‘Mass and Communion. After breakfast the Prime Minister broadcast the war had begun.’ Thus Evelyn Waugh wrote in his diary at the beginning of September 1939 when news came through that German troops had crossed the Polish border. Much as the cause of Franco had stirred British Catholics into taking sides during the Spanish Civil War, the menace of Hitler had largely been neglected. ‘Despite his impressive evidence and formidable eloquence, Churchill was not taken seriously – Parliament ignored him,’ recalled Burns. ‘I remember thinking that he was aggravating 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 view widely shared among many of my friends.’
Even after the Munich crisis, many of them still hoped that a peace pact with Hitler was possible. The painter and poet David Jones – an integral figure in the coterie of friends that Burns had formed around him – wrote to Harman Grisewood at the BBC, following Chamberlain’s first encounter with Hitler. ‘Yes, I heard Chamberlain’s grand little speech on his first return. I did like that more than I can say. He is simply the real goods, there is no doubt about that – the only bright spot. But, Lord, what a weight the poor man has to carry, and hardly any bugger to give him proper support.’ Hitler stirred more complex emotions. In April 1939, Jones was staying at the Fort Hotel, Sidmouth when he wrote again to Grisewood thus, after reading a full edition of Mein Kampf. ‘I am deeply impressed by it, it is amazingly interesting in all kinds of ways – but pretty terrifying too. God, he’s nearly right – but this hate thing mars the whole thing, I feel. I mean it just misses getting over the frontier into the saint thing – he won’t stand any nonsense or illusions or talk – but, having got so far, the conception of the world in terms of race-struggle (that’s what it boils down to) will hardly do. But I do like a lot of what he says – only I must admit he sees the world as just going on for ever in this steel grip. Compared with his opponents he is grand, but compared with the saints he is bloody.’
Burns sought inspiration and hope from developments at the Vatican. On 10 February 1939, the ultramontane Pope Pius XI died. Within minutes Burns received a telephone call from Grisewood, with an urgent request that he accompany him immediately to Rome to help facilitate the BBC’s coverage of the funeral. ‘You’ll be able to pull strings for me – I know nobody there. The BBC will pay all expenses,’ Grisewood told Burns, who was more than happy to assist.
Burns had a key contact in the Vatican, a raffish prince, William Rospilgliosi, of Italo-American parentage, who ran the Italian state radio network. Thanks to the contact, the BBC was given unparalleled access to the funeral ceremony inside St Peter’s, and provided with the equipment it needed.
Grisewood went on to organise the BBC’s coverage of the election of the new Pope by the College of Cardinals in just three ballots and the subsequent crowning of Pius XII on 12 March, the eve of Hitler’s march into Prague. The new Pope was Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, a brilliant young Vatican lawyer who had played a major part in the drafting of the Code of Canon Law, a legal instrument which helped transform papal primacy and infallibility into an unprecedented principle of papal power.
In the early 1930s, Pacelli, by then promoted to Cardinal Secretary of State, the most important post under the Pope, negotiated a concordat with Hitler under which the Vatican secured certain privileges and protection for German Catholics in return for their withdrawal from politics. Pacelli proclaimed the Reich Concordat an unparalleled triumph for the Holy See, a total recognition of the Church’s law by the German state. But Hitler interpreted it differently, seeing in it the Vatican’s blessing of his policies, not least his increasingly virulent anti-Semitism.
Nevertheless when Pacelli was elected as Pope, many British Catholics saw him as a man capable of providing moral authority in the midst of the turmoil of European politics, strong enough to see off the threat of communism and to contain the ambitions of Hitler and Mussolini. Pacelli’s coronation marked much more than the advent of a skilful mediator: it symbolised the Vatican’s potential as a universal power.
Three days earlier, Burns had written to Grisewood in a state of spiritual and emotional euphoria. ‘This is the first chance of writing to you or anyone. I’ve thought a lot about Rome these days and imagined you are at various times and places. Ann read me your letter and I saw and felt with you in St Peter before the conclave. I wonder if this is the time – what I think we both feel (and hope) – that this Pope really can be and do a great thing – something in a different order from others – as if he were a Gregory. Never before have I had such a personal devotion to a Pope, a personal trust as in leader and not just this supremely important ecclesiastic but really Christ’s vicar … People are just longing for a spiritual leadership and he has all of them waiting for him and him only. It is positively momentous – This Papacy …’
Ann was Ann Bowes-Lyon, a member of the Royal family, with whom Burns had embarked on a passionate if doomed affair. The precise circumstances and timing of their first meeting remain obscure, with both parties taking a deliberate decision to keep their relationship protected from public scrutiny in later years.
But letters and other material discovered by the author in the later stages of researching this book have helped bring to light one of the more intriguing social encounters of the 1930s, when a generation was forced to set aside the frivolity of its party days and face up to the slow drift to world war with a sense of urgency as well as vertigo. Ann was the daughter of Patrick Bowes Lyon, a retired army officer, and the fifth son of the 13th Earl of Strathmore. She was the youngest of four children. The oldest in the family, Gavin, was killed in action in the Great War, aged twenty-one. A second brother, Angus, fought and survived the same war and committed suicide in 1923, aged twenty-three. Ann’s sister, Jean, was three years older than her, and never married. The extended Bowes-Lyon family of cousins and second cousins had a history of early death, neurosis, and alcoholism. Ann was descended from an ancient aristocratic Scottish family, although rumour had it that the blue blood had been mixed by the time Ann was born due to the ancestral dalliance with working-class maids. The family seat, Glamis, was a legendary castle, the fictitious setting for the murder of King Duncan in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and the real-life childhood home Ann had shared with her cousin, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the future Duchess, Queen Consort, and eventual Queen Mother.
Of those childhood days, prior to the outbreak of the Great War, royal biographer Hugo Vickers has remarked on the structured aristocratic society that manifested itself at Glamis, as it had done for centuries. ‘Following the three month London season, the aristocrats retired to their estates, where they remained from August to November … they invited other aristocrats to join them in their sport, be it shooting or hunting.’ During the First World War, Glamis was converted into a Red Cross home for wounded servicemen. While Elizabeth stayed in the castle helping her mother and older sister look after the soldiers, Ann remained closeted in her parental home in London’s Queen’s Gate, taught by governesses.
