Donald Maclean was a star diplomat, an establishment insider and a keeper of some of the West’s greatest secrets.
He was also a Russian spy, driven by passionately held beliefs, whose betrayal and defection to Moscow reverberated for decades.
Codenamed ‘Orphan’ by his Russian recruiter, Maclean was the perfect spy and Britain’s most gifted traitor. But as he leaked huge amounts of top-secret intelligence, an international code-breaking operation was rapidly closing in on him. Moments before he was unmasked, Maclean vanished.
Drawing on a wealth of previously classified material, Roland Philipps now tells this story for the first time in full. He unravels Maclean’s character and contradictions: a childhood that was simultaneously liberal and austere; a Cambridge education mixing in Communist circles; a polished diplomat with a tendency to wild binges; a marriage complicated by secrets; an accelerated rise through the Foreign Office and, above all, a gift for deception.
Taking us back to the golden age of espionage, A Spy Named Orphan reveals the impact of one of the most dangerous and enigmatic Soviet agents of the twentieth century, whose actions heightened the tensions of the Cold War.
Roland Philipps went into publishing on graduating from Cambridge and until recently was Publisher of John Murray. He has edited some leading novelists, politicians, historians, travellers and biographers.
A Spy Named Orphan, his first book, arises from lifelong connections to Donald Maclean and his story.
The Maclean family: Private Collection. Donald Maclean’s parents: Victor Console / Associated Newspapers / REX / Shutterstock. Lady Bonham Carter: TopFoto.co.uk. School photograph: Courtesy of Gresham’s School. James Klugmann library card: Marx Memorial Library. Cambridge Armistice Day March: Private Collection. The ‘Magnificent Five’, in clockwise order: Ramsey and Muspratt; Private Collection; Keystone / Staff; Keystone / Staff; Photo © Tallandier / Bridgeman Images. Arnold Deustch, Theodor Maly and Kitty Harris: Private Collection. British Embassy staff, Paris: Private Collection, as per The Missing Macleans by Geoffrey Hoare (Cassell & Co Ltd, London, 1955). Anatoly Gorsky: Private Collection. Melinda Marling: TopFoto.co.uk. Sir Roger Makins: Bettmann / Contributor. Yalta conference: INTERFOTO / Alamy Stock Photo. British Embassy, Washington: Popperfoto / Contributor. Walter Krivitsky: AP / Rex / Shutterstock. Meredith Gardner: National Security Agency. Robert Lamphere: Bettmann / Contributor. Arlington Hall: U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command. Donald and Melinda: AP / Rex / Shutterstock. Philip Toynbee: © National Portrait Gallery, London. Donald, Melinda and Harriet Marling: Private Collection, as per A Divided Life by Robert Cecil (The Bodley Head, London, 1988). Donald in pinstripes: Bridgeman Images. Beaconshaw: Evening Standard / Stringer. Maclean family: Keystone-France. Moscow Centre: Courtesy of SVR Archives. Foreign Office: Trinity Mirror / Mirrorpix / Alamy Stock Photo. Yuri Modin: Private Collection. The Falaise: Science & Society Picture Library / Contributor. Wanted posters: AP / Rex / Shutterstock. Melinda and children: Keystone Pictures USA / Alamy Stock Photo. Alan Maclean and mother: TopFoto.co.uk. Jim Skardon: Popperfoto / Contributor. Melinda and boys in Geneva: Private Collection as per The Missing Macleans by Geoffrey Hoare. Vladimir Petrov: Keystone Pictures USA / Alamy Stock Photo. Melinda Marling: AP / TopFoto.co.uk. Bugress funeral: AP / Rex / Shutterstock. Philby and Melinda: Photograph by John Philby, Camera Press London. Maclean’s funeral: AP / Rex / Shutterstock. Tomb of Sir Donald and his son: Private Collection. Levy/AP/REX/Shutterstock
For Felicity
Donald Maclean awoke on 25 May 1951 at his house in the quiet Kent village of Tatsfield to a beautiful late-spring day, a welcome change in the weather. That Friday morning would be his last in England; it was his thirty-eighth birthday. He ate his breakfast of bacon and eggs with two cups of tea in his usual haste. The housekeeper and nanny to his sons Fergus and young Donald (known as ‘Beany’) entered the comfortable Victorian villa to see him rush upstairs to kiss his American wife Melinda goodbye. Remarkably, given the traumatic year they had just had, Melinda was now eight months pregnant with their third child. Donald came back downstairs, quickly watered the cyclamen1 that Melinda had bought him, bent his long frame into his car and set off for Oxted station and the commuter train to London’s Victoria. When he arrived in London the tall, slender, elegantly pinstriped diplomat with his trademark bow-tie, his good looks now with an air of distinction about them as his blond hair was starting to grey, walked briskly from the station through St James’s Park, which was in full flower, to the Foreign Office. The man with the trilby and unnecessary raincoat had to adopt an undignified scurry to keep pace with Maclean’s stride; it was almost as if the taller man were taunting him. Maclean was at his desk as head of the American Department by 10.00 as usual. He was young for such a prestigious job, the latest promotion in what had so far been, with one setback, a remarkably successful career. He was on track to reach the heights of his profession, the major ambassadorships certainly, perhaps even ending up as Permanent Secretary. His friends were already calling him ‘Sir Donald Maclean, OHMS’, in recognition of his work On His Majesty’s Service. Here was a cultivated, laconic mandarin who was also a highly experienced Soviet agent, and MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence service, were on to him.
