It was the stiffness in Sir Samuel Hoare – dressed in a dull charcoal suit and severity stamped on his face – that reminded Burns of the least likeable aspects of his own late banker father David, the puritan Scotsman who had only converted to the Catholic faith with the approach of death. Burns believed the Whitehall gossip that the real reason Churchill had left Hoare out of his cabinet and encouraged his posting abroad was that he could not bear the thought of having to cope with someone so abstemious and fastidious at close quarters for the rest of the war. Hoare, so Churchill had once joked, was descended from a line of maiden aunts. The new ambassador’s distrust of foreign parts and his belief in their endemic political instability had been engendered by his early experience as MI6’s station chief in Tsarist Russia’s St Petersburg during the First World War before heading the British Military Mission to Italy. On the other hand Hoare’s unwavering belief in the integrity and enduring political, economic and cultural superiority of the British Empire had been engendered by a record in the higher echelons of public office spanning three decades. He had served Britain as Foreign Secretary, First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Privy Seal, Home Secretary, Secretary of State for India and Secretary of State for Air.
Then, after nine years of virtually uninterrupted ministerial office, Hoare had lost his place in government just as his country was embarking on a defining chapter in world history. He was shocked by the sudden severance from the trappings of high office. From one day to the next he lost his official telephones, ‘red boxes’ of sensitive documents, office, car and staff. Hoare wandered disconsolately from his house in Chelsea to the Carlton Club and from the Carlton Club to the House of Commons, ‘not knowing where to lay my head and wondering how I should occupy my time and energies’. For a short period, his old friend Beaverbrook took pity on him and suffered his advice at the new Ministry of Aircraft Production.
But what happened next came close to humiliation for a man who regarded himself as one of the most experienced politicians of his generation. Faced with the reality of his exclusion from the cabinet and the looming prospect of an extended exile to the backbenches, Hoare wanted Churchill to make him Viceroy of India. He wrote to Chamberlain asking him to force the new prime minister to do this. Lord Halifax vetoed it, saying that Hoare was not up to it. Instead Halifax asked Hoare to go to Spain as an emissary and tasked initially only with the implementation of an Anglo-Spanish trade and economic assistance treaty signed the previous March. Halifax told Hoare that his mission to Spain would take only a few weeks. The politically disgraced and physically fading Chamberlain – for whom Hoare retained enormous respect – tried to warm him against going, on the grounds that he could expect little of Franco’s Spain other than it falling into German hands.
Another of his trusted allies advised him that it was precisely such a prospect that made his mission both urgent and necessary. The Deputy Chief of the Naval Staff, Admiral Tom Phillips, warned of the crucial importance of ensuring that the Atlantic ports of the Iberian Peninsula and north-west Africa did not fall into enemy hands, if the Royal Navy was to pursue with any chance of success its ongoing battle with German U-boats. It was equally critical to stop the Germans using Spain as a platform for attacking and taking Gibraltar, a key naval base for Allied Mediterranean and eastern communications.
Thus did Phillips soothe Hoare’s wounded ego, restoring his faith in his own importance, and dispelling any notion he harboured that he was being put out to grass. The mission, in Hoare’s eyes, was no longer a ‘pretext for breaking the fall of an ex-minister, or for finding a job for an old friend’. It was instead ‘real and urgent war work of great strategic urgency in which the chiefs of staff and the fighting services were vitally concerned’.
Hoare and his wife Lady Maud – a matronly figure from a staunchly Conservative background (she was the youngest daughter of the Tory grandee Frederick Lygon, 6th Earl of Beauchamp) – set off for his new post via Lisbon, arriving in Madrid on 2 June. For all his foreign experience, Hoare seems to have been ill prepared for what awaited him in the Spanish capital. He was shocked to discover that the Foreign Office, unlike the Indian Civil Service, did not provide its higher officials with fully-appointed houses and a large complement of domestic staff for their missions abroad. He sent urgent word to the Secretary of the Office of Works, Sir Patrick Duff, to remedy the situation. Duff saw to it that a cargo of china, cutlery and linen was collected from noble establishments around London and shipped out immediately to Madrid via the port of Valencia.
Far from being warmly greeted by their host country, the Hoares faced angry anti-British demonstrators outside the embassy, shouting in Spanish, ‘Gibraltar must be Spanish.’ With no official residence to go to, the Hoares booked into the Ritz Hotel. Like the Palace, which it faced on the other side of the wide Paseo del Prado, the hotel had only recently been restored after being used as a military hospital during the civil war. It had a palatial entrance of wrought-iron gates, topped with gold paint, and was surrounded by manicured gardens. Its rooms were filled with antique Spanish and French furniture, including priceless velvet curtains, tapestries, chandeliers and silverware.
The Hoares had chosen the Ritz on the recommendation of the Spanish ambassador in London, the Duke of Alba. The Duke’s sister, the Duchess of Santoña, was among a group of Spanish aristocrats who were regular guests at the hotel, taking suites there while waiting for their palatial houses to be restored to their pre-civil war splendour. Doña Sol, as the duchess was popularly known, made a point of sitting at the same table in the hall by the bar that her family had had before the war. The table was sacrosanct. Every day before luncheon at 1.30 she sat at the same table sipping her dry Martini, in the presence of other members of the aristocracy.