Yet Ann was eleven years old by the time the war ended and not unaffected by the anguish and trauma which the Bowes-Lyons, like so many other families, suffered at the battlefield deaths of family members. The men of the Strathmore family, according to Vickers, were ‘damaged for life’, with a heavy strain of alcoholism affecting sons and fathers, and breakdown and suicides affecting the next generation.
Ann survived her teenage years, living comfortably between Mayfair and a large country house in Kent and watching her older female cousins emerge in society, the normal events of the season – balls, races, hunts, and shoots – re-established despite crippling taxation.
She came of age at eighteen in 1925, at a time when the old social boundaries of the Edwardian age were, in the words of D.J. Taylor, ‘annually dissolving’. Alongside the formal entertainments of Ascot and debutante balls there emerged the ‘smart bohemia’ of the ‘Bright Young Persons’, with hedonistic parties open as much to aspiring avant-garde intellectuals as to young Ladies and Honourables.
How frequently Ann stepped out of her protective seasonal programme and into the racier nights where social convention was self-consciously flouted is not clear. There is an undated letter to her from Harman Grisewood offering an introduction to Olivia Plunket Greene, among the more notorious female members of one of the chief Bright Young Persons groups. She also corresponded as a young woman with academics and the occasional artist. But Ann did not earn a reputation as a fast aristocratic young lady with a particularly adventurous private life. It would take her some years before she found someone capable of breaking through her emotional self-control and gained sufficient trust in men with which to build a relationship.
Burns’s own memoirs suggest that he spent most of the 1920s without ever falling seriously in love. It was a period during which he avoided deep commitments, including proposals of marriage, or complex affairs, preferring instead to live, as so many of his ‘set’ did, in a state of fluctuating and frivolous affections.
Before moving to Glebe Place, on the King’s Road, Burns lived in a flat in St Leonard’s Terrace from where he straddled social milieus with an eclectic group of friends, several of them active members of the Bright Young Persons set, ranging from homosexual painters like Cedric Morris and his anonymous ‘saturnine lover’ to writers like John Betjeman and the poet’s friend from Oxford days, the extrovert Etonian Lord ‘Cracky’ Billy Clonmore.
During ‘the season’ Burns emerged from his modest quarters in Chelsea ‘like a butterfly from a chrysalis’, in white tie and tails for events often given by hostesses he barely knew.
He later recalled, ‘I discovered that I was on some sort of hostess register, my entry read: “Smart young man, dances well, safe in taxis.”’ When there were no balls, Burns visited the venues appropriated by the wilder party-goers and sexually liberated intellectuals of the Bloomsbury set. The Gargoyle, the Café Anglais, and Hell were habitual haunts.
Life however had moved on by the time Burns met Ann Bowes-Lyon. By the 1930s, in common with many of the Bright Young Persons, Burns had put behind him the unbridled extravagance of his youth and replaced it with a deeper yearning to make sense of the gathering storms moving across the world stage. He was a committed publisher, dedicated to weighing up the possibilities for co-operation and resolution of conflict between the modern world and Catholicism at every point where contacts could be established – in arts, politics, economics, and, last but no means least, human relationships. Their first meeting is thought to have taken place on 19 June 1935 during the first performance in the Chapter House of Canterbury Cathedral of T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. The play had Robert Speaight, a mutual friend of Burns and Grisewood, in the main role of Becket and all three were there that night, as was Ann, invited by – drawn by – veneration for Eliot. Ann at the time had become increasingly drawn to the Catholic faith through her friendship with a Cambridge academic couple, Dorothy Hoare and her husband Jose Maria, otherwise known as ‘JM’ De Navarro – both Catholics – much to the disapproval of her Protestant parents.
While Burns had befriended Eliot in 1932 during the poet’s yearlong professorship at Harvard University in the US, Ann’s acquaintance was more recent, and was linked to her developing interest in poetry as a writer of it herself, and her growing interest in religion. Like several aspiring poets, Ann had sent Eliot some of her own tentative verses to him at the publishing house Faber & Faber, where he was director, with the hope of obtaining his blessing.
Within two years, by 1937, Eliot liked Ann sufficiently to publish her first and only collection of verses with the coveted Faber imprint. The edition was entitled simply Poems by Ann Lyon, had a very small print run, and limited publicity. It was subsequently circulated among friends rather than family, suggesting a tension between Ann’s public persona and private life.
Of the fifty-four poems, mostly written in the haunting elegiac style of the early-twentieth-century ‘Georgian’ poets, three – ‘To Have Loved Enough’, ‘Hypnos from a Bronze’, and ‘The Lover’ – stand out because of the intimacy linking the poet to an unidentified person. They are love poems, intensely expressed, with feelings of longing underpinned by a prevailing sense of vulnerability and foreboding. The lover was Burns.
So bound in you, I scarce can draw breath
But your quiet breathing stirs against my breast,
Under my heart I feel your heart’s unrest
The close quiescence of your tenderness …
I have no movement shared not-even death
That stills the tumult of a blood to sleep
Shall merge immortally hand and lip
And seal the consummation of our kiss.
It was over a discussion about Eliot, his growing interest in Christian activism, and the way in which the play they had seen in Canterbury seemed to combine faith and poetry in the figure of a solitary and ambivalent martyr, that Burns fell in love with Ann Bowes-Lyon, at twenty-eight years old one year younger than himself.
Burns found Ann – born a Protestant but moving towards the Church of Rome much as Eliot was – intellectually mature and physically attractive in a way that set her apart from and above other women he had known. She was no sexual flirt like Olivia Plunket Greene, nor a religious fundamentalist like Gabriel Herbert. Her royal lineage and self-control challenged him socially and romantically – the commoner pursuing his ‘princess’. The suggestion that Ann’s blue blood may have been mixed as a result of an ancestor’s affair with a Welsh maid appears to have been kept from him, another secret the Bowes-Lyon family thought it prudent not to share with the outside world.
Ann, for her part, found herself initially uneasy at being courted with such passion by a man who evidently was well outside the tightly-knit aristocratic circle in which she had been brought up. A cradle Catholic, born in a foreign land, and educated by the Jesuits, the darkly handsome Burns carried the charismatic air of a bachelor who seemed more content with life than the male members of her family, and with a self-confidence that contrasted with the stiff upright young men she had met when growing up. And yet from their first meeting, he had also shown himself disarmingly thoughtful.