Maclean’s employers had been exceptionally loyal. They had not only brought him back into the fold the previous winter but they had promoted him to his influential new post. Less than a year before he had been in the throes of paranoid alcoholism and had come close to bringing disgrace upon British diplomacy. When one of his oldest friends had picked him up at the station on his way to stay with her in Wiltshire, she had been so alarmed by his appearance that she took him first to a friend’s garden to relax before driving him home. As he lay on piled-up cushions beneath a beech tree, he was seized by an attack of delirium tremens so violent that he kept jumping up to fight the branches above him2. An acquaintance saw him soon afterwards and described him as looking ‘as if he had spent the night sitting up in a tunnel’3. A year on, and a delicious lunch in Soho seemed a fitting celebration both of his birthday and of his recovery.
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The Foreign Office had been constructed on a regal scale in keeping with the majesty of the British Empire in the mid-1860s. That Empire was now shrinking fast, although the outlook of the politicians and diplomats was not always keeping pace with the decline. The great ideological struggle of the twentieth century between Communism and capitalism was now being fought as a cold war between the superpowers of America and the Soviet Union; Britain’s most potent contribution to the struggle had ended with the Second World War, when Donald Maclean had held a prime ringside seat in Washington DC. The grandest office in the Whitehall building was that of the Foreign Secretary, and there Herbert Morrison had the previous day signed the order for Maclean to be brought in for questioning. Although the extent of his betrayal was barely understood, the trap was about to snap shut on one of the most influential spies of the century.
Maclean’s lunch date, who had helped him through his crisis the previous year, drove her jeep into the palatial Foreign Office courtyard just before noon. She noticed he was wearing a jaunty bow-tie, always a sign that he was in good spirits. Gone was the shaky wreck of the previous summer. They chatted about his family over pre-prandial oysters and a half-bottle of champagne in Wheeler’s fish restaurant, then made their way through Soho’s bustle and sunny spirits to Schmidt’s where they were meeting the friend’s husband for an unseasonably heavy German lunch. En route they bumped into a writer they knew, who noted that Maclean seemed ‘calm and genial’4, a welcome change from the gate-crasher who had appeared late in the evening at his Regent’s Park home a couple of weeks earlier and passed out in the hallway so that the departing dinner guests had to step over him.
As Maclean had insisted on paying for their lunch he needed to refill his wallet so he walked back to Whitehall, his watcher trotting not far behind, via the Travellers Club in Pall Mall to cash a cheque for £10. He was back at his desk by 3.00 for the only planned meeting of the day, a dull one which he despatched with his usual efficiency. He left his office for the last time around 5.45, reminded a colleague that he would not be at work the following morning, Saturday, and ran into his boss, Sir Roger Makins, in the grand courtyard with its marble pavements and arched colonnades. Makins thought highly of Maclean and had given him his current job after being impressed by him when they worked together on top-secret atomic matters in Washington at the end of the war. Makins had been as astonished as all the other senior men in the Foreign Office when he had learned of Maclean’s crimes, but had been assured that there was no danger that he would be able to leave the country, so he acted in his normal friendly manner. The tail followed Maclean to Victoria, where he caught the 6.10 train, carrying a cardboard box and a few small parcels, but without his briefcase. Makins was the last civil servant to see him. Donald Maclean was now invisible to official eyes.
That same afternoon, Guy Burgess, an acquaintance of Maclean’s from their days in Cambridge and someone he had seen on several occasions in the past couple of weeks, was in his flat in New Bond Street preparing for a journey. He carefully packed a tweed suit, some shirts, shoes, socks, a dinner jacket, shaving kit, £300 and the novels of Jane Austen in a one-volume collected edition (‘I never travel without it’) and put the case into the back of a cream Austin A40 he had hired that afternoon5. Tickets had been booked for the midnight sailing of a ship, the Falaise, on the advice of Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the King’s Pictures and Director of the Courtauld Institute, an establishment figure soon to be recognised with a knighthood. Blunt, Burgess and Maclean were all three members of the Cambridge spy ring, known to their Soviet controllers as the ‘Magnificent Five’. Now, after decades of brilliant espionage that meant no government had ever been as comprehensively penetrated as Britain’s, the ring was about to come apart.
