Last of the Cold War Spies (5 page)

Young Straight awoke early in mid-June 1925 as the ocean liner
George
Washington
scythed through the Channel’s calm seas and approached Plymouth Harbor. Despite his misgivings, it was an exciting moment to be
met by Dorothy, Leonard, and Whitney, now 14 years old, to commence a new life.

Straight claimed he was different from his 14-year-old brother and 12year-old sister. They already knew what they wanted to do in life. Whitney, the gallant adventurer, wanted to race cars and fly, and he took advantage of Dartington’s intention of a progressive, liberated education to do exactly what he wished. Beatrice wanted to be an actress. Even at 10 she was directing plays, with all the hired staff in the United States forced to watch her performances whether they wished to or not. But Michael, like most people his age, had little real idea of what he wanted to do with his life. He may have imagined it, but the governess seemed to him to be setting him apart from everyone else. She almost bossed him into keeping a diary, and it forced Straight into thinking he might actually develop as a creative author.
⁵

Straight assessed all the children’s relationships with Leonard, the alleged interloper in his eyes. He claimed that Whitney’s removal from the United States put him at cross purposes to Leonard. But this was contradicted by Whitney’s liberation at Dartington and his being able to do as he wanted—dash around in fast transport on the ground and in the air. Beatrice spent six years at Dartington getting useful training as an actress, leaving at 18 to become a successful thespian. But she did return to begin a theatrical school under Michael Chekhov. Straight reckoned he was too young at 10 to be hostile to Leonard.

In keeping with the intent at Dartington, Straight was given a small garden, which he had to upkeep himself. While he hoed it one day in that first Dartington summer, May Gardner came to say a tearful good-bye. Straight felt liberated. He would no longer have her stand over him while he said his prayers each night before bed. Straight was relieved to be free from the burden of religious obligations, especially when the governess demanded that he kneel by his bed each night where he had to say a prayer he found repugnant:

If I die before I wake

I pray the Lord my soul to take . . .

With Gardner’s departure, he stopped praying altogether, leaving a belief vacuum. By his teenage years at the radical Dartington, he had
supplanted the concept of a religious god with a Pantheon of political gods. Foremost among them were Marx, Lenin, and Stalin.

Straight wished to give the impression of being a child adrift and therefore vulnerable to other influences that would fill the vacuum that he said he had when compared to his siblings. Straight and these influences were about to embrace each other.

D
espite their wealth and background, Leonard and Dorothy did not plan to ride to the hounds or open up the great banqueting hall to the local gentry, who would have seemed at home in a Jane Austen novel. Instead they strove to integrate the impoverished surrounding villages in their grand experiment in education and the arts. Their aim was the union of the best elements of town and country and the development of agriculture and industry.

They made themselves unpopular with the gentry by shutting off Dartington’s 800 acres to the foxhunters. Much to the chagrin of the local rector, The Reverend J. S. Martin, the Elmhirsts did not plan to patronize the local church on the main road. They preferred the privacy of their own home. Martin, Leonard noted, seemed to think from then on that the devil had moved his headquarters from Moscow to Dartington Hall. Perhaps most of all, the locals resented Dorothy, a wealthy American. She didn’t quite conform to the protocol of socializing with wives of the surrounding estates and the local aristocracy. She had her own workload and was as busy with her plans to create a suitable household and to develop the arts as Leonard was in putting up structures to house them.

In the first couple of years, the Elmhirsts and their strange goings-on alienated the local community leaders. Dartington became the
focal point of gossip over such trivialities as the children bathing nude in the river or mixed-sex showers in the school dormitory.

Outside reaction led the newcomers to turn inward. Leonard brought his three brothers, Pom (who became Dartington’s legal adviser), Vic, and Richard, from Yorkshire to cut down trees, clear the undergrowth, remove the Victorian shrubberies and weeds, and strip away the formal flower beds from the sunken garden, or tiltyard. A dramatic landscape of terraces emerged from beneath a worn out surface and blended into a wider river valley. The great trees planted by the Champernownes stood tall and grand. Sweeping views materialized. The gardens were shaped to blend with surrounding countryside. The industrious Elmhirsts and experts from England and the United States helped in the rebuilding. Roofs went on, walls were fortified, new structures erected. The combined effect of Leonard’s vision and Dorothy’s garden creations was to establish an estate that had more grandeur than at any time in its thousand-year-plus history.