He was not only insightful about literature, and matters of faith, but deeply sensitive and receptive to her views. He began to pay court, writing to her and seeing her whenever he could – whenever she returned to London between extended stints at Glamis and her country home in Kent near Churchill’s house in Chartwell. Burns would often follow Ann to Orchard Farm, a large cottage her academic friends the De Navarros owned in Worcestershire, near to where her sister Jean lived.
The De Navarros were happy to provide an intimate environment where the lovers could meet without the intrusion of Ann’s parents or some of her less liberated childhood friends. Such was the intensity of the affair that Burns would leave sealed notes around the cottage for Ann to remind her of a particular passionate moment they had recently shared.
In one letter, dated 29 May 1939, Burns while at Orchard Farm wrote: ‘Darling, here I am alone in this room, crouched next to the fire – I can hear little padding about above and still the sound of your voice. This is just a “ticket” for your morning – to tell you how very dear you have been all day. From the moment you popped your fuzzy head out of the window – to the moment you laid it back on the pillow after I had kissed you goodnight you were beautiful, really and truly lovely … I know that my heart is branded with your beauty, Ann, and no one else can make their mark now. Dearest … I’m grateful for you being so much better than when I last saw you …’
Photographs the De Navarros snapped of the couple at the time show Burns and Ann standing rather awkwardly before the camera, as if slightly uneasy about their relationship being recorded for posterity. Perhaps Ann’s sister Jean was present that day. However intense, their love affair appeared to be based on fragile ground.
Gradually she found herself opening her inner feelings to him in a way that she had never done with anybody else, as if he had laid siege to her Edwardian battlement and breached its defences.
As she wrote in another of her poems:
If to have loved enough could be its own assurance
There was no chink left in my armour,
Never a hidden entry for betrayal
Only the safety of your tenderness
Like a firelit room secure from the winter night.
The passionate poetess is barely hinted at in a collection of photographs taken by Howard Coster for the National Portrait Gallery in 1937, about the time her relationship with Burns was becoming more intense. It shows her very posed and controlled – a well-groomed woman with a swan-like neck, face of fine complexion and eyes suggesting an inner intelligence. As a mature young woman, Ann shared some common traits with her cousin Elizabeth, including deep-blue eyes and that ‘thrush-like beauty’ as Cecil Beaton would later refer to the future Queen Mother. Beneath the veneer of prudence and decorum was a multi-layered personality that Burns discovered only gradually, and which made his relationship with the future Queen’s cousin something tense, unpredictable, and for his part certainly, almost obsessive.
That Burns’s relationship with Ann came to prove more complicated than his previous somewhat frivolous affairs of the heart had to do with the royal milieu into which she had been propelled as a result of the events of 1936. For in that year her cousin Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon had become the Duchess of York, briefly sister-in-law to King Edward VIII, before finally Queen Consort to King George VI. Suddenly Ann found herself sharing her family duties with an extended royal household that, after the debacle of Mrs Simpson’s relationship with King Edward VIII and the ensuing abdication crisis, was less than open to outsiders.
Ann nonetheless stirred in Burns romantic notions of his own Scottish roots, which, he believed, stretched back, as they did with the Bowes-Lyon family, to Robert the Bruce, the great King of Scotland. The turmoil sweeping through European politics, and the growing realisation that world war might not be far off, made the relationship both intense and complicated as it developed during the late 1930s.
When not seeing each other at Burns’s flat off the King’s Road, or at the homes of mutual friends, the pair maintained a regular correspondence, only Burns’s side of which has survived. The letters are punctuated with references to a feline world in which Burns includes sketches of himself and Ann as loving cats in constant pursuit of each other – he a dark tabby, she a sophisticated white Persian. The feline imagery and language show the influence of T. S. Eliot, whose recently published whimsical verses on cat psychology and sociology, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats – fully illustrated – contrasted with the intensity of his early works and the mounting sense of collective unease in the run up to the Second World War.
During the first months of 1939, Ann suffered periodic illness – fatigue accompanied by nausea and fever, symptoms of the depression that affected generations of Bowes-Lyons. Several letters written to her by Burns during this period refer to her either as bed-ridden or recovering from illness. Learning from his experience of living with his friend David Jones, who was also a depressive, Burns tried his best to divert her attention from what he saw as the demons that threatened her from without – in particular the pressures to conform emanating from Glamis Castle and her parents’ home in Kent. But there was a part of him that increasingly came to see the darkness affecting those dearest to him as part of a broader pattern of political and social dislocation. As the war drew nearer, it focused his protective thoughts on her, expressing them as a form of prayer, as if by so doing he hoped not only to win her heart but ensure, through God’s intercession, that war would be avoided.
In March he wrote, ‘My darling Ann, I wish I was with you tonight. Being together in love would put these given things in their place. Poor poor little miaoooo – being sick in the wood – I do indeed understand how you could be but you see, darling, things are much better than they appear to be: and we live in the frontiers of heaven and hell – of which peace or rumblings of war are very sketchy shadows. Live in the reality and the world will do what one expects of it, of good and bad. I mean live in a kind of prayer and you’ll be all right …’
In August, Ann was with other members of the Bowes-Lyon family in Glamis Castle, attending the usual round of summer house parties as generations had done before them, when Ribbentrop, the former German ambassador to London who had become Hitler’s foreign minister, flew to Moscow and with Stalin’s foreign secretary Molotov signed the Nazi–Soviet Pact that divided Poland between them. A letter reached her from Burns: ‘I keep thinking of you isolated up there with all this wild and grim news flying around: poor darling: I do hope you are all right. The Russian–German hook-up may turn out to be a good thing; if the Germans and Poles both act with generosity and common sense: seeing destruction of Poland as certain if things waver and deciding to play for peace with Danzig and the diminished life of Poland after its gone. Before this pact, you see, the Poles were more likely to fight and the left wing in this country were getting more and more impatient with Chamberlain and keener and keener on the Russians; now at any rate, even Mr Gollancz will have to see the light – which is simply that the Russian simply cannot be trusted at all. I hope it is not too late – but our left wing has led us a long way up the garden path and it’s difficult to come back …’
The hope that another world war might be avoided was shattered by Hitler’s invasion of Poland. When he heard the news, Burns could think of nothing better to do but go to Fortnum & Mason and invest in a pair of strong brogues and an all-purpose canvas bag, in case he might be called up. Later he went back to his house, and there, in the white room, with Tim on his lap, wrote Ann the first lines that came into his head. In the intimate code language they used with each other, spontaneous notes quickly dispatched by messenger or left on coffee tables came to be known as ‘tickets’. This was the first ticket of the war.