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Melinda Maclean later claimed that she had spent the day baking her husband a birthday cake and preparing a ‘special dinner’6 and that she was therefore understandably upset when he got back to announce that not only would Roger Styles, a friend of his she had never heard of, be joining them but the pair had to go somewhere on business immediately after dinner and might even have to spend the night away. He started to go upstairs to pack and they argued – not only was it ‘too bad’ that he had invited an ‘unknown guest’ home for his birthday which they could have spent as a family, but now he was not even staying with her and their boys, both of whom were in bed with measles. She would now be alone as she prepared the house for his high-maintenance sister Nancy and Nancy’s new husband who were arriving on the following day. She begged him not to go, but he insisted. The argument woke up their son Fergus, aged seven, who asked ‘Why are you going away, Daddy? Can I stand at the window and watch you go?’ His father said: ‘Get back into bed, you little scamp; I’m not going far; I’ll be back soon.’7
Roger Styles, dark and thickish-set, turned up half an hour after his host and was introduced to Melinda, who found him ‘charming and easy to talk to’8. Dinner was in the end a chatty, ‘normal’ meal, with nobody showing any sign of strain. After dinner, Maclean announced that they had to be on their way smartly, and went out to stoke the boiler for the night, leaving Styles talking to his wife. They did indeed have to hurry, and only just covered the ninety miles to Southampton in time to embark at 11.45. They left the car on the dockside as they jumped aboard. ‘We’ll be back for it on Monday!’9 they shouted to a waiting sailor.
The following morning, they stayed on the boat for too long, drinking beer, before disembarking in Saint Malo, leaving their luggage and some ‘disorder’10 in their shared cabin. Although a few days earlier a general instruction had been put out for UK police and passport control to watch for Maclean, the British had chosen not to share this warning with continental police or ports for fear of leaks, so the pair were free to have a leisurely cooked breakfast. They were so leisurely that they missed the 11.20 boat-train to Paris and ended up hiring a taxi to drive them the forty-three miles to Rennes where they caught up with the train.
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The Foreign Office was shut from Saturday afternoon until Monday morning, in common with the rest of the country, so, as she later explained, Melinda could not do anything to contact her husband until Monday at 10.00 when she rang his office to say that she had lost track of him. Makins thought he might have given Maclean that day off as well, so it was not until she called again and mentioned his hurried departure with Roger Styles that anyone became worried, and then, in a very controlled and mandarin way, panic-stricken. Word went out to all the diplomatic and consular posts on the continent to look out for the two men and to report back on a ‘clear the line’ basis direct to the Prime Minister11.
The charming, well-connected and brilliant enigma that was Donald Maclean had made his choice. The events of that day provoked a sea-change within the British establishment, destroyed much of the carefully built trust between Britain and America and damaged the great nation’s standing in the eyes of the world. The Cold War was about to get very much colder. This is the story of a scandal still reverberating today, although the man at its centre has, until now, largely remained a mystery.
By any standards Donald Maclean was a very successful schoolboy. He had risen to the highest rank in his school’s Officer Training Corps, was a prefect, the editor of the school magazine, secretary of its League of Nations Union and a successful all-round sportsman with colours in cricket, rugby and hockey. His contemporaries regarded him as ‘way ahead of others’1 at a time when the ‘others’ included those who were to become some of the leading figures in British political, public and intellectual life. He left his centuries-old school as the holder of an exhibition to Cambridge, at the summit of the first generation of Macleans to go to university, the hopes of his ambitious parents and teachers intact, a glittering future lying before him. The reference later provided by his school for the Foreign Office seems to bask in shared triumph as it enumerates his achievements and acclaims his ‘moral character’ as ‘exceptionally good’2. He was the ultimate insider at the school, liberal and not too showy, high-achieving without being seen to try too hard.
Yet although a combination of his devout family upbringing and his school’s unique disciplinary code enabled him to appear as a ‘reliable person of integrity … who would not let you down’3, this young paragon was already morally primed to be ‘the cat that walked alone’4, the outsider with ‘an open invitation to betray one’s friends’5. And to betray his country even as he was its most diligent servant. He needed to find a cause and an opportunity.
Donald Maclean was born in 1913, when the British Empire was at its zenith, before the Great War and the Russian Revolution undermined the assumptions that upheld it. His father, also Donald, was a successful Member of Parliament and a leading member of that exalted establishment that sustained the Empire. He was of strong non-conformist stock, a stern and austere patriot who was able to love and serve his country while applying his highly developed conscience to every decision he took in its service. Of his five children, his namesake was the one who turned out simultaneously most to resemble him and yet most to go against the grain. The roots of their beliefs were planted firmly in the soil of the barren, windswept Hebridean island of Tiree.
Sir Fitzroy Maclean, 26th Chief of the Clan Maclean, summoned his clansmen from all over the world to Duart Castle on the far northern Isle of Mull, Tiree’s neighbour, for 24 August 1912. All were loyal members of one of the oldest and fiercest families of Argyll and the Hebrides, families that had for the most part been scattered in the Highland Clearances of the previous century as the landowners ejected the crofters to make way for their vast flocks of sheep. The devout and hard-working Liberal Member of Parliament, now being celebrated as a prominent member of the clan, was just a generation away from his father’s subsistence on the soil, on part-time work as a fisherman and on meagre earnings as a shoemaker in their tiny home. His obedience to the summons was a demonstration of the pride he felt in his small branch of the vast clan tree, in their rise from their centuries-old, back-breaking and diligent Hebridean life to middle-class Edwardian comfort and national respectability. He kept the invitation to the gathering at Duart Castle among his papers6 for the rest of his life. His third son and middle child, born nine months later on 25 May, was named Donald Duart, binding the infant to his own success and the newly attained family standing. From then on, Duart became the middle name of all his male descendants.