In 1927, the Elmhirsts put on their first major play at Dartington,
The
Unknown Warrior
, which had achieved success in London. It was performed in the solar, the restored meeting room near the equally restored great hall.

In between inviting actors, musicians, artists, dance troupes, philosophers, and writers to visit and “perform” at Dartington, Dorothy managed to have two children with Leonard, Ruth in March 1927 and Bill in February 1929. She also worked with Leonard on education plans, which were set out in a rather lofty, philosophical prospectus, where learning was to be associated with practical experience. For instance, a teenager could learn about the business of poultry farming in a poultry project. It was called learning by doing. The “school” was to be self-governing. There was to be no discipline—a reaction to the rectitude that both Dorothy and Leonard experienced at school. The curriculum was to flow from the children’s own interests, which turned out to be haphazard and less rewarding than supposed.

Whitney, at age 15 in 1927, found he had to learn Latin to enter Cambridge. Beatrice never learned to spell, and Michael Straight complained in old age that his grammar was poor. In fact, none of the original students, who along with the three Straights included fourteen local and other kids from poor backgrounds, could spell or do algebra or geometry.

By contrast they attended lectures by speakers such as Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, and A. S. Neill and had visits from T. E. Lawrence and George Bernard Shaw. A teacher, Wyatt Trevelyan Rawson, taught Freudian psychoanalysis and interpreted dreams for the children in class. Michael Chekhov taught drama. H. N. Brailsford, the socialist writer, stayed at Dartington for six weeks during the autumn term of 1928. Consequently, the more intellectual students in the early teens, such as Straight, were semiliterate and innumerate but capable of grasping the big, persuasive ideas of the time. They comprehended a bit of Freud and the broad principles of Marxism-Leninism despite being unable to articulate them on paper with grammatical clarity. In September 1929, Michael Young (later, Lord Young of Dartington), a “pauper” as he called himself, began at the Hall when stars of the ideological firmament were frequenting there more than ever. He was Straight’s age, and they were thrown together, according to Young, because of Dorothy’s propensity to find permanent playmates for her children.

Young loved the freedom after a succession of preparatory and state schools in London and Australia, where straps and canes were used on hands, knuckles, legs, and buttocks. He was amused by the mixed-sex showers, which Leonard had suggested would take the curiosity out of the youngsters and reduce sexual tensions. “I had found it had the opposite effect,” Young noted in interviews.

As for the unisex dormitories, a worry in his five years at the Hall was the prospect of pregnancies. “There were surprisingly few compared to other schools,” he observed, “but it wasn’t for want of trying.”

Young had not long been at Dartington when he became fascinated by the new panacea that was Marxism. It was fashionable among thinkers at the leading universities. Both boys were inspired by a desire to change the world through revolution. Their isolation in the Dartington educational milieu assisted their precocious development. They were at least aware that their inspirations were radical and a threat to the establishment, even the liberal, democratic views of Dorothy and Leonard. It forced them into a bond, an early adolescent cabal, which, despite their intellectual equality, Straight appeared to dominate.

“He was arrogant and could be cruel,” Michael Young recalled.
¹
“He was extrovert and I, introvert.” He remembered them being “more rivals than friends,” although they remained friends through that original bond into their 80s.

Teachers at Dartington noted that Straight was difficult, uncooperative, and rude. Wyatt Rawson, trying out his newly discovered Freudian analysis, found Straight to be “tremendously under the influence of an English governess [the redoubtable May Gardner], who kept his emotions arrested at an age of about five.”

Straight used to repeat this amateur observation over the decades in an attempt to show that he was in need of being attached to somebody or something—that he was vulnerable to his later recruitment to a secret cause. On a 1929 trip with his parents to Bengal to see Tagore, he found his stepfather (here in a diary entry dropping the affectionate nickname “Gerry” for Leonard) remote and Dorothy naive. Straight seemed to be painting her as not the best mother a sensitive lad could have. This added to the image of a poor little rich boy who needed that sense of belonging once more. Thus he was later open to being fostered in the communist cause. Added to this was his professed alienation in the United Kingdom since leaving the United States, which was again to propose that he had no true motherland. He was implying that when another was later offered, he was attracted.

An alleged example of parental guidance, or lack of it, concerned a play that his mother put on at Dartington when he was 13,
Le Tombeau
Sous l’Arc de Triomphe
by Paul Regnal. Its central character was a French soldier who volunteered for a suicide mission. He was given twenty-four hours to be with his father and his betrothed. Straight claimed to Dorothy that he did not understand the soldier’s mentality. If he was the top fighter, why did he have to sacrifice himself? Dorothy cut him off by implying he was ignorant. Then she pointed out that the soldier’s status caused him to be obligated to make the sacrifice.