‘Darling little heart – this is just a scribble in the midst of things to say hello. I think these last days aren’t at all without their muse. They make us take stock and see what we stand for and mean to do and be. My Darling – I will write a little ticket very soon – tonight it’s impossible … What a wind and rain tonight – cats ought to be curled up in boxes on such a night as this – I’ll send my love to keep you warm. Blessing you my dreamt one …’
Hours after war had been declared, Burns sat at home drinking whisky with a young friend, Michael Richey, discussing the tumultuous events that were unfolding. At twenty-three, Richey was ten years younger than Burns. A fellow Catholic, he had been educated as a schoolboy by the Benedictines, and had for a while considered becoming a monk himself before joining Eric Gill’s commune of artists as an apprentice carver.
By 1939 Richey was looking for a job in the wider world, quite where and what he had no idea after the unique if occasionally unsettling experience of working with Gill.
Burns convinced Richey that the best way to reconcile his pacifism with his sense of patriotic duty was to join the navy, serving on a minesweeper as an ordinary seaman. As he told Richey, ‘This seemed to me an admirable way of confronting things, as when you sweep mines you are destroying instruments of destruction though you are liable to be blown up yourself.’
Burns for his part made an effortless entry into government service, the outbreak of the war marking his transition from a public figure to an agent of the state playing multiple parts. The BBC’s Grisewood and Lord Howard of Penrith were among those who brought to the attention of the higher echelons of Whitehall Burns’s background as a leading Catholic publisher and his experience as a consummate communicator and social networker.
Shortly before war broke out he received instructions to report to the Ministry of Information (MoI), and was told he was to be in charge of ‘Roman Catholic affairs’.
The Ministry of Information, while officially functional from 4 September 1939, the day after the UK declared war on Germany, had been secretly planned since 1935 by an internal Whitehall committee. Secrecy had been maintained because the government did not want to admit to the inevitability of war.
Senior UK officials claimed to have learnt the lessons of the First World War, when propaganda was the responsibility of various government agencies except for a brief period when there had been a Department of Information (1917) and an earlier version of the MoI (1918) which was subsequently disbanded.
Plans for the new MoI, with overarching responsibility for publicity and propaganda in the Second World War, had been accelerated in response to the well-oiled Nazi propaganda machinery under Dr Goebbels. The MoI’s initial functions were threefold: news and press censorship; ‘home publicity’; and overseas publicity in Allied and neutral countries. In early 1939, UK government officials predicted a ‘war of nerves’ involving the civilian population and warned ministers they would have to go further than ever before in ‘coordinating and utilising’ every propaganda tool at their disposal in order to counter the Nazi threat. Burns was given a broad brief, from encouraging contacts with dissident Germans to liaising with the Vatican, and developing links with Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Portugal, as well as with influential Catholics in the United States.
Burns moved into the Ministry of Information’s offices in the University of London’s headquarters at Senate House in early 1940, about the time his friend the future poet laureate, John Betjeman, was recruited into the Films Division by Kenneth Clark.
Employees of the Ministry were instructed to keep their duties secret from the outside world and worked to a rolling eight-hour shift pattern to ensure 24-hour coverage. And yet for all the semblance of a functioning and efficient government department, the early months proved particularly shambolic as the MoI struggled to define a clear role for itself and to make efficient use of a mixed bag of recruits drawn somewhat haphazardly from a wide variety of professions. One of the MoI’s senior recruits, Kenneth Grubb, recalled the initial confusion its creation brought to the machinery of government: ‘The permanent civil servants who inevitably handle the higher arrangements of a new ministry were themselves frequently at a loss to perceive the next step, although war presupposes quick decisions. Many different types of personalities and experiences were needed. Someone had to find the scholarly approach on some remote but key territory, the journalist with the right touch, the broadcaster, the advertiser, and many others from the publicity profession. Most of us indulged in an unscrupulous and crazy scramble to secure the best available people before they were snapped up, since everyone knew that war was bound to create a shortage of capable management types.’
In the early stages of the war, the MoI’s operations were hampered by the lack of cooperation from other agencies of government, namely the War Office, the Air Ministry and the Admiralty, and the intelligence services that resented what they saw as a weakening of their ability to control and manipulate the flow of information to the public on military plans and movements. Similarly, the MoI’s involvement in propaganda in enemy-occupied and neutral countries led to tensions with the BBC and other Whitehall departments such as the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Economic Warfare.
In its attempts to impose itself on government policy, the MoI was further disadvantaged by frequent changes of senior personnel. Between 4 September 1939 and 20 July 1941, the department changed ministers three times – Lord Hugh Macmillan, Sir John Reith, and Alfred ‘Duff’ Cooper paving the way for a more continuous and successful leadership under Brendan Bracken. There were also mixed blessings in the fact that civil servants outnumbered public relations and advertising experts, with many tasks being left in the hands of writers, publishers and artists with no experience of government, still less of taking on an enemy expert in the art of spin and deception.
In Evelyn Waugh’s 1942 novel Put Out More Flags, it is the MoI in the early months of the war that bears the brunt of Waugh’s acerbic satire as the author tries to capture the mood of a nation changing from frivolity to a deep sense of foreboding, and as the ageing generation of bright young things contemplates division, death and destruction.
The main character, Basil Seal, finds himself at the outbreak of war a man without a job, despite his firm belief in himself as the kind of person who ‘if English life had run as it did in the books of adventure’ should at this turn in world affairs have been sent for by the secret intelligence services. But hard as he tries to exploit his social ‘old boy networks’, Basil cannot penetrate the world of propaganda and secrets. The nearest he gets to initial employment is an interview at the MoI, a Ministry also visited by his friend, the camp aesthete Ambrose Silk, who ends up peating bogs in a friar’s garb. Ambrose’s invitation to visit the MoI is facilitated by his publisher, Geoffrey Bentley, who is working there at the head of some newly formed department. In his introduction to the Penguin edition of Put Out More Flags, Nigel Spivey notes, rightly, that Basil Seal falls short of being quite the mirror image of his creator, Waugh – ‘too tall, too handsome, too well-born’ – but the book is a brilliant satire on the administrative chaos and improvisation that characterised Whitehall, and the MoI in particular, in the first months of the phoney war. It is hard not to see Basil’s alter ego Bentley as a thinly veiled if partial portrait of Waugh’s friend Burns, who in real life continued to commission books from his literary contacts, while branching out into a world of intrigue and secrets for which he had no formal training.
