Read Kim Philby Online

Authors: Tim Milne

Kim Philby (9 page)

BOOK: Kim Philby
4.24Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
The year 1941 wore on. Germany invaded Russia, making the
Russians our allies and, presumably, life rather less of a strain for Kim. At the Survey Training Centre in Ruabon, I moved from training raw recruits in square-bashing and the rudiments of warfare, of which I knew little, to being assistant adjutant. This was a nine-to-five sort of job, with much paperwork, and deadly dull. In September I was about to be promoted to captain and adjutant when a telegram arrived from Kim to say that a new possibility had arisen in another quarter and he had arranged a London interview for me through the War Office. A summons duly arrived and I travelled to London. The interview turned out to be with a Major Felix Cowgill; Kim was present. Again I learnt little from this of the nature of the work, but later that afternoon Kim gave me an outline. It seemed the job was in Section V of the Secret Service – the counter-espionage section, which Kim had joined a month earlier. The pay would work out at a little more that I had been getting as a second lieutenant, a little less that I would earn as a captain. But the work sounded a hundred times more interesting. The office was in St Albans. It was not London, the only place at that time of my life where I wished to live, but it was only a Green Line journey away. I had no hesitation in saying I wanted the job.
That evening I went to an impromptu party in Kim’s flat in South Kensington, or more precisely in Aileen’s bedroom; a week or two earlier she had given birth to their first child, Josephine. I had met Aileen briefly at the time of my Easter interview for the SOE job. Once again I was struck by the change in Kim, or rather in his company and surroundings. Central Europeans, of course, were out; MI5, it seemed, were in, though I did not yet know them as MI5. Among those I met for the first time I can recall with certainty only Tommy and Hilda Harris. The sole
relic from the past, apart from me, was Guy Burgess. After many months in north Wales, among worthy sobersided RE officers and Welsh farmers, I found myself in a different world: everyone seemed enormously intelligent, sophisticated and well informed, and given to mildly malicious gossip. It was a fascinating but, as it turned out, scarcely typical introduction to life in the Secret Service. Kim and Aileen were not only celebrating the arrival of their first-born but also saying goodbye to London, while St Albans did not lend itself to parties of this kind.
I returned to Ruabon, where Marie and I made preparations to leave the remote and now increasingly uninviting farm on the river Dee where we were living. A few days later my posting order arrived, assigning me to ‘Special Duties without pay and allowances’ from Army funds. On 8 October we drove down in our small second-hand Ford 10 and spent the night in Chelsea. The next day I presented myself at the War Office, and was told to report to Broadway Buildings, opposite St James’s Park Underground station. I can remember only two of the interviews that followed. One was with the office doctor, who asked me if I was going abroad. Nobody had said anything about going abroad, and I wondered, wrongly, if I was being gradually introduced to some quite different kind of job. Then I was passed along to the security officer. ‘You’ll need some kind of cover story,’ he said. He thought a moment. ‘There are still a lot of refugees coming over from the Continent. You’d better tell your friends you’ve been seconded to the Passport Control Department of the Foreign Office to help in their interrogation.’ It was difficult to imagine anything less likely than that a supposedly trained RE officer, aged twenty-nine, graded A.1 in health and with indifferent languages, would be pulled out of the Army
for this purpose. I ignored his advice, or instruction (it wasn’t clear which), and told everyone as occasion arose that I had been posted to War Office intelligence. People readily accepted this and I was seldom bothered over cover problems for the rest of the war.
On the afternoon of the following day I drove to St Albans and turned through an unguarded gateway into the drive of a large late-Victorian house: Glenalmond. A job that was to last twenty-seven years had begun.
Notes
1
. At the time deputy director general of MI5, subsequently director general 1953–56 and chief of SIS 1956–68. Retired as chief in March 1968, some six months before Milne’s retirement.
2
. A 1977 Granada TV drama-documentary.
3
. Frances (‘Bunny’) Doble was the divorced Canadian-born wife of Sir Anthony Lindsay-Hogg, an English baronet. As Lady Lindsay-Hogg she had achieved some fame on the London stage.