Donald instilled in his children, young Donald especially, a powerful moral impulse. When he died, Stanley Baldwin paid tribute to him in the House of Commons: ‘In Donald Maclean I see a soul as clean as the West wind that blows over Tiree, where he was born.’7 In fact, Donald senior had been born in Lancashire in 1868 as his father John had come south with his wife, Agnes Macmellin, to look for work. No more successful in the north of England, John continued moving down the country until he reached Haverfordwest, in the south-west corner of Wales, and later nearby Carmarthen, where his cordwaining skills could flourish. But the former Prime Minister correctly identified the defining characteristic of Sir Donald – the purity of his soul, the clarity of conscience which throughout his life drove him to act as that conscience dictated, not for personal gain but for the greater good as he and his religion saw it.
Both Donald and his younger brother Ewen received a grammar school education in South Wales. Donald moved to Cardiff at the age of nineteen to train as a solicitor, soon forming his own firm with a partner. The Welsh non-conformist, Methodist tradition, known locally as ‘Chapel’ and resistant to the established Anglican Church, suited a man with his upbringing and reinforced his certainty that the writ of God could not be transgressed for fear of damnation, his conviction that others must be helped on to the right paths. Non-conformity ran deep within the family in both action and reaction. The religion emphasised temperance: Sir Donald was a lifelong teetotaller who banned alcohol and tobacco in his houses, although his friend, neighbour and fellow Scot J. M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan, noted that ‘at times he lit a cigarette to please me, and I have almost as nobly looked the other way while he got rid of it. On a special occasion I have also seen a ginger-beer bottle in his hand.’8 Among his other early appointments, Maclean was a director of a life assurance company, the United Kingdom Temperance and General Provident Institution, a founder of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, secretary of the Cardiff Chamber of Commerce and vice-president of the Cardiff Free Church Council, advocating tolerance for all beliefs in conscience as well as in the debate over free trade9. C.P. Scott of the Manchester Guardian wrote in his diary that Maclean had ‘Liberalism in his bones’10, and all this activity in the Welsh Liberal heartland brought him to the attention of the leader of the Party, Herbert Asquith. Maclean entered Parliament at his second attempt as MP for Bath in 1906, glad to support the new Prime Minister, a man ‘he loved as few men are loved by another’11.
Donald Maclean worked hard, ‘and quickly made his mark in Parliament by modesty, sincerity and industry’12, concentrating on domestic issues that would improve the lot of the working or unemployed man – labour exchanges, old-age pensions and National Insurance. In 1907 he opened an office in London, and in that year married Gwendolen Devitt, the daughter of a Surrey magistrate and colonial rubber broker.
In her only daughter’s eyes, Gwendolen was ‘an exceptionally good-looking woman but very difficult to live with’13 as she reinforced, in a less biblically stern way, the pattern of parental dominance over her children. Although her parenting style was sweeping, unethical and, to modern thinking, wrong, the family doctor described her as ‘that type of strong personality you often do get as the parent of episodic drinkers’14 – a judgement made at a time when young Donald was finding it impossible to stick to his father’s temperate path. Gwendolen was a forthright product of her age and her own upbringing. Like almost all girls of her generation, she was not well educated, yet she was never afraid to speak her mind, the more so as she got older. She was imperious to the point where her family gave her the affectionate nickname the ‘Queen Bee’, abbreviated in speech and correspondence to ‘Queenie’. The Macleans ‘made a handsome couple: he had a florid complexion and since his late twenties his hair had been white. She was a fine-looking woman with a lively manner. When Asquith invited them to dinner to meet the Prince of Wales, [Asquith] described her as “young and quite good-looking … with glowing cheeks and glittering eyes”.’15 Donald remained strongly attached to his mother all his life, but she was no more privy to the most important parts of his mind than anyone else. She in turn remained devoted to her son and to the memory of her husband and his principles. When young Donald was being splashed across the front pages of every newspaper, it was Lloyd George who was ‘that traitor’16 for splitting the Liberal Party half a century earlier. In her eyes, constancy was the key to both Donalds.
Ian Maclean was born in 1908, followed by Andrew in 1910, then Donald Duart (known by his parents as ‘Teento’, for ‘Teeny Don’) in 1913, Nancy in 1918 and, when Sir Donald (as he had become for his work in the House of Commons during the First World War) was sixty and Lady Maclean forty-four, their fourth son, Alan Duart, in 1924. The expanding family and their cook, parlourmaid, housemaid, nanny and nursery-maid17 moved into a stuccoed five-storey house at 6 Southwick Place, Bayswater. The house, with its porticoed entrance and gloomy interiors, was just on the north side of Hyde Park, close to Paddington Station for Sir Donald’s visits to his business in Cardiff and to his constituency, which by then was North Cornwall.