Hoare was struck less by the Ritz’s aristocratic inhabitants than by its intrigue, not least the presence of so many Germans. From the moment he and Lady Maud booked into the hotel, he suspected he was being watched and followed, and his telephone tapped. The Hoares found it oppressive and immediately started looking for an alternative residence. House-hunting was not easy, for few good houses had survived the civil war intact and the ambassador had to count on the services of his military attaché, Brigadier William Wyndham Torr, to exploit his contacts among the Spanish senior officer class in his search for a suitable abode.
A large house was eventually secured off the Castellana, within walking distance of the embassy building in Fernando el Santo Street. That Hoare chose to live next to the residence of Baron Eberhard von Stohrer, the German ambassador, was a deliberate act of defiance, symbolic of his determination not to be seen to be intimidated by the Nazi presence in Spain.
Hoare’s first days in Madrid were marked by a growing realisation of the importance of his mission. When he had set off from England, Spain was seemingly isolated from the rest of war-torn Europe, but the Nazi military offensive had intensified the nearer he got to Madrid. While he was en route, Dunkirk was evacuated. Then, while he was in Lisbon, Norway followed by Belgium had fallen to the Germans. Almost simultaneously with his arrival in Madrid, France had finally capitulated, allowing German troops to reach the Franco-Spanish border at the Pyrenees and radically altering the whole strategic balance of Western Europe.
It was not just the Atlantic ports of the Iberian Peninsula that were potentially in jeopardy from Hitler’s advance. Following Mussolini’s entry into the war, the whole of the Mediterranean, and, by extension, the maintenance of access to the Suez Canal and beyond, was under threat. The British could no longer rely on the French fleet with its bases at Marseilles, Bizerta and Casablanca. Instead they faced the nightmare scenario of Hitler pushing through Spain, taking Gibraltar and taking over North Africa so as to dominate continents and seas.
To Hoare, it became evident that, in addition to official German organisations and ‘front companies’, there were German sympathisers in every department of the Spanish government, with some Nazis enjoying a major influence over the media, and how the war was reported. The German embassy had been built up into a powerful hub of diplomatic, military, commercial, and covert activity, its reach extending as far as South America. The Abwehr ran a European and American network of agents from its Madrid base, while the Gestapo had established close ties with the Spanish secret police, delivering training and equipment and moving its informers backwards and forwards across the Portuguese and French borders in pursuit of Allied targets.
Among the most formidable and sinister players at the German embassy was Hans Lazar, who, under his cover of press attaché, controlled an impressive secret propaganda and intelligence organisation. Lazar’s background was as mysterious as much of the work he carried out. The suggestion that he had Jewish ancestry was almost certainly a piece of misinformation mischievously circulated by the British embassy; that he had been born in Turkey and had moved with the Armenian diaspora into Eastern Europe before spending his time between Vienna and Berlin after becoming a supporter of Hitler during the Anschluss, was less in doubt.
A stylish dresser with a trim moustache and swept-back hair, Lazar was indistinguishable from the other well-groomed and cocky young men who dominated key areas of public life in the Spanish capital; only a monocle (when he wore it) gave him a sinister air. Lazar moved with ease in Madrid’s social circles, and added daily to his array of contacts. At an early stage in the war he was rumoured to have more than four hundred agents reporting to him, making his department bigger than any other in the embassy.
By comparison, what the British had up and running in Madrid fell well short of what Hoare felt necessary to carry out his mission with any hope of success. The embassy had only been re-established, under Franco’s new authority in Madrid, the previous October, after moving from its temporary civil war lodgings in San Sebastián. Hoare’s predecessor, Maurice Peterson, had found the small complex housing the residence and the chancery in a state of abandonment, with only preliminary restoration work funded by the British Office of Works.
On 12 May 1940, Peterson received a letter from the Foreign Office bluntly informing him that his posting was at an end. The charge laid against him when he returned to London was that he had grown unpopular with Spaniards, and that he was not ‘comfortable’ in Madrid.
Hoare arrived in Madrid and was shocked to find just how right the sceptics in Whitehall had been in thinking that the ineffectual Peterson’s ‘slow-motion machine of a peace time embassy’ was totally ill-equipped to deal with the developing strategic imperatives of securing Spanish neutrality. So fragile did Hoare believe the situation to be that he arranged for an emergency aircraft to be on standby to evacuate him and the embassy staff in the event of an Axis takeover. ‘It may well be that things may go badly in Spain and that we may have to leave at very short notice and in very difficult circumstances,’ he wrote in late May 1940. ‘We have to face the facts in the world today and we must not exclude the possibility of a coup organised by German gunmen.’