In the autumn of 1938, Burns approached Waugh himself to write another book, a history of the Jesuits. He also commissioned the eccentric and controversial Hilaire Belloc, whose blend of humour and bellicosity came to be much admired by Catholics of Waugh’s generation, not least Evelyn himself.
Burns asked Belloc to write a preface to a book by his old friend J. B. Morton – ‘Beachcomber’. Belloc’s agreement was conveyed in a letter addressed to Burns care of the Reform, one of several London clubs the publisher used for nurturing his friends and clients.
‘Dear Burns … I shall be delighted to do such a preface as you propose. I don’t mind the terms so five guineas will do as well as anything else, but I shall begin it with the words, “My dear Morton” because I think beginning with the name under which I usually write to him, “My dear Johnnie”, would be too familiar for public print.’ After Chamberlain’s declaration of war, Burns enlisted the help of his friend and political ally Douglas Jerrold to get Belloc to write 10,000 words of pro-government propaganda, entitled ‘The Case for the Present War, from the Catholic Angle’.
During the 1930s the fear of Communism had produced ground in which sympathy for fascism had grown among some Catholic intellectuals as well as the members of the British upper classes – hence the support for the Italians in Ethiopia and the Nationalists in Spain, even if this has been described by church historian Adrian Hastings as ‘individualistic and idiosyncratic’ and ‘carrying little weight outside the upper-class Roman Catholic community’. But if Belloc, one of Burns’s enduring influences, had made enemies on the left by his support for right-wing French Catholics and his alleged anti-Semitism, his mind about Nazism had been made up once war had been declared, and he was against it.
Belloc grew to despair of the newly elected Pope’s apparent inability to speak out unequivocally against the Nazis, ‘browbeaten, by people who talk of a large and powerful Catholic body in Boche-land’. As Belloc put it, ‘There is no such thing. The Catholic Germans were swamped and dowsed long ago in a flood of horribly vulgar Paganism with Atheistic architecture.’
In fact the need to encourage the stirrings of opposition to Hitler within German Catholic circles was one of the tasks Burns had set himself from his early days at the MoI. In this endeavour he was helped by Harman Grisewood and Bernard Wall, who, after a stint working undercover in Rome, went on to join the Foreign Office research department based at Balliol College, Oxford, under the direction of Dr Arnold Toynbee and Sir Alfred Zimmerman.
‘Before the war … violent polemics were carried out by literary men, but they hardly ever bothered to check and counter check their facts. Now facts took their revenge,’ recalled Wall. ‘We had to find out what was true in a world deluged by lies. The lies weren’t only Hitler’s and Stalin’s. Though in Dr Toynbee’s department we told no lies, we were surrounded by lies. The British and Americans, once they had set their minds to war and propaganda, pursued both ruthlessly.’
Once again the network of Catholic public school boys had a common point of contact not just in Burns, but also in his old Jesuit mentor Fr D’Arcy. The enthusiasm D’Arcy had put into backing the Franco cause during the Spanish Civil War was channelled into the new war aims of the British government. Appointed to the BBC’s religious committee, D’Arcy began to broadcast frequently on the need for Christians on both sides of the Atlantic to unite against the Nazi persecution of the Catholic Church. Later, in September 1941, D’Arcy left for the United States on a mission organised by the Catholic Department of the Ministry of Information. His aim was to influence the Catholic community in the US, namely the Irish and Italians, to drop its opposition to US intervention in favour of the Allies.
D’Arcy’s success in becoming part of the Allied war effort contrasted with Evelyn Waugh’s failure to join a network of friends at the MoI. In Put Out More Flags Basil’s own attempt to gain useful employment during the phoney war is drawn from Waugh’s own frustrating experiences during that period.
Waugh wrote to Basil Dufferin, the Under Secretary of State for the Colonies, an old acquaintance, in the hope that he might use his influence. This and subsequent approaches failed to elicit a positive response. Waugh himself suspected the dark hand of MI5, the security service, which, after Munich, and especially after the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, was digging up old files and creating new ones on potential fifth columnists it saw as capable of furthering the interests of an international conspiracy of Nazis and communists. Waugh had supported Mussolini in the Abyssinian War, and had been pro-Franco during the Spanish Civil War, declaring his sympathies for both causes respectively in Waugh in Abyssinia and Robbery Under Law. His social contacts during the 1930s had extended to families like the Mitfords and the Mosleys, who moved on the fringes of British politics and openly sympathised with Hitler’s Germany. It was this background, combined with Waugh’s reputation as a satirist, that might have contributed to putting obstacles in his way inside Whitehall. Burns, thanks to his friends in the Foreign Office, seems to have been initially more fortunate in ensuring that his pro-Franco leanings were not held against him, although he failed, despite Waugh’s recommendation, to enlist for covert military duties with the Special Operations Executive, having been judged to lack a killer instinct.
Burns later recalled: ‘Evelyn turned up at the Ministry of Information early in the war. He had fixed an interview for me with some Special Services unit and advised me to go, “Get a haircut …” I eventually reached the War Office via Trumper’s suitably trimmed. Here a bull-necked officer rushed at me with unexpected questions: “Can you gouge a man’s eyes out with your thumbs – from behind?” “Can you find the kidneys with a sharp knife?’ I must have failed in these and other questions because I never heard from him again. Anyway, I was soon off on other business in Spain.’
Burns’s ‘business’ in Spain was a few weeks away yet. It was still a phoney war for almost everyone except those in the Royal Navy who were already embarked on a dangerous mission at sea. Instead of engaging in full-scale military operations, the British shadow-boxed with the enemy, drawing up secret plans, intercepting secret messages, distributing agents, befriending friendly foreigners and tracking suspect aliens. Priests, public school boys, convent girls came and went at the MoI, a building whose architecture and some of its activities partly inspired the model for the Ministry of Truth wherein Winston Smith laboured at the falsification of history in George Orwell’s novel 1984. ‘The Ministry of Truth – Mintrie, in Newspeak – was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up terrace after terrace 300 metres in the air.’
In fact Senate House is built of Portland stone and not quite 300 metres high. The Ministry of Truth was an amalgam of Orwell’s literary imagination, which was also influenced by his experience working as a propagandist at the BBC, and that of his wife Eileen’s time working for the Ministry of Food.