The Macleans also bought Elm Cottage in the village of Penn, in Buckinghamshire’s Chiltern Hills. The largely eighteenth-century house had three-quarters of an acre of land, an orchard, a vegetable garden and rosebeds, which the children weeded and pruned during their weekends there. Penn, about twenty-five miles from London, was true to the Quaker foundation that had sent William Penn from there to found the state of Pennsylvania in the seventeenth century; whether or not this influenced the Macleans in their choice of country retreat, Sir Donald did not relax his religious principles there: Ian got into very hot water with his father when he saw ‘God First’ painted on the wall and told villagers that it was announcing the result of a bicycle race18. Their summer holidays were spent in Cornwall and carried on the same routine of daily prayers and healthy endeavour.
The senior Macleans (Sir Donald’s mother, speaking Gaelic as her first language, also lived with them until her death in 1924) led blameless lives. He worked ‘soundly and sweet-temperedly’19 in Parliament, promoting free trade and improving the lot of his less fortunate countrymen. In the occasional periods when he did not have a seat, Sir Donald was a diligent solicitor, charity campaigner and committee man, as well as a lay preacher.
Religion was always at the centre of family life, claustrophobically so for his children. Sir Donald, in his frock coat and grey silk hat, led his family every Sunday to the Presbyterian church in Marylebone to hear about grace through faith and the absolute sovereignty of God. J. M. Barrie wrote in The Times after Sir Donald’s death that ‘You did not know him at all unless you knew his religion. He was in London as much a Scotch Presbyterian as though he had never left his native Tiree. He was an elder of the Church and in his home held that “family exercise” in which a Scottish household is seen at its best.’20 These family prayers were one of young Donald’s strongest memories21: enforced daily service to a God one could not believe in would be a good working discipline for when he had formed his own views.
Donald saw his father as a ‘middle-aged martinet’22 and ‘a harsh man’23. He was fixed in his ways, Victorian in style and unbending in his outlook, insisting on the highest and purest standards of probity. He was clear that his sons’ privileged start in life meant the offices where they could do most good were easily attainable by them if they worked hard and looked to their morals. There were rows when Ian and Andrew crashed back into the ‘teetotal fold’24 in the small hours after late-night parties. Drinking was a source of deep shame in Sir Donald’s eyes. His middle son took this in at an impressionable age, and made increasingly vain attempts to keep his consumption under control until it became mired in his own profound shame and ultimately overwhelmed him. When Sir Donald had reached the peak of his career towards the end of his life he became a ‘doting old parent’25 to his two youngest children. Teento was in the middle of these two groups, able to forge his own beliefs unseen behind the paired older boys and their battles, neither the girl nor the baby of the family; the clever one they did not have to worry about, but also the one who had to feel his way, watchful without drawing attention to himself, finding his own outlets for his inherited conscience. Paradoxically, young Donald, who found his father and ‘his principles daunting’, absorbed so thoroughly ‘his passionate belief that you did what you thought was right at all costs’ that he too became ‘a genuine political animal’26.
The two Donalds felt the same ‘vehement sense of rectitude’27 and saw the world in terms of clearly defined certainties which they both acted upon consistently. When Alan and young Donald were sharing a bedroom and recovering from flu, they spent hours playing soldiers together on the floor of their room, the five-year-old Alan trying to ensure that the glorious Highlanders always beat the ragged sepoys ranged against them, the teenage Donald playing for the opposite result. When the younger boy complained that this did not seem to be the way things were in real life, his elder brother said, ‘Why shouldn’t the Indians win? After all. It’s their country.’28 Even as a pillar of the diplomatic corps, Donald could be provoked to unstatesmanlike rage by a chance derogatory remark that violated his personal moral codes and the rights of those without a voice. He carried his father’s moral imprint deep within him for the rest of his life.
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After a few years at St Mary’s College in Lancaster Gate, near the family’s London home, Maclean went at the age of ten to Gresham’s School, Holt, isolated just outside a picturesque Georgian town on the far eastern edge of England. The great and misnamed ‘public’ schools that nurtured the British elite – Eton, Harrow, Winchester, Marlborough and the rest – tended to be within easy reach of London. Alongside this geographical difference, the school had developed a unique ethos that set it even further apart from its rivals, and made it the perfect psychological training-ground for a nascent spy.
W. H. Auden wrote shortly after leaving Gresham’s that he thought its disciplinary code had been the most ‘potent engine’ for turning his schoolmates into ‘remote introverts, for perpetuating those very faults of character which it was intended to cure’. It meant that ‘the whole of our moral life was based on fear, on fear of the community, not to mention the temptation it offered to the natural informer, and fear is not a healthy basis’29. If Maclean had absorbed from his home life the need to follow his conscience, but not its spiritual corollary of openness, his education at the same school as Auden gave him the ability to turn himself inwards, to live as a high achiever for both the country that he loved and the country with the system he would crave. He turned out to be such a natural keeper and supplier of secrets himself that he was able to maintain his two lives in balance for decades, until the division between them, and not being sufficiently recognised in one of them, became too much for him to bear.