The embassy struck Hoare at first sight as the most ‘horrible building’ he had ever been required to work in, its facilities cramped, its staff struggling to remain operational despite the additional funding that Burns and Hillgarth had obtained for their operations. At the time the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, had established a relatively small but self-contained office in Madrid in the same grounds as the chancery but in a separate outbuilding. By the end of 1940, British propaganda and intelligence operations within the embassy were seeing unprecedented levels of activity. It had not always been thus.
During the Spanish Civil War, the handful of British diplomatic and consular officials out in the field struggled to provide the eyes and ears of the Foreign Office, while trying to protect UK lives and interests amidst the chaos of the conflict. The bulk of their reports had helped forge the British policy of non-intervention in Spain, turning the country – in the eyes of the professional British spies – into an intelligence backwater. While Abwehr and Soviet NKVD agents swarmed all over Spain, MI6’s intelligence gathering was reduced to occasional reporting by its accredited representative, Colonel Edward de Renzy Martin, a veteran of the Great War who had been posted to Spain after serving as Inspector of the Albanian Gendarmerie. When the British embassy was re-established in Madrid in early 1940, Renzy Martin was replaced as ‘head of station’ by Hamilton-Stokes.
MI6’s new local chief tried to maintain his own separate channel of communication to London under the so-called CX system. This consisted in a two- to three-digit prefix on SIS telegrams which identified their recipient to the Foreign Office clerks. ‘CX’ indicated a personal message to the chief of MI6, while CXG indicated the sharing of information within the organisation. While the system was justified in terms of protecting sources and operations, it also conspired against accountability and effective administration. In Madrid, as elsewhere, there was a tendency built up over the years to keep the distribution of MI6 information to a restricted ‘need to know’ basis although the agency itself drew on sources from other areas.
When Hoare arrived in Spain, MI6 was drafting plans to reinforce its operations in Madrid, Lisbon, Gibraltar and Tangier. In June 1940, MI6 had lost touch with its agents in occupied Europe, forcing the organisation to build up its stations in the neutral countries of Spain and Portugal as well as Switzerland. Until then much of the information coming out of Madrid had been collated as a result of individual initiative rather than in response to any grand strategy. The embassy’s two pivotal operatives, Hillgarth and assistant press attaché Malley, had established their own lines of reporting to London and were responsible for the bulk of intelligence on Spain that reached the Foreign Office and Churchill.
Both men were fortunate in having an experienced deputy head of mission, Arthur Yencken, to hold the fort during the change of ambassadors. An Anglicised Australian who had won a Military Cross during the First World War, Yencken had done some useful intelligence work during his previous posting in Berlin. Drawing on contacts he developed in the German metallurgical industry, Yencken had sent some intuitive reports about Hitler’s rearmament programme which eventually found their way into Churchill’s hands, thanks to a high-level source he had in the Foreign Office.
As Burns remembered him, Yencken was ‘tough, laconic, witty and sometimes rather wild’, popular on the Madrid diplomatic circuit and as skilled an operator in obtaining intelligence from local sources as he had been in Germany. In Burns, Yencken identified from the outset a friend and useful colleague, a ‘semi-Brit’ who could similarly integrate effortlessly into the local landscape because he had managed to resist being drawn into the pompous insularity and phobias that pervaded the British Foreign Service. ‘One of your many jobs here will be to keep Sam [Hoare] from doing a bunk,’ Yencken told Burns soon after they met.
Notwithstanding the professional talent that existed within the British embassy, Hoare spent his first few weeks in Spain feeling almost overwhelmed by the situation he found himself in. He became paranoid about the German presence in the country, which he believed was paving the way for a full-sale Nazi occupation. ‘Things are moving so quickly that by the end of three months there may be no more Mission in Madrid,’ he wrote to the Treasury in June 1940.
Just how dire the situation seemed to observers beyond the embassy was summed up in a report published around this period in the New York Times. According to its correspondent, compared to the small team of less than a dozen staff employed in the British embassy, there were some two hundred Germans operating in Madrid under diplomatic cover. The report went on: ‘Barcelona and other Spanish ports are said to be swarming with German and Italian agents, awaiting Mussolini’s signal for the war in the Mediterranean to begin.’
The highly charged political atmosphere Hoare encountered fuelled deepening concern about the survival of his mission. A week into his post he confessed in a private letter to Chamberlain that he found himself ‘in the midst of every sort of difficulty with little or no daylight’ to guide him through it. He compared living in Madrid to living in a besieged city, ‘a shortage of almost everything, prices terribly high. And a heavy atmosphere of impending crisis on all sides.’
Hoare saw armed guards wherever he went, and felt unsure whether they were there to guard or to intimidate him. He became so nervous about his personal safety that he insisted on being shadowed on his daily walk to the embassy by a stalwart Scotland Yard detective he had arranged to have smuggled in from London. And yet Hoare felt a need to redeem himself in Madrid and set about overhauling and shaping the embassy to meet the needs of the mission with which he had been entrusted – that of preventing Franco from entering the war on behalf of the Axis powers.