At the MoI, Burns was joined by Graham Greene, an appointment he helped facilitate with the help of Denis Cowan, the head of his Catholic propaganda section. Greene was recruited initially into the Film Division, sharing an office with his Oxford contemporary John Betjeman, and put to work on some scripts. After returning from Mexico, and writing up his account of his time there for his publisher Burns in The Lawless Roads, Greene had set about turning this into fiction in The Power and the Glory. This was followed by The Confidential Agent, a novel set in the Spanish Civil War. Its two main Spanish characters were drawn from opposite sides of the conflict.
Greene had never been to Spain. As we have seen, the nearest he’d got to the Spanish border was his attempt to reach besieged Bilbao in 1937, but the book shows that Greene’s literary imagination had not remained idle during a period when some of his closest professional contacts and friends were fully absorbed by events south of the Pyrenees.
The two main characters combine to mirror Greene’s own torn loyalties when faced with the stark clash of ideals the war in Spain provoked. The confidential agent ‘D’ of the title is a Republican but was a scholar of medieval literature before the war. The other agent ‘L’, who is on the side of Franco, in conversation with ‘D’ confesses to also being a student of such literature but laments the fact that ‘D’s comrades had burnt his pictures and books, including a manuscript of St Augustine’s City of God.
In September 1939, in order to complete the novels he was working on, Greene persuaded a draft board of the Officers’ Emergency Reserve to postpone his call-up by a few months. After joining Burns at the MoI, Greene managed to survive the administrative upheavals higher up the management chain by helping to enlist the support of a variety of authors and other contacts for the propaganda effort.
Among those who visited the MoI during this period was the writer Barbara Lucas, Bernard Wall’s wife, whom Burns had first introduced to Greene while working as a young publisher for Sheed & Ward. Wall was accompanied by Mike Richey, who had by now followed Burns’s advice and enlisted in the Royal Navy.
Lucas recorded in her diary, ‘Mike on leave came to see us … went to the Ministry of Information to see Graham Greene and Tom. We hadn’t got passes but Mike said we were parachutists (SOE) so were let in. Had a nice chat with Graham Greene and a horrid one with Tom who is always a bit stiff when he is in his office. I recall that Tom thought it rather a bore that these two rather scruffy people were dropping in on him just when he was starting in his rather nice new office.’
If the stress of wartime government work occasionally got the better of Burns, he, like Greene, knew how to compartmentalise his existence, compensating for the self-imposed discipline of office life with romantic entanglements. The prospect of war, the pervading sense that life as lived till then was about to change irrevocably, with unforeseeable consequences, fuelled a basic human instinct to live for the moment, and focus on what was achievable, a need Burns and Greene were reminded of no sooner had they stepped out of the cold interior of Senate House and into the surrounding neighbourhood of Bloomsbury.
And yet the woman Burns pursued at the time, Ann Bowes-Lyon, continued to resist marriage, and any enduring emotional attachment. The declaration of war brought back memories of the death in action of her youngest brother in the last Great War and of so many of their generation, making her anxious and threatening another bout of depression not unlike that which had ended in her older brother’s suicide in 1923. This time nothing her lover could say to her seemed to motivate her. Instead it was her extended Royal family who saved her, for they fuelled in her a sense of patriotic duty, and determined what action she should take.
A major influence was her enthroned cousin, Elizabeth. For within days of Chamberlain declaring war on Germany, Queen Elizabeth threw herself into a hectic round of morale-boosting visits and initiatives aimed at encouraging the involvement of women in the war effort. A new generation of women – voters and workers – was being called for special duties, many of them separated from their children. This was a war destined to draw women into a whole range of fields, from nursing to special operations. With no medical training, Ann joined VAD (Voluntary Aid Detachment) and was posted to the Royal Herbert Hospital in Woolwich. Just over twenty-five years earlier, in December 1914, the first wounded soldier from the First World War had arrived from Dundee Royal Infirmary at Ann’s childhood home at Glamis. It had taken a quarter of a century for Ann to rediscover a sense of public duty which she believed she carried in her blood.
In May 1939, news had reached Burns from Madrid of two public displays of ceremony that convinced him that he might be well qualified, because of his knowledge of Spanish politics, range of contacts, and Catholicism, to monitor Franco’s New Spain. The first was Franco’s triumphant state entry into Madrid, and a sixteen-mile parade along the capital’s main avenue by 200,000 troops that followed it. Near the front of the parade was a battalion of Italian black-shirted Arditi, their daggers raised in a Roman salute. The rear was brought up by General Wolfram von Richthofen and his Condor Legion. In between marched Moorish mercenaries, the Spanish Foreign Legion, members of the neo-fascist Falange party, Navarese carrying huge crucifixes, and regular Spanish troops, goose-stepping. Above, in the clear blue mountain sky, aircraft circled and drew Franco’s name in smoke. The second took place next day when there was a solemn Te Deum ceremony of thanksgiving at the main military basilica of Santa Bárbara, where Franco led prayers in thanks for his victory and presented the Primate of all Spain, Cardinal Goma, with a silver and gold sword specially crafted in Toledo for the occasion.
Through the prism of the secular left, the two ceremonies confirmed Franco as Europe’s new dictator, a relic of Spain’s repressive and unenlightened imperial past transformed into an ally of the new fascism, threatening what peace there was left in the world. But as he sat reading the reverential Catholic media reports in his publishing office near St Paul’s, Burns was not alone in seeing the ceremonies instead as symbolic of an opportunity unfolding.
Burns was aware of the debt Franco owed Germany and Italy for the help given during the Spanish Civil War, but he saw Franco as an authoritarian ruler imbued with an almost mystical sense of national identity whose Catholic faith and pride in Spain’s past imperialist history would resist full submission to the pagan ideologues of the Third Reich, just as it had effectively blocked the plans of the Russian Comintern to extend its influence south of the Pyrenees. Burns believed that the more Catholicism influenced British diplomacy, propaganda and secret intelligence the greater the likelihood that Franco would stay neutral.
In Spain few English institutions lent themselves more willingly to the concept that there was no inherent contradiction in supporting the New Spain and being a patriotic supporter of the Allied cause than the Catholic seminary of St Alban’s in Valladolid. The establishment was a curious remnant of a time when English Catholics were regarded as potential traitors to the English Crown and forced either underground or into exile. It was founded in 1589 by the Jesuit Robert Persons, under the patronage of Philip II, as a seminary for exiled Catholic clergy. The majority of priests executed in England during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I – the Catholic ‘martyrs’ – had studied at St Alban’s.