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Most of the schools of the time emphasised sport and the classics, promoted Christianity of the Anglican sort and produced men to run the country and Empire that were theirs by inheritance. These attributes did not fit with the more radically non-conformist outlook of the Macleans, and when the time came to choose a school for their eldest son Ian, they took the advice of Dr Gillie, the minister of the Presbyterian church in Marylebone, to send him to Gresham’s. Until 1900 the sixteenth-century foundation had mainly served the sons of local clergymen and merchants in the prosperous farmlands of East Anglia, under the motto ‘All worship be God’. In one measure used to judge a school’s academic standing, between 1858 and 1900 it had sent a mere twenty-four pupils to Cambridge, and three to further-off Oxford. In 1900, by which time the number of pupils had fallen to an unsustainable fifty and the fabric of the school was in disrepair, a new headmaster, G. W. S. Howson, took charge.
Howson and his successor from 1919, J. R. Eccles, changed Gresham’s into a forward-looking school that would attract the sons and grandsons of some of the leading liberal thinkers of the time, including those of C. P. Scott of the Guardian, Walter Layton of the Economist, the Presbyterian John Reith, first Director General of the BBC, the Liberal MP and future Chairman of the BBC Ernest Simon, Erskine Childers, executed Irish nationalist and author of The Riddle of the Sands, and Sir Donald Maclean, MP. The school also fostered a remarkable artistic roll-call of alumni in this period that included Stephen and Humphrey Spender, W. H. Auden and Benjamin Britten; and some notable scientists and engineers, among them the future Nobel laureate Alan Hodgkin and the inventor of the hovercraft, Christopher Cockerell. In 1932 alone, the year after Donald Maclean left the school, fifty-seven former pupils went to Cambridge and twenty-one to Oxford30. By the time of Donald’s arrival in 1923, it was the school of choice for those of a progressive outlook who recognised the educational needs of a changing world. Ian had passed through the school in exemplary fashion, becoming head boy before going to Cambridge and eventually starting work without much enthusiasm in their father’s law firm. The next brother, Andy, had difficulty adjusting to the school, and was withdrawn after a bout of pneumonia just as Donald, his junior by three years, started to outshine him.
The curriculum was modernised to concentrate on the sciences and modern languages rather than the classics, and Greek was abandoned altogether. Caning was abolished far ahead of most schools, and punishments instead involved the more wholesome essays, being ‘off jam’ or runs of three or four miles31. After the First World War the school was the first of the public schools to become a member of the League of Nations Union, reflecting a more modern outlook that valued negotiation over conflict and debate over bloodshed – lessons the future diplomat took to heart. Gresham’s developed a culture far removed from the hierarchical outlook of the more traditional schools, in effect creating an environment in which pupils were able to work out their own beliefs and were more inclined to join the professions or, a significant attraction to the liberal parents of the new pupils, become committed public servants. Charles Trevelyan, the first Labour Minister of Education, gave the Speech Day address in 1924, and the hidebound Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, A. C. Benson, reported that ‘he made a vulgar attack on the old Public Schools – and rejoiced that the blue-blooded land-owning aristocratic product was down in the market … He spoke idealistically and with some passion and impressed the boys …’32
But what really set Gresham’s apart from its competitors, other than geography, was the ‘Honour System’. The headmaster spoke to new pupils ‘of truth, and frankness, and honour; of purity in thought, and word, and deed; of the value and importance of hard work and honest work’33. Each boy then took a private oath to him and separately to his housemaster by which he promised:
‘Impurity’ in this context meant ‘dirty talk or masturbation’35, impracticable in the extreme in a school of teenage boys, particularly those brought up in a rigid environment focused on the suppression of ‘vices’ such as alcohol and tobacco. To help promote purity in deed, all the boys’ trouser pockets were sewn up; purity in thought was a different matter altogether. The notion behind the system was ‘liberty based on loyalty or freedom founded upon trust’36, but the most troubling rider to the oath encouraged anything but loyalty and trust: if you didn’t turn yourself in, or couldn’t be persuaded to do so by your schoolfellows, one of them could do it for you.
Gresham’s was proud of its Honour System. Bullying and homosexuality (and presumably swearing, smoking and smut) were rarer than in other public schools as a result of the system’s strictures, but the consequences of its imposition are psychologically troubling, as Auden made clear – not least in encouraging the betrayal of one’s schoolmates. The gap between the rules and the way boys actually are meant that the official morality was unworkable. It led to a high rate of anxiety and often breakdown among the pupils, to an obsession with secrecy, to the burying of true and open selves and to the repression of emotions. For a boy who kept himself to himself as much as young Donald did, a third son with two brothers to draw the heat, able to keep his head below the parapet, the system was a continuation of his home life under Sir Donald: he could adhere to strict codes without subscribing to them himself, and hide any duplicity and resentment behind successful conformity. He made the transition to boarding school effortlessly.
