stalin. ‘These solitary prophets and witnesses were welcomed with sympathy as if they had escaped from an earthquake, but an earthquake far removed from our island.’
And yet the Spanish Civil War brought the earthquake much nearer than Burns had believed possible at the time. It was a conflict that transcended ordinary politics, inflaming and dividing British public opinion as few other foreign questions had done since the Russian Revolution.