And yet, soon after war was declared in 1939, the rector, the Rt Rev Mgr Canon Edwin Henson, received a letter from the MoI asking him to become involved in the propaganda war against Germany. It was signed by Lord Perth, the Catholic peer who had overseen the recruitment of several members of his faith to the MoI. The peer, otherwise known as Sir Eric Drummond, was considered one of the great and the good in British diplomatic and political circles. During the First World War he had served as private secretary to one prime minister (Asquith) and two foreign secretaries (Grey and Balfour), before being appointed Secretary General to the League of Nations, and subsequently British ambassador to Rome.
His letter as diplomatic adviser to the MoI, drafted with Burns’s help, defined the role expected to be played by trusted friends at home and abroad. ‘It is clear that if friendship and understanding are to be established between England and Spain it must be largely through the Catholic Church … In this question of the approach to the Spanish episcopate Cardinal Hinsley feels there is no one else who possesses your special opportunities,’ Lord Perth wrote.
Hinsley, the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, was himself to play an increasingly influential role politically, becoming the first leading Catholic bishop since the Reformation to be trusted by the government in wartime as a true patriot capable of ensuring that the minority faith remained united behind the Allied cause. As for Henson, he became a trusted agent in tune with the main thrust of British government policy towards Spain. Thus, while he was happy to help out in Britain’s efforts to counter Nazi influence in Spain, he remained doggedly anti-socialist and anti-communist, and constantly denounced any attempts by the left to influence British policy against Franco.
Henson initially responded to the MoI by suggesting that Burns’s department ensure that Pope Pius XI’s letter against Nazism, Mit Brennender Sorge (With Deep Anxiety), be distributed in a good Spanish translation. Given its broader attack on fascism generally, the encyclical had been deliberately suppressed by the pro-Franco forces during the civil war when it was first published in 1937. However, the MoI had resurrected it, believing that it was more relevant to its Second World War propaganda aims than Pius XII’s first ‘encyclical’, published in 1939, Summi Pontificatus (The Function of the State in the Modern World), which, much to the disappointment of Burns and other Catholics, lacked a firm public condemnation of the Nazi onslaught.
In addition to circulating Mit Brennender Sorge, Henson also suggested the posting of an English Catholic chaplain to Madrid to counter the influence of two German Catholic priests who were suspected of working for the Abwehr. The appointment of such a priest had become an important point of principle for Henson since the last chaplain, his former vice-rector at St Alban’s, Fr A. V. Philips, had left the priesthood during the Spanish Civil War to support the Republican cause as a journalist with the News Chronicle, before being arrested by Franco’s forces. Thanks to Henson’s recommendation, the Madrid chaplaincy was handed to Fr Joseph Mulrean, a Gibraltar-based priest who had served as field chaplain of the requetés, the right-wing Carlist militias, during the civil war. His first job was to intercede on Philips’s behalf and save him from being shot by a firing squad as an alleged communist.
Henson’s links with British intelligence and propaganda grew increasingly close after Chamberlain’s declaration of war. The relationship was prompted initially by the posting to the British embassy in Madrid of a kindred spirit. This was Bernard Malley, a politically conservative Anglo-Irishman who had lived in Spain for some twenty years as a teacher and university lecturer specialising in ecclesiastical affairs. When the civil war began, Malley was based near the monastery of El Escorial, built as a retreat by Philip II in the mountains outside Madrid. He took refuge in the British embassy when the capital resisted Franco’s forces, before making his way into the Nationalist zone and joining the staff of the British agent Sir Robert Hodgson in Burgos. As soon as the British embassy was established Malley volunteered his services as an informant, adviser and general fixer, making himself an indispensable member of the team thanks to the contacts he had built up over the years.
Correspondence between Henson and Malley began in December 1939, within weeks of Burns’s appointment to the MoI. In one letter, Henson complained about the bulletins the press department at the British embassy was publishing, and which he thought chimed with the socialist idea of an international anti-fascist alliance. ‘Until England breaks definitely with the USSR, and until England definitely states what her reasons are, I am afraid the “boletines” will not do much good.’
The issue of what kind of propaganda should be encouraged in Spain and how it should be delivered became an increasingly hot topic of debate in a series of exchanges between the embassy in Madrid and Whitehall early in 1940 as Britain and the rest of Europe moved inexorably towards world war. Burns was called to a crisis meeting by his immediate superior, Denis Cowan, to be told to make ready for a joint trip to Madrid to try and sort things out.
Cowan was a former member of the Foreign Office’s consular section, who had last visited Madrid in the thick of the civil war when the capital was still in Republican hands. He had formed part of a commission led by Field Marshal Sir Philip Chetwode, a hero of the First World War, which Spanish officials on both sides of the divide had agreed to in order to facilitate a general exchange of prisoners. Cowan was later implicated in a plot by Colonel Segismundo Casado, a Republican officer, to wrench control of Madrid from the communists and negotiate with Franco. Just over a year later, in February 1940, Cowan’s role in helping secure safe haven in Britain for Casado and others who had fought for the Republic embroiled him in controversy as he set off by car on his journey to Madrid with Burns.
News of Cowan’s trip and of the declared nature of his mission – the reorganisation of British propaganda emanating from the Iberian Peninsula – had reached the Spanish embassy in London and prompted a string of protest letters to the Foreign Office. The Spanish ambassador, the Duke of Alba, accused Cowan of having ‘pro-Republican sympathies’. Mention was made of his involvement with Casado and with other Republican elements exiled in London, including members of the exiled Basque government.
Alba’s press attaché was Pablo Merry del Val, a contemporary of Burns’s at Stonyhurst when his father had served as ambassador in London. With a reputation as an aristocratic playboy and a member of the Falange, he had subsequently worked as one of the chief liaison officers for the foreign press during the Spanish Civil War. Del Val wrote to the Foreign Office accusing Cowan of encouraging the former priest Philips to write a series of anti-Franco articles in the News Chronicle and a pamphlet following his release from a Franco prison. Cowan was aware of the protests, but went ahead with the trip hoping that the furore would die down by the time he reached Madrid.