4
OWN TRUMPET
T
his is a book about Kim as I knew him and the interaction of his life and mine. But now I must digress to say a little more about myself. The reader may well have been asking: who is this man? What did Kim Philby see in him? Why did Philby try to get him to join first SOE and then SIS? Was there some ulterior motive? The
Sunday Times
articles from 1967 suggested that I might have played a part, conscious or unconscious, in one particular stage of Kim’s Secret Service ambitions. That it might strike people in this way had not really occurred to me before I read the articles, but I can see there could be points to answer.
Necessarily some of this must turn on the question of my own education, qualification, ability and mental make-up. This means I shall have to talk about myself, even blow my own trumpet a little. I promise this trumpet involuntary will not be a long one.
My father taught all his four children to read at an early age – I read fluently and avidly by the time I was four. How he – a busy and successful civil servant (he had a CBE before he was forty), but handicapped by poor health – found time and energy to do this, I cannot imagine. He was a marvellous teacher; the secret was, I think, that he seemed to be learning with you rather than teaching. By the time I reached my kindergarten, just six years
of age, I had, among many other books – and for no reason that I can remember – read Kingsley’s
The Water Babies
ten times. I was put into a class that could read – and our book for the term was
The Water Babies
. My education proceeded through kindergarten, first prep school, second prep school, but also through my father. He, like his brother Alan, had been a mathematical scholar at Westminster, though unlike Alan he had not gone to university. I was never to be a mathematician myself, but he gave me a lasting feeling for arithmetic and algebra. His greatest love was books, and we children grew up in a house lined with English classics.
I began to acquire a capacity for mental arithmetic and for absorbing statistics, dates and names. Along with other useless but agreeable information, I became a walking Wisden’s. The scores and players of the early 1920s are still vivid in my mind. I tested this statement the other day, and found that of the first hundred players in the batting averages of 1922 I could name the teams of ninety-eight. We were, needless to say, a crossword family; Sunday was Torquemada day from the moment he first appeared in
The Observer
, in the middle or late 1920s.
At my second prep school – the one which my grandfather had founded and which St John Philby had attended – I was groomed for a scholarship in my last four terms, working on my own. The school spent a lot of effort on this, although they had not had a success for some years. Most of my time was given to Latin and Greek. The mathematics master, a man of wisdom, simply handed me a thick volume of Hall and Knight’s
Algebra
, with answers at the end, and left me to get on by myself. A year later I had reached the binomial theorem, though it was true I had slightly neglected things I found less interesting, like geometry.
On my thirteenth birthday I sat for the Westminster scholarship
examination and came out top. At the end of my first year at Westminster I and several other juniors in College took the School Certificate, something like today’s GCSEs. I had to get five credits to pass. Four I knew were in the bag – Latin, Greek, French and mathematics – but I also needed history or English or divinity, to none of which had I devoted enough attention. Numbers and dates came to my rescue. A few hours before the history exam, I was feverishly trying to ‘revise’ – i.e. learn things I ought to have learnt earlier – when I came across an account of John Wesley, full of dates of journeys and statistics of conversions in various towns and counties. That afternoon I was delighted to find in the history paper a question about Wesley. The examiners must have been surprised to receive a whole page of accurate dates and statistics: perhaps they thought I was an ardent Methodist. Anyway, with Wesley’s help I got my credit in history.
In the same summer term of 1926 my arithmetical turn of mind came in handy in another way, and one which may have made an impression on Kim. The Cheyne Arithmetic Prize (it actually involved algebra rather than arithmetic) was open to the whole school. The paper was compulsory for those who had not yet taken the School Certificate and voluntary for others, but the prize was usually won by someone in the top mathematical form. To my astonishment, when the marks list was published, I was first, although as I was barely fourteen, I was only allowed to receive the junior prize. (In my last year I sat for it again and was again top, so I got the senior prize in the end.)
After the School Certificate one had to choose between classics, science, history, mathematics and so on: I decided to stick with classics. I turned out to be a reasonable solid classicist but not a brilliant one. Possibly I might have done slightly better in
science or mathematics; I cannot say. I continued to do a little mathematics on the side and learnt the elements of calculus, trigonometry, statics and dynamics. At the end of my third year I took Higher Certificate in Latin and Greek, with mathematics as a voluntary subsidiary. When the results were published it appeared that I was the only person in the entire country that year to have got both a distinction in a classical subject (Latin) and a pass in the mathematics subsidiary. I know this sounds a little like being the only left-handed red-headed person to have ridden a bicycle from Wapping to Wigan on a Thursday, but I suppose it does indicate a slightly unusual mental combination, and one that could come in useful in certain types of job.