Taking on the Germans in the propaganda war and winning over Spanish public opinion was placed at the top of Hoare’s agenda. On 7 June he wrote personally to Duff Cooper, the newly appointment Minister of Information, asking for his support in developing the operational capacity of the press section. Hoare also wrote to Beaverbrook, asking for his help in ensuring that ‘someone really big’ – he had suggested the head of the Foreign Office’s Western European Department, Walter Roberts – be posted to Madrid as soon as possible to help advise him.
That Hoare was sent not Roberts or anyone of his rank or status within the upper echelons of the civil service, but Tom Burns, a Catholic publisher and relatively recent recruit of the Ministry of Information, partly reflected the ambassador’s unpopularity and the resentment he still generated in British political circles.
Those within the Foreign Office who joked about Hoare being murdered by Germans or Italians saw him as a cowardly appeaser and were unconvinced of Spain’s developing strategic importance. They were damned if they were going to help Hoare out in his time of need, and wanted to thwart his plans if they could. There were also those in the Ministry of Information who had no difficulty in offering Burns up as a sacrificial lamb. Coming as he had done from outside the civil service and largely through the recommendation of his Catholic network, Burns had made enemies among his own colleagues. Religious bigotry, politics and envy all conspired against him, and in particular the fact that he had backed Franco.
Burns’s own record of his first meeting with Hoare on a hot July day in 1940 suggests that neither man expected to survive long in Madrid. ‘I protested my inadequacy and lack of experience, but all objections were brushed aside. Perhaps he [Hoare] thought that job would be too short-lived anyway,’ he later recalled. Fate and circumstances had thrown these opposites together into a coordinated effort that was to survive, for better or for worse, for most of the war. And yet the job Hoare offered Burns suggested there was method in the ambassador’s madness. ‘What you make of the job is largely up to you,’ Hoare told Burns; ‘all I insist is that that you report directly to me.’
Thus, having initially asked for a senior Whitehall mandarin to come and hold his hand, and seen the request turned down, Hoare felt he had no option but to make do with what he’d been sent and to try to turn the appointment to his advantage. The ambassador calculated that Burns’s relative inexperience would make him more manageable, easier to fit into the grand design he had for the embassy and for British policy towards Spain generally. The fact that no single department would, under Hoare’s design, be able to claim ownership over Burns meant that his appointment could be turned into a pivotal post, straddling civilian and military departments and diplomacy and intelligence – in effect, the ambassador’s eyes and ears.
Given their differences in background and character, both men faced a formidable challenge in ensuring an effective professional relationship between them. What separated them was rooted in geography, blood, faith and history. Hoare seemed ill at ease in Spanish society. Burns believed his ambassador’s alienation stemmed from an indelible insularity reinforced by puritan convictions. And yet these personal failings, thought Burns, were largely overcome by Hoare’s own dynamism. ‘He was,’ Burns would later comment on his ambassador, ‘absorbed in his station and its duties, restlessly determined to advance or initiate whatever might help in his mission.’
Burns’s own advancement under Hoare’s tutelage was largely thanks to the fact that he found the official policy the ambassador pursued for much of the war entirely in accord with his personal opinions. The urgent necessity of bolstering Britain’s presence in Spain was, after all, the proposal Burns had reported back to the Ministry of Information and his friends in the Foreign Office when he had completed his earlier visit to Spain in February 1940. Moreover, he hoped for and worked towards Spanish neutrality with a passion that perhaps Hoare lacked. Ever since his friend Douglas Jerrold had helped plot Franco’s uprising, Burns had argued, contrary to the view held by many fellow British men and women, that the Spanish Civil War was not by design a rehearsal for the Second World War, thus linking Franco ineluctably with the Axis, but was a phenomenon specifically of Spanish political history. It was not that Burns ignored the Axis support for Franco. He saw this as an undeniable fact, just as he regarded as an undeniable fact the support given to the Republican government by the Soviets and worldwide communism. But he had no doubt that if these ‘giants’ had been off the scene, the ‘fatal clash in Spain’ would still have come about.
Now Burns saw in the mission dedicated to preserving Spain’s neutrality the answer to the question posed by his friend Mike Richey during that night of shared whisky and revelations on the eve of the Second World War. What, in all conscience, could those who could not bring themselves to kill but who wanted to do their bit for the war do? Burns had signed up to his ambassador’s ‘special mission’.
And that was how, scarcely a week after his arrival from Lisbon, Burns found he was staying on in Madrid, keenly aware that he was joining, as he put it, an embassy of ‘many talents and many tensions that over time came to be transformed into a closely-knit unit family’. This time he didn’t stay at the Palace Hotel, but for some weeks took up residence in the no less luxurious if smaller and more discreet Gaylord’s Hotel, which was operating under the name Hotel Buen Retiro. One of Franco’s first decrees on coming to power was that hotels and other such establishments should have Spanish names but Gaylord’s was what its customers continued to call it, immortalised as it was thanks to the pen of Ernest Hemingway.