Burns accompanied Cowan reluctantly – the thought of separation from Ann Bowes-Lyon pained him – but he also felt politically uncomfortable with the diplomatic divide that threatened to open up between the Spanish embassy and the MoI. Burns left it to another more senior Catholic in the ministry, Alec Randall, an experienced civil servant on secondment from the Foreign Office, to try and resolve the issue. In exchanges with the Foreign Office, Randall initially defended Cowan’s reputation: ‘The Spanish ambassador is apt to consider anybody “Red” who was not out and out pro-Franco, but otherwise I believe Cowan’s relations with the Spanish embassy, particularly with the press attaché, quite friendly.’
By contrast the British ambassador in Madrid at the time, the prickly Sir Maurice Peterson, was furious that the first he heard about Cowan’s trip was when he was sent a copy of Alba’s protest. Peterson had been in post for less than a year, and knew how delicately poised Spanish neutrality was. He believed Cowan was a diplomatic liability and would ‘upset the apple cart’ and told the Foreign Office that he had formed this opinion independent of Alba’s protest. ‘The trouble is that the Spaniards, and particularly those young Spaniards who now control the press, are profoundly suspicious of him,’ the ambassador wrote.
Burns and Cowan were oblivious to the brewing diplomatic row as they crossed the Channel and motored south, through France, to Spain. As they drew further away from England, both men appeared to set aside whatever hidden suspicions they might have had of each other, and shared in a spirit of adventure, the open spaces, timelessness and the unpredictability of what lay ahead, a welcome relief from the bureaucratic drudgery and cramped conditions of work at the Ministry. ‘He was excellent company as we bowled along in a big grey Humber through unoccupied France. I had told my friends that I would be back in no time. But things happened differently,’ Burns later recalled.
By the time they reached the border, an internal Whitehall enquiry had concluded that Cowan’s visit to Spain made no diplomatic sense. ‘It is fantastic to say the least,’ said an internal Foreign Office report, ‘that the man in charge of propaganda in Spain should be persona non grata to the Spanish propaganda authorities, the Spanish embassy in London, and our own ambassador in Madrid …’
Before entering Spain, Cowan and Burns called on the British consulate in Hendaye, in south-west France, to report to London on their progress. The consul handed Cowan a sealed On His Majesty’s Service envelope marked ‘urgent’. It contained orders from the Foreign Office for Cowan to return to London and for Burns to drive on to Madrid on his own. ‘It seemed that Cowan was persona non grata with the Spanish government on account of his having served as one of the neutral observers controlling non-intervention during the Civil War,’ Burns wrote in his memoirs. ‘The non-intervention policy had been suspect with the Spanish Nationalists who were convinced that it was a one-sided affair, favouring the Republicans. I am sure that Cowan himself was innocent of duplicity but that was irrelevant. We parted with sorrow. It was sad to hear much later that he had been killed in an air raid.’
Burns picked up the Humber and drove south. The curling road through the great passes of the mountain border brought back memories of himself as a young schoolboy trekking in Belloc’s footsteps. This remained God’s landscape, beautiful and majestic to behold, the highest peaks still covered in snow, the lower valleys sprouting fresh green. Yes, Burns mused, Belloc was surely right about Spain, that on entering it through this border pass one finds a strong emotion rising in one, and most strongly does one feel ‘the contrast and the change – the interest of exploration, the appetite for the discovery of new things, and the weight of the past’. And most strongly does one feel all these things when one passes into that ‘proud, separate and reserved world’ that is Spain, ‘not by any entry commonly used, but alone, through some chance high notch of the ridge, where, not without difficulty but without peril, the mountains may be crossed and an approach made to Aragon …’
The landscape, of hills and valleys, on the way to Burgos also brought back memories, for it was along here that Burns, lovesick for Ann Bowes-Lyon, had felt the stirrings too of an unsuspected political passion and religious fervour when sharing the ambulance with Gabriel Herbert, the bright young thing turned Joan of Arc, and the general who was a Franco spy. And yet the town itself was transformed. ‘Whereas uniforms had been everywhere and much bustle and movement of men and machines, and a sense of urgency, Burgos was now, bereft – like a woman with nothing to do but confront the chores and the tedium of a solitary life …’
Beyond lay what for Burns was the new frontier, the undiscovered plains of Castile, trod by countless travellers before him but for ever reinvented with quixotic imagination. As he travelled south from the hills of the Basque country and Asturias, Burns may have well have thought of how the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset had described the stark landscape that lay ahead … ‘the yellow land, the red land, the land of silver, pure clod, naked soil … the plain undulating as if in torment … sometimes turning in on itself forming ravines and gullies, small hills and unsuspected towns … always inhospitable, always in ruins, always the church in the centre, with its fine alert tower, which looks tired, but which rests like a good warrior, on its feet, saddle sunk into the earth, elbow resting on the cross …’
The civil war had since grafted a new devastation on to the stark landscape where Quixote had mistaken windmills for giants. The long road from Burgos to Madrid that Burns took was pockmarked with bomb craters, its fields disfigured with trenches, the villages torn and broken as if an earthquake had shaken the heart of Spain. As he drove down through the mountain passes he glimpsed the clear outline of Madrid on the horizon ahead of him. In 1940, it was not so much a European capital as a provincial town, more contained and much smaller than London, and yet dwarfing every village between it and the border. Its outskirts – where the International Brigades had put up their last failed rearguard action in defence of the Republican-held city – were in disarray and partly crumbling; all the major university faculties, a major hospital, the home of the painter Velásquez, a statue of King Philip IV, churches, bridges and barracks had been wrecked by gunfire and explosives during a three-year battle of attrition.
In the third weekend of February 1940, Burns drove into Madrid, through the Paseo de la Castellana (it was then called Avenida del Generalísimo). The city centre was undergoing reconstruction and reform, but the signs of enduring poverty and hunger were still visible – the gaunt faces of the women in black, the skeletal street urchins, the scarce traffic, the empty or boarded-up shops, the mutilated trees and unkempt gardens.
It was evening by the time Burns reached the British embassy, a Parisian-style fin-de-siècle remnant of Spain’s imperial past. It stood in a narrow street off the Castellana, protected by an iron gate and a high fence. The building was dimly lit and lifeless. A porter advised him that it was closed and passed him a message that he had a room reserved at the nearby Palace Hotel and was to report for duty on the following Monday.
‘A group of journalists were predictably to be found at the bar but I had no inclination to mix with them, as I had no identity at this time, no reason for being there that I cared to reveal,’ recalled Burns. A new sort of loneliness had been thrust upon him, that of a government agent in a foreign land, probing the untested and the unknown, even if he already had an inner sense of belonging to the scene.