Even in those earliest days of psychological study, the consequences of the repression of sexual exploration inculcated through such a process of tale-telling as the Honour System, particularly for those coming at an impressionable age to such an unnatural school environment from more old-fashioned homes, were disregarded. Such shame and confusion as Maclean may later in his life have felt in his attitudes to sex and to the secrecy surrounding his drinking are as deeply embedded in his schooldays as in his home life.
Eric Berthoud was at Gresham’s before Maclean. As Sir Eric, a distinguished ambassador, he wrote from his posting to highlight the danger of the Honour System for boys emerging into adulthood. Berthoud claimed that he had always ‘felt that the psychological background for Maclean’s ultimate mental disequilibrium’, as his actions were seen by the fearful, incredulous establishment of the 1950s, ‘should be sought in his school background … It might be worth someone discussing Maclean’s evolution at the school with J. R. Eccles … a bachelor of very rigid views.’ Berthoud described how he had been beaten in front of the whole school for an unspecified ‘breach of trust and honour’37 and carried the scars throughout his outwardly successful life. An earlier alumnus than Berthoud, John Reith, said that the system ‘upset his relations with women for years afterwards’38. Keeping oneself hidden, learning to bury one’s natural urges, could only have repercussions in later life.
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The galvanic political event of Maclean’s schooldays was the General Strike of 1926, with its accompanying excitement and hope for the left, and fear of revolution for the right. Mine owners’ proposals to reduce miners’ pay (which had almost halved in the previous seven years) and impose longer hours of work led to protracted negotiations between the government and the unions; final talks broke down when the printers of the Daily Mail refused to print an editorial condemning the strike as ‘a revolutionary movement intended to inflict suffering upon the great mass of innocent persons in the community and thereby to put forcible constraint upon the Government’39. The Trades Union Congress, in support of the miners, called a General Strike. For nine days there was no transport and no press; local committees of trade unionists controlled the distribution of food and power. The army was patrolling the streets, with armoured cars in London’s main shopping artery, Oxford Street. Upper-class volunteers registered for work at their Mayfair clubs, manned soup kitchens, enlisted as special constables and helped out in the docks. Some members of this ‘thug militia of St James’s Street’, comprising ‘bands of young, steel-helmeted clubmen’40, went on to have Damascene conversions to socialism as their eyes were opened for the first time to the conditions in which most of their countrymen worked. These included the artist Wogan Philipps, who was moved towards Communism by the plight of the strikers he met while working as a special mounted constable in the London docks. Sir Donald, a strong advocate for freedom of both thought and trade, spoke strenuously against the strike in the House of Commons, just as he consistently voted against loans for Soviet Russia41. His two eldest sons, both still at Gresham’s, volunteered: Ian Maclean took a job as a railway porter, Andrew as a delivery boy.
The Communist Party saw the strike as ‘the greatest revolutionary advance in Britain since the days of Chartism, and the sure prelude to a new revolutionary era’42, although ultimately it did little more than preserve the status quo and banish the spectre of a Bolshevik revolution in Britain. But the sight of the strikers, the alarming news coverage of the parts of the country that came to a standstill and the divisions between workers and masters all impressed themselves upon the minds of the young and inquisitive. It prepared the way for Communism to flourish in the radical political decade to come and, for a boy searching for a banner to follow, signalled the first notes of the call to arms.
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Maclean’s closest friendship during his time at the school was not based on his games prowess or mutual sexual attraction but on academic compatibility. Above all, he was searching for the peg on which to fix his conscience, formed largely by his father, for he sensed that the Honour System had no workable morality. He was not easily given to making friends at any stage in his life, but at the age of twelve, the cat that was already walking alone, he was gangly and awkward, and had not yet developed his polished good looks. His height and shyness sometimes made him appear ‘supercilious and reserved’43 to others. His school friendship with James Klugmann, his first exposure to an ideologically kindred spirit, was the most formative of his life, even though it would last less than a decade.
Norman John (known as James from his teens) Klugmann was in his last term at the Hall School in Hampstead at the time of the strike, heading for Gresham’s the following September. He wrote a poem, ‘On the Lower Fourth Debating Society’, which satirised those who spoke against the unions:
A diminutive child
Then steps out to speak
On the strike. And he talks
Of the TUC’s cheek
In calling a strike –
Mr Baldwin he says,
Is only the Prime Minister.
He is not sinister.
But Ramsay MacDonald
He never would like.44
Baldwin was the Conservative Prime Minister, MacDonald the Labour leader. The Klugmann family were leading Jewish Hampstead liberals: James’s father Samuel had been born in Bavaria and now ran Klugmann & Co., Rope and Twine Merchants, in the City of London. In common with Sir Donald’s, ‘his liberalism was rooted in the idea of self-improvement and individual responsibility … it was a liberalism which sought a wider civic duty, to use the advantages of privilege to aid the common good’45. James was a natural candidate for Gresham’s, which he entered on a scholarship. Even at the age of thirteen he was showing many of the characteristics that brought him to Moscow’s attention as a potential recruit. He was ‘quiet and thoughtful, modest, conscientious, industrious and serious’. Above all, ‘he exercises great influence over people’46, and through his quiet persuasiveness was later called upon when a good turn-out was needed from the Cambridge socialists at demonstrations and marches47. He was certainly to influence Donald Maclean’s intellectual and political development profoundly: the latter, an outwardly unformed boy hidden under the weight of family beliefs and the Honour System, was ready to go into his adolescent cocoon and emerge fully formed.