During the civil war, communist officers and Soviet spies had stayed at Gaylord’s, displacing the bourgeoisie with the same disdain they had shown for the previous occupants of churches, convents and palaces. It was there that Robert Jordan, the young American volunteer in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, had ended up during his three-day leave from the front, because there you could get ‘good food and real beer and could find out what was going on in the war’, thanks to Karkov, the Russian KGB colonel. Jordan had at first felt bad about being there – it seemed too luxurious and the food too good at a time when most of the city was starving – but Jordan corrupted very easily, or so he thought. He felt he owed himself some decent food after taking on the dangers that living at war in Spain brought along.
It was in the room once slept in by an NKVD officer that Burns found himself one night when, towards the end of July 1940, he sat and wrote his first long Spanish ‘ticket’ to Ann Bowes-Lyon. He imagined her on night duty in the military hospital at Woolwich, listening to the groans and cries of the wounded and the dying, trying to distinguish between the pain and the nightmares. ‘I am in shirt sleeves after a sweltering day,’ he wrote to her. How inadequate, by comparison, seemed his existence, but what else was he supposed to write that was not invention? ‘Nothing is emptier than a hotel when you’re alone,’ he continued. ‘Even the furniture is dead and gone and the room seems to soak up one’s life like blotting paper so that one has to get out every now and then to survive it all.’
Writing that seemed a corruption of the language: ‘survival’ in a hotel room without a shot being fired or a bomb dropped? He had to explain as best he could that his peace, Spain’s peace, was deceptive. So he wrote on, telling her that Madrid that summer was an all day burning sun and dust – ‘not a heavy humid heat, but dry hard bright heat and a gentle warm tender sort of night’. He went on: ‘People creep along the shade of walls from house to house in the midday and sit for hours in the evening round their little tables on the pavement … It is all peaceful as far as you can see, you would not guess the intrigue and threat behind it all …’
And then he told Ann what he had been dreading having to tell her – that he wasn’t coming back to London, to her, not for a while at least, because of the ‘special mission’ he had been recruited for. This meant that for the first time since they had met they faced the prospect of a prolonged period of involuntary separation. He tried to think of a way of reassuring her. It was duty not betrayal but he thought it best to deflect the issue. He turned instead to the cat language, a frivolous code but one they had learnt to share. ‘Sam Hoare seems – miao – to think he is a much better sort of cat than I am. Any way he has asked me most insistently if I would stay here and cope with things for a month …’ Hoare had in fact given Burns no time limit but had insisted that the job should be open-ended, and include assignments in Lisbon, Gibraltar and North Africa. Like the rest of the embassy, Burns was secretly warned by his ambassador that he might have to flee Madrid if Franco joined the war on Hitler’s side. The ‘month’ Burns had mentioned to Ann was a white lie conjured up to reduce the blow of a less predictable separation. What followed reflected a sense of calling, on Burns’s side, and the need to overcome any vestiges of self-doubt: ‘Do see darling a bit and help us by being all right as I shall try to be … How I am plunked down with much too big a job for my furry head and having to work like fury … if only one can keep this heavenly place from the main flood of war, that will indeed be worth all one’s sweat and life.’
He ended, as he always did whenever he wrote to her, wishing God’s blessing on her ‘dreamt heart’, and wishing ‘her safe and well, and his enduring love’. He sketched her as a white cat looking at him, similarly transformed into a black cat, sitting in a building marked British embassy. ‘Oh dearie, he is grand!’ the white cat mocked. And, yes, there was a sense that Burns had found something he could be proud of telling her, that he had finally got somewhere special before her, that he had found his own Glamis Castle, one whose bridge was not drawn up on him even if walking into it risked losing her.
Burns placed the letter in the diplomatic bag for urgent dispatch to London, acutely aware of the distance that separated him from England now that he was flying the flag in a foreign land. ‘She looked jolly nice … in her tight fitting tailored blue coat and black tie and white collar,’ David Jones wrote to Burns after a visit by Ann. ‘She seemed all right and pretty cheerful, but of course sad that you were going to be longer away than you thought.’
It was the summer of 1940. London, like Madrid, was experiencing a heatwave. Jones, the artist, struggled to remain above the fray, as nearly everyone else got dragged into it. Jones continued to live rent-free in the basement of Burns’s Chelsea house, his meals dutifully cooked by Ethel, the housekeeper. Her wages were still paid out of Burns’s London account, as was much of Jones’s general unkeep, thanks to an informal arrangement the painter had reached with his friend at the outbreak of war. Such generosity sprang from a sense of enduring loyalty and protectiveness Burns felt towards the neurotic artist.
Of the original close group of Catholic friends, Harman Grisewood, by contrast, was working flat out and almost to the point of exhaustion at the BBC, a key link man between the Corporation and Churchill’s war effort. In his letters to Madrid, Jones also reported on the occasional visit by Bernard Wall, down from Oxford where he was working as a researcher on a ‘secret Foreign Office project’.