Straight claimed, unconvincingly, that this all related back to his agony over his father’s desire to abandon his family and go off to war. Dorothy never went beyond the explanation that the top man should lead the way in sacrifice. Straight said this befuddled him. The impression he wished to convey was that he had developed a deep sense of noblesse oblige, after the example set by his father and upheld by his mother.

Just like his father, he would put his hand up if he were ever asked to serve for a cause in which he believed. Again, this temperament, when coupled with his emotional statelessness, implied that Straight would be vulnerable to any later overtures to become a KGB agent.

The self-portrait of Straight as an emotionally defenseless neo-orphan
waif did not sit with those who knew him intimately. Young found him a dominant personality obsessed with extreme left-wing ideology and driven to fulfilling political ambitions through it. “He was extremely good-looking,” Young recalled, “an Adonis with intellectual gifts to match.”

Straight was very competitive. He hated losing even on the tennis court, which was one of the few areas Young managed to conquer him.
²

Even as a young teenager, Straight could summon an excess of charm and apply it at will. His self-styled emotional retardation seemed even more implausible when he encountered the curvaceous dancer, Margaret Barr, an Australian communist of 24 who came to teach dance at Dartington in 1930.

Straight thought that she was dark, dramatic, bold, and strong. He likened her to a statue by Gaston Lachaise.

Margaret took class twice a week, and Straight, just 14, set out to impress her with his knowledge of communist ideals and by his working hard at exercise routines started by her mentor, Martha Graham. These exertions won Margaret’s attention. He proved to be a fair dancer, and she cast him in leading roles she had created. Margaret’s epic was a clichéd heroic-workers-versus-the-fat-capitalist-boss saga—typical of that produced in Moscow and Leningrad by order of the state—performed to the Second Symphony of Jean Sibelius. Straight led a large chorus of workers out of poverty and oppression and into a painless new order. The show received a mixed reaction. Left-wing critics invited down from London for the opening night liked it. Admiral Sir Barry Domville, who had two children at Dartington, thought it was evidence that the school was a potential hotbed of Soviet propaganda and influence, and said so. Pom Elmhirst, as left wing as anybody at the Hall, threatened him with a libel suit.

Straight continued for more than a year in his pursuit of Margaret until she relented, and they began a furtive love affair in her cottage. Straight insisted on outlining this in detail to a salivating Michael Young.
³
Margaret and Straight stole away to Dorothy’s weekend cottage in Cornwall and read
Lady Chatterly’s Lover
aloud. Straight was Mellors, the working class gardener, who had the affair with Connie (Margaret’s role), the upper-class wife.

By 1932, the school—under the leadership of W. B. (Bill) Curry—had shed its unstructured attitude to the basics of education. Now any student could move on to higher formal qualification. English had to be taken every year. The fundamentals in arithmetic, languages, history, geography, and science were taught. The principle of enticing VIPs to visit Dartington continued. By now leaders in all walks of life were being invited or were coming on their own volition to examine the experiment. The contrast in visitors was notable. Rabindranath Tagore, always willing to lend his wisdom to his good friend Leonard, was there for some time in 1930. Tagore pleased Dorothy by declaring that the estate grounds had spiritual roots. He claimed that they went back to Christ’s time and that the natural springs and water beds had healing properties.

At the other end of the belief spectrum, the Comintern—the international arm of Russia’s espionage operations, which ran communists and parties in other countries—was interested in the key British educational institutions for propaganda and recruitment. They had infiltrated Oxford and Cambridge, from where the nation’s leaders in every field had come and would come. The Comintern, which had been set up and directed by Leon Trotsky, had a patient long-term view about recruitment. If they could nurture the right kind of idealist—one with the potential to climb into high ranks of politics, intelligence, or the military—from early undergraduate days, it fitted their plans. Even if the recruit was a sleeper (mole)—quietly working in a chosen field for even twenty years before being directed to spy—that was in accord with communist strategy. Marx wrote about it, Lenin articulated it, and Trotsky, then later Stalin (to a telling degree), implemented the long-term plan. It applied as much to industry as it did to espionage. But in the seventy years of communist domination of Russia it was more successful in the latter.