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The Svengali-like teacher of the questing, conscientious young minds of Gresham’s was a young French master, Frank McEachran. Maclean and Klugmann were his best students at the time. Auden ‘looked up to him … as a father figure’48, and McEachran encouraged each new pupil to arrive at the ‘basic literary and philosophical framework of his lifetime’s enquiry while still at Gresham’s’49. He ranged far beyond his own subject across literature, history, philosophy and poetry, a thrilling and inspirational combination to a thirsty young mind.fn1 He believed passionately in the unity of Europe and its peoples, brought about through common culture, and wrote two books in response to the darkening situation in the wake of the economic collapse of the Depression and the growing fascist sentiment in Germany. He warned in 1932 that ‘the fever of nationalism which now rages around the world has not only shattered into fragments what little common feeling it once possessed but has also nearly destroyed the unity of Europe, the focus in modern times of human civilisation’50.
Klugmann credited McEachran with the ability to open his ‘eyes to new horizons of ideas, new excitements, to rouse imagination in books and theories and liberalism and languages’51. Although not a Marxist himself, McEachran urged Maclean and Klugmann to read Marx, and imbibe ‘the core ideas on the state, class struggle and historical materialism’52. Both boys served on the school’s library committee and spoke regularly at the Debating Society, itself founded by McEachran in 1930. In February 1931, Maclean opposed the motion that ‘This House condemns Socialism both in theory and practice’. In words that picked up on his own unacknowledged tug of moralities, he ‘deplored the distinction between public and private morality. Socialism would carry into a wider sphere the domestic virtues of service, liberty and justice.’53 The motion was narrowly defeated.
Another McEachran innovation at the school, from 1929, was The Grasshopper magazine, for which Maclean wrote a strikingly dreamlike short story in 1931. ‘The Sandwichmen’ are shuffling through the West End of London, ‘a bedraggled lot, with their ramshackle bowlers, their greeny-black overcoats all worn at the shoulders, their sagging, muddy trousers and then their boots that oozed mud as they slumped along the gutter. Their faces were studies in abject misery; dirty hair hung over their coat collars.’ Shades of the General Strike and the early hunger marchers. In their degraded state the Sandwichmen are not even worthy of names. ‘Number Seven’54 looks up at a house in Wimpole Street ‘with a vague sort of interest’. We then cut to an operating theatre being prepared for an emergency night-time operation on a ‘famous society hostess’. The surgeon who is driven up for the surgery is ‘a very popular young man in town, for he had a rare charm of manner and a quick smile that made him many friends; but more than just being popular, he stood high on the esteem of the whole medical world, not only for his undisputed brilliance, but for his unstinting generosity with his talents’. He has come from ‘Lady Marsham’s reception’ and ‘his face was flushed, his eyes bright and his manner slightly aggressive’. His blade slips, the patient’s blood wells up into the fatal wound, ‘the fumes left his fuddled brain, and he could see all too clearly now’. The surgeon flees into the night and the final sentence takes us back to the Sandwichmen as they leave Wimpole Street with ‘Number Seven’. The fall from brilliant young man to Sandwichman is painful, as Maclean imagines the narrow divide between fame and success. There is the background guilt associated with the ruinous effects of drink which he had absorbed from his Temperance Society father and the sermons both religious and secular at home; there is also a tension between desire and duty that was to run throughout the teenage author’s life, and the painful awareness of class differences and the dispossessed poor. The detail employed in the description of the men contrasts with the almost callous brittleness in the prose evoking the upper-crust society and the bright cleanliness of the operating theatre.
‘The Sandwichmen’ is eerily prophetic of many of Maclean’s own experiences in life. He rehearses the gaps between what we seem to be and what we are, between society life where conformity is important and ‘real’ life. He subconsciously offers some of the key themes of his maturity, including the effects of drink and its potential for damage as instilled into him by his father, in fictional form.
Maclean and Klugmann saw each other in London during the holidays. While Maclean was a welcome guest in the free-speaking openness of the Klugmann household, he was careful to keep the self-styled ‘clever oddity’55 out of Southwick Place for fear of Sir Donald finding out about his burgeoning political philosophy. They went instead to socialist or avant-garde films or met in pubs. The school careers of the two boys in many ways mirrored their subsequent outward revelation of themselves to the world. Klugmann, who happily called himself ‘The Communist’ while still at Gresham’s and went on to become one of the most overt and active members of the British Party, was ‘chubby, bespectacled and hopeless at games’56. He hated the very idea of the Officer Training Corps, and did not become a prefect. Maclean, by contrast, excelled in these areas and had now become a good-looking young man, although his full lips and smooth face beneath his high cheekbones, combined with his rather mincing walk and naturally high-pitched voice, gave him an effeminate demeanour until he was well into his twenties. By that time his politics were completely covert.
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