Periodically Jones dined with Douglas Woodruff, the former Times leader writer who was now writing regular leaders for the Tablet as its editor, strongly supportive of Spanish neutrality and Britain’s ongoing relations with Franco, while his wife Mia helped coordinate nursing support across London. Jones shared occasional leisurely lunches with his literary patron, Hilaire Belloc, the religious apologist and social prophet who had lived his life with an irredeemable grief and an embittering sense of failure. Belloc lived in Cheyne Row, around the corner from Burns and Grisewood. With the local church named after the recently beatified Catholic martyr Thomas More, this small part of Chelsea had developed into a faith-based community in the heart of London.
Belloc was looking older than his seventy years. Italy’s declaration of war had struck at the old Catholic’s heart, while the fall of France, where his beloved daughter Elizabeth lived, had filled him with anxiety. It was only several months later that he heard through his one-time disciple Burns that she was safe. Burns sent word that Elizabeth had crossed into Spain, before making her way back to England. Belloc, meanwhile, continued to urge the Pope to speak out against the Nazis but the head of the Catholic Church continued to confine himself to generalities.
Meanwhile, Eric Gill was working on his autobiography despite periodic bouts of sickness. Unaware of the cancer beginning to creep up on him, he was busily making plans to emigrate to America with his family to join Graham Carey in the founding of ‘another cell of good living’. He had lost none of his mistrust of industrial society and its ability to create a proper human world. He now saw war as a death wish once again made reality, with mankind drifting towards self-destruction.
Months before the start of the war, Burns and two other Gill disciples, Harman Grisewood and Rene Hague, while on their way to visit the sculptor, had narrowly escaped serious injury if not death when the brakes on the MG sports car Burns was driving failed, leaving the vehicle to crash into a brick wall on the outskirts of London. Hague put the three friends’ survival to divine providence. ‘Now, that’s the sort of accident I like – just time to make an act of contrition,’ he had remarked after stumbling out of the crippled car, good-humouredly.
And yet the accident was an omen of sorts. For the extended community of family and friends that had stayed at Pigotts and which Burns had come to know so intimately had long been in a process of dispersal, and in the case of one of its female members, disintegration.
At the time of the accident, Gill’s one-time model and apprentice and David Jones’s muse, Prudence Pelham, was suffering from depression and was under treatment for a creeping multiple sclerosis that would eventually lead to her death in 1952, at the age of forty-seven.
‘What a real sod and bugger this neurosis is for this generation – it is our Black Death, all right,’ wrote Jones.
Prudence’s husband Guy Branch was flying increasingly dangerous missions with the RAF and had once been reported missing, only subsequently to reappear. The news had been brought to Glebe Place by Paul Richey, brother of Mike, who was on short leave from duties with Bomber Command. Richey had turned up to borrow Burns’s sports car for an outing with a girlfriend. As he watched the car disappear down the King’s Road, tooting as it went, David Jones recalled the day when Burns had taken him and two other friends for a drive to one of their favourite country pubs, only to misjudge a curve and end up in a ditch, laughing their heads off like schoolboys breaking rules. Those days of carefree merriment seemed gone for ever. Those who got drunk and made love now did so in the knowledge that their days might well be numbered.
Mike Richey had tried as best he could to keep in touch with the network of Catholic friends that Burns had helped build up in the run-up to the war. Earlier in the summer he had written to Graham Greene with some critical comments on The Power and the Glory, arguing that he had found the novel too long and the portrait of the priest theologically unconvincing. Greene wrote back defending his work: ‘You are objecting to him (the priest) on the same grounds as people who object to a book because it has no nice characters. The answer is: they are not meant to be nice.’ It was a courteous exchange nonetheless, born from a growing friendship. Greene extended an invitation to Richey to come and visit him when he was next on leave, before adding, ‘You certainly live now in a stranger world than the priest’s.’ Mike, the younger of the two Richeys, was in some secret part of the ocean, blowing up mines while avoiding German U-boats when he wrote to Greene. Soon afterwards, while on shore leave, he visited Jones at Glebe Place. ‘He looks like a young lion with a blue anchor tattooed on his vest and hairy fore-arm – he’s just the same,’ Jones wrote to Burns.
Richey collected a gift Burns had organised for him before leaving for Madrid. It was a brandy flask inscribed with the legend: love to Mike from David [Jones], Tom [Burns], and Ann [Bowes-Lyon]. The flask was later lost at sea.
Letters continued to arrive at Glebe Place for Burns, and Jones took care to sift them. One letter arrived with Burns’s name neatly typed on a large brown envelope. Jones opened it and saw that it came from Burns’s tailors in Jermyn Street, Mayfair. It was an unpaid bill with a warning of imminent legal action to recover the debt. Jones rang and secured an indefinite deferment after telling the manager that his friend was on ‘a top secret mission of huge national importance’.
‘I bet it is bloody hot in Spain,’ Jones wrote to Burns days later. ‘I think about you a lot and wonder how you are liking it all. It’s weird to think of you there. Rum when chaps are away doing something quite different and all looks the same – the room etc – as if you might walk in any moment and say, “Come on, Dai, let’s have a pint – I’m absolutely dying for a quick one.”’