At Oxford, where I had a close scholarship to Christ Church, I read honour moderations (classics) for five terms, and greats (philosophy and Greek and Roman history) for seven. I got a sound but uninspired double second, the thing one is always advised to avoid – the only classes worth getting, people said, were a first or a fourth. But my double second did well enough for me, and no doubt helped me to get into advertising.
Everyone knew Benson’s advertising in those days. Our star client was Guinness, but we also had Kodak, Bovril, Johnnie Walker, Austin, Colman’s, Wills’s, and many other names famous in the 1920s and 1930s. Dorothy Sayers’s
Murder Must Advertise
was written about Benson’s, a year or two before I got there, and conveys extremely well the atmosphere of moderately gifted amateurism. Advertising ideas never came easily to me, but I had some family facility for writing verses and parodies, which occasionally came in useful for Guinness and others. Most of the work was hard slogging; I was especially concerned with one of our most interesting clients, Kodak. There were only about nine or ten of us in the
Benson copywriting department, which was responsible for planning the campaigns, thinking up the ideas, writing all the words, doing much of the contact with various clients and a great deal besides. Mortality, in those competitive days of the Depression, was high; I think that in my five and a half years, Michael Barsley and I were the only two completely new boys in the copy department to survive infancy. By the outbreak of war, still a bachelor, I was probably better off in real terms, that is, net purchasing power after tax, than I was to be again for at least twenty years.
I continued to work in Benson’s for a few months after the war began, in an increasingly unreal atmosphere, until the time came to join the Army. A friend of my sister’s, Peter Shortt, was a major in the Royal Engineers (though at that time he was acting as personal assistant to General Gort, the Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force). Knowing my predilection for maps and travel, and that I had a grounding in mathematics, he suggested I might try to get into the Survey Service of the Royal Engineers. So it was that I became one of twenty-four officer cadets at Fort Widley in June 1940. About half the twenty-four were master printers and others from the printing profession, while the other half were supposed to be, or have been, mathematical specialists. I was neither, but it turned out that what was needed, apart from basic trigonometry, was the ability to handle figures quickly and accurately. At the end of the course we were marked on mathematics, knowledge of instruments and astronomy. I came second, missing 100 per cent through a single elementary slip. On the practical map-making side in the field, which took three weeks, I had 96 per cent for accuracy but only 40 per cent for speed. Probably I was more cut out for the Ordnance Survey than an RE map-making unit in battle.
The
Sunday Times
book says, ‘We know nothing about the political stance of [Kim’s] admiring former school-friend “Ian” [i.e. me].’
1
Let me try briefly to fill this gap. In my twenties I was, of course, left wing. I say ‘of course’ not because everyone of my age had those views – a number of my friends did not – but because most young men who took any interest in politics, particularly European politics and the rise of fascism, were left wing. I never joined any political party, except that in my first term at Oxford I was persuaded by an old school friend to part with half a crown as subscription to the Oxford University Labour Party or Labour Club – I have forgotten the exact title. I attended no meetings and my membership soon lapsed. In my undergraduate days and for a time afterwards I regarded myself as belonging to the left of the Labour spectrum. My guiding light was the
New Statesman and Nation
, which I devoured weekly as soon as it came out. Though I never managed to read more than a page or two of Marx or Lenin, I recall that when I was studying Roman history at Oxford and had to write an essay on ‘The Year of the Four Emperors’ (those who followed Nero in rapid succession in ad 68–69), I tried to interpret the whole complicated story in what I conceived to be Marxist terms of class struggle. The attempt went rather well, and maybe had an element of truth, but I realise now that the available facts could probably have been made to support any other historical theory with equal effectiveness.
BOOK: Kim Philby
4.24Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Stepbrother Desires by Lauren Branford
Lonesome Road by Wentworth, Patricia
Mutineer by Sutherland, J.A.
04.Die.My.Love.2007 by Casey, Kathryn
A Blind Eye by Julie Daines
The Forgotten Child by Eckhart, Lorhainne
Mistress of the Wind by Michelle Diener
An Honest Love by Kathleen Fuller