It was bloody hot in Spain but that was not what most concerned Burns in those early days in Madrid. It was his conscience. In a letter to Jones he confessed to feeling wonderfully suited to the heat and the shade, the long lunches, the two-hour afternoon siesta, then the long, balmy evenings, drinking and dancing and feeling that the Spanish lifestyle was good for the soul. But it was then that he remembered how he had left London just as the capital and the entire country was bracing itself for an onslaught by Nazi Germany. He had settled in Gaylord’s – just as the Battle of Britain had entered its preliminary stage. German attacks had also begun on convoys of merchant ships, those which his friend Mike Richey had volunteered to protect with his minesweeper.
Then the Luftwaffe began bombing RAF bases in southern England, before turning on London. Burns thought of Paul Richey, and Prudence’s Pelham’s husband Guy, flying Spitfires off the English coast. Both were eventually shot down. Paul survived but Guy was lost in action. He thought, too, of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, from whom he had not heard since leaving London but who, he imagined, were now closer to mortal danger than he was.
Waugh’s tortuous search for military employment had finally borne fruit the previous November when his application to join the Royal Marines was accepted. Months of indoctrination in military history and training followed until the end of May 1940. Then, while stationed at a tented camp at Bisley, near Aldershot, he received a message to call Burns. It was Saturday 25 May and his old friend and publisher – at the time Burns was still at the MoI – had somehow managed to track him down to the Swan Hotel in Alton, where he was spending a romantic weekend leave with Laura Herbert, his second wife. ‘We went to church, read P. G. Wodehouse (who has been lost along with the Channel ports), watched old men in panama hats play bowls, and forgot the war. Burns made strenuous efforts to get in touch.’
Three days later, on his return to Bisley, Waugh received an official summons to report ‘soonest’ to the MoI. Arriving there on 28 May, he recorded:
‘I found the news of Belgian surrender on the streets and women selling flags for “Animal Day”. Had hair cut and bought pants. Went to M of I [Ministry of Information] where Graham Greene propounded a scheme for official writers to the forces and himself wanted to become a marine; also Burns. I said I thought the official writer racket might be convenient if we found ourselves permanently in a defensive role in the Far East, or if I were incapacitated.’
Waugh’s biographer Christopher Sykes described the Official Writers Scheme typical of the ‘empty-headed utopianism of the “Phoney War”’ which was already out of date by the time it was proposed. Within weeks Waugh had been appointed an intelligence officer with 8 Commando brigade and was on his way to Freetown in Sierra Leone as part of an Anglo-French attempt to wrest Dakar in Senegal from the Vichy government and install General de Gaulle and the Free French in its place.
The operation turned into a military fiasco late in September 1940. But long before then Burns had fixed in his imagination the image of Evelyn bravely fighting battles to which he was physically and psychologically unsuited, a heroic example which darkened his own early days in Madrid with a sense of guilt. That he should feel like this was somewhat ironic for, unknown to Burns, it was his mission in Spain that Waugh had looked to with some envy at a time when Madrid was filled with Germans and Aldershot had no Germans at all. Waugh had learnt of Burns’s sudden appointment from their mutual friends Douglas and Mia Woodruff during an evening in London on leave, drinking champagne. ‘They [the Woodruffs] were full of tales of the interesting jobs all my friends are getting – Tom [Burns] in Madrid, Chris [Hollis] in Washington. I felt sad to be going back to the confusion of the marines.’
As things turned out, Waugh would reach West Africa only after Graham Greene had got there first – although neither they nor Burns could have predicted how their respective lives would unfold in the weeks and months after their unsuccessful attempt to engage with the Official Writers Scheme.
The guilt that Burns sometimes felt at leaving London for Madrid was accentuated by the German aerial offensive on the capital which began on 7 September 1940 and continued every night until 2 November that year.
The horror of the Blitz was brought home to those who had shared the vigorous literary life of the 1930s by news of a heavy air raid on a leading publishing house in Paternoster Row, near St Paul’s. It was there, while working for Longman, that Burns had shared an office with the employees of Burns & Oates, the firm named after its founder, his great-uncle James. It was there, too, that Burns had signed up Greene to write The Lawless Roads and discussed other publishing ventures with Waugh.
News of the bombing reached Burns through Douglas Woodruff, whose offices had also ended up reduced to ashes and rubble of broken brick and stone, and charred furniture. Burns also heard about the bombing of Greene’s house in Clapham. Miraculously, Greene had been staying at his studio in Bloomsbury with his mistress while his wife Vivien and the children were in Oxford. As Vivien later remarked, not without a sense of enduring pain and betrayal caused by the love of her life, ‘Graham was saved by his infidelity.’
Burns would later come to reflect with sadness that the destruction of Greene’s house in Clapham, where Vivien had once cooked him and her husband a generous meal, had come to symbolise the beginning of an end of a marriage he had suspected was doomed to failure because of differences of temperament and expectation.
He would learn belatedly that Greene’s job at the MoI had come to an abrupt end in September 1940. Greene was allowed to leave by the Ministry’s new Director General, Frank Pick, on the grounds that his position in the writers’ section – ‘an absurdly hilarious time’ according to Greene – was no longer necessary. As his friend and publisher, Burns rightly sensed that Greene’s ignoble exit from the MoI was providential. It allowed him to draw on material for further novels, and paved the way for his eventual recruitment by MI6 and a posting in early December 1941 to Freetown, Sierra Leone.
In the letters Burns wrote back to London during those months in 1940, he had Greene among others in mind when he told his friend David Jones how bad he felt to be enjoying his posting to Madrid when all the other ‘chaps’ and the world generally seemed to be having such an ‘awful time’. But he also reflected on how the ‘love thing’ he felt for Ann Bowes-Lyon was not about being ‘above and beyond or below and besides’, it was on a different plane. And there was a part, deep within him, that confessed to wanting nothing else but Ann. As he wrote to Jones, ‘Hell, bugger them all. I will be as near to Ann Bowes-Lyon as I bloody well can be, even if she does not write another letter back and is completely indifferent. Empires can crash and the lands be waste – let the buggers get on with it – I must be near the extraordinary girl – I can do no other come what will.’
A Catholic with a conscience needs a co-religionist to set him free. So it was that David Jones came to act as Burns’s informant, confessor and counsellor. Jones’s surviving letters to Burns gave a vivid if sometimes rambling account (one letter was fourteen pages long) of how the London they had experienced together was changing under the impact of war. Right up to the beginning of September, Jones continued to visit their favourite pub on the embankment, the Cross Keys, and hear mass at the Church of the Holy Redeemer in Cheyne Walk, where the statue of her patron Thomas More served as a constant reminder of Catholic witness and martyrdom for the faith. ‘We get raid warnings a good bit at any old time in the 24 hours, one has got quite used the sound of the old sirens, occasional bumps and “noises off” etc. It is a bloody curious type of war … odd in many ways, everything goes on as normal except that if one makes an appointment it may get put off if there is a warning.’
Then the bombs started falling and Jones found it increasingly difficult not to write more graphically about the devastation they caused. He and the rump of friends that remained in London clung desperately to old habits and old haunts. On 14 September 1940, Harman Grisewood, then working as the BBC’s assistant director for programme planning, married Margaret Bailey at the Holy Redeemer in a ceremony attended by Jones and three other friends. They celebrated with a champagne lunch at the Hyde Park Hotel and a visit to the zoo during an air-raid warning. There was no one there except for the animals. They ended the day having tea back at Grisewood’s home at 61 King’s Road, before he went off to the BBC on night duty.
It was, as Jones put it, ‘very phantastical now, this curious compound of ordinary private life in the old haunts, mixed in with the violent stuff.’
Despite the Blitz, Burns’s dark tabby, Tim, for ever immortalised in his letters to Ann, seemed to flourish, his coat full and glossy as he devoured pieces of liver bought for him by Jones from the local butcher. Ethel continued to cook meals for Jones and tidy up after him, thanks to the cheques Burns sent from Madrid. She was by now also working part-time in an air-raid shelter.
Number 3 Glebe Place survived the Blitz unscathed physically, but bombs hit a house across the street, the crypt of the Holy Redeemer, and the local public library on the King’s Road, killing dozens of civilians. Jones made plans to evacuate his paintings. Wherever he walked he saw a church damaged, books burnt. Winston Churchill had no doubt that the ultimate scalp the Luftwaffe was seeking was St Paul’s Cathedral because of its iconic status. It all added to Jones’s growing sense of seeing Hitler as an anti-Christ, destroyer of faith and art.
In a letter to Jones, Burns said he felt that what he was living through in Madrid was ‘uncontemporary’ in the sense that it seemed existentially dislocated from the horror sweeping through Western Europe.
Jones tried to put Burns’s mind at rest. ‘I think you ought to do whatever you bloody well feel inclined to do, and, sweet Tom, don’t let it get you down. It is difficult for anyone else to know a person’s mind. Anyway it is not a moral question. But it would seem that if you can be of use in any place, stay put. We’ve all got ourselves to think about – and by doing what we can best do and most want to do, ourselves, we best do what is best for the jolly old “community” in the end. I’m sure of that … to an on-looker, however intimate, you seem to possess all of the requirements and qualifications for the kind of job I imagine you are doing.’
In fact, for all his years in publishing, cudgelling authors of the likes of Waugh and Greene, inherent empathy with the Catholic faith, and networking abilities extending from the higher echelons of Whitehall to Buckingham Palace, nothing could have quite prepared Burns for the job he found himself doing in Madrid.
His tasks went well beyond the normal duties of a press attaché. In peacetime this would have been reduced to keeping tabs on what the local media were reporting and acting as an information service, if not informal tourist office, on UK affairs. Such duties were neither relevant nor practical in Spain after the outbreak of the Second World War, given the censorship imposed on the Spanish media and the pervading influence of the Nazis based in Madrid, not least in the areas of propaganda and secret intelligence.