Coldspur

October 31, 2015 · 11:25 am

Mann Overboard!

This essay is not about Thomas, Manfred, or even F. G. Mann: it concerns the scientist, Wilfrid, of that Ilk. It was prompted by my recent reading of Andrew Lownie’s biography of the spy Guy Burgess, Stalin’s Englishman, which reveals a number of important facts about the notorious reprobate. It is a highly enjoyable work, my only major reservation being that Lownie does not assiduously enough pursue the several hares that he starts, leaving such readers such as this one gasping to know (for example) why Burgess not only managed to maintain any job he had in government, but how he succeeded in getting placed elsewhere despite his reputation. I have a particular interest in Burgess’s high-level sponsors and protectors (there must have been at least one), because of my research into the enigmatic voyage that he and Isaiah Berlin made towards Moscow in the summer of 1940.

One intriguing detail that Lownie does bring to the table, however, is an addendum to the case of espionage made against the nuclear scientist Wilfrid Mann. When Andrew Boyle published his Climate of Treason (originally titled The Fourth Man) in 1979, the author made broad hints about the identity of two suspected spies. The first, whom he called ‘Maurice’ was quite easily identified as being Anthony Blunt. The second, ‘Basil’ (whom Boyle then called the ‘Fifth Man’, not knowing about John Cairncross or even Leo Long at the time), was a British scientist in Washington whose name had been revealed to the F.B.I. by the Israelis, and who was subsequently ‘turned’ by the F.B.I. to provide disinformation to the Soviets. Boyle wrote: “It has not surprised the counter-intelligence interrogators that ‘Basil’ broke down quickly and easily, confessing that he had become a covert Communist in his student days and a secret agent for the Soviet not long afterwards.” (p 310) Unlike the hints about Blunt (who turns up regularly in Boyle’s book), there was only one reference to the obvious candidate for ‘Basil’, namely Wilfrid Basil Mann, where he attends a party given by Kim Philby, at which Burgess predictably misbehaves. Boyle must have felt on firm ground to use Mann’s second name without fear of a libel suit.

Mann replied not with a legal action, but with a rather dubious protest, in a book titled Was There a Fifth Man? (1982), suggesting explicitly that the question should be about whether such a character existed rather than whether he, Mann, was that person. It cast doubt on Boyle’s chronology, claiming to show that the author was not around when the episodes of espionage occurred, and that he was in fact out of the nuclear picture when the leaks occurred. Like so many memoirs in the field of espionage and counter-espionage, however, Mann’s account is not really to be trusted. Yet the topic of his guilt has languished for a while, with no definite proof either way (not that proof could be found that determined that anyone had never been a spy, as Lord Rothschild discovered). And then, in 2015, Lownie offers his revelation. He presents new evidence of Mann’s guilt. On page 213, he writes: “ . . . Mann’s recruitment and turning has now been confirmed by Patrick Reilly, chair of the Foreign Intelligence Committee, and then the Foreign Office Under-Secretary in charge of intelligence, who wrote in his unpublished memoirs, ‘that “Basil”, who can easily be identified, was in fact a Soviet spy is true: and also that he was turned round without difficulty.” Lownie gives a reference to this item as appearing at the Bodleian Library. I am sure it is valid, and I plan to inspect it next time I am in Oxford. But I wonder why it has not been picked up before?

Moreover, another lead appears in Lownie’s book. On page 211, he reproduces two caricatures drawn by Burgess on Wilfrid Mann’s copy of Atomic Energy, the author of the book described here as being George Crannov. This is, however, an obvious misprint, as Lownie has admitted to me: the caricature clearly shows the correct name of the author, G. Gamow, who is described, in Burgess’s writing, as being ‘under the action of absinth’, and it features an obvious image of Joseph Stalin chewing a cocktail-table, as if Gamow were haunted by the influence of the Soviet dictator, and taking on his shape. The episode occurred in November 1950, as the caricature is clearly dated. What is going on here? And what is the connection between Burgess, Mann, Gamow, and Stalin?

Well, I am familiar with this George Gamow. In my thesis about Soviet subversion that is about to be submitted, I have a paragraph on him, which runs as follows (the footnotes and endnotes demanded by such a work being replaced with parenthetical explanations): “As has been shown with Isaiah Berlin’s father, Mendel, threatening exiles with harm to relatives still living in the Soviet Union was a favoured tactic of Stalin’s secret police. Pavel Sudoplatov [who headed the ‘Special Tasks’ group, responsible for the liquidation of Stalin’s enemies, and had blood on his hands, personally] described how another physicist suffered the same treatment because of his concern for relatives left behind. ‘Using implied threats against Gamow’s relatives in Moscow, Elizaveta Zarubina [a resident NKVD operative in the Unites States, and also not a nice person] pressured him into cooperating with us. In exchange for safety and material support for his relatives, Gamow provided the names of left-wing scientists who might be recruited to supply secret information.’ Like Peierls’ wife, Eugenia, George Gamow had started his scientific career in Leningrad: he was also a friend of Peierls [Rudolf Peierls, who spearheaded atomic weapons research in Britain in 1940, and was the colleague and mentor of the atomic spy Klaus Fuchs], who credited Gamow’s explanation of alpha decay as ‘one of the earliest successes of quantum mechanics’. Max Born [another famous émigré scientist with communist sympathies] explains that Gamow made several unsuccessful attempts to escape to the West from the Soviet Union, but eventually gained a permit in 1932 after several distinguished physicists, including Einstein and Bohr, had guaranteed his return. When Gamow decided to settle in the United States, Stalin was so furious at his refusal to return that he took his frustration out on Pyotr Kapitza [another leading Soviet scientist who worked at Cambridge University for many years, before being recalled by Stalin and not allowed back].”

You can find a rich biographical article on Gamow. ‘Getting a Bang out of Gamow’, at https://physics.columbian.gwu.edu/george-gamow , although it says nothing about any espionage activity, or his relationship with Mann and Burgess. He is credited with being the originator of the ‘Big Bang’ theory of the universe, and is ascribed as having a considerable influence on the scientists at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory. It includes a fascinating photograph of John Cockcroft and Gamow at the Laboratory in 1931. The account of the escape by Gamow and his wife to the West, after making unsuccessful attempts beforehand, does not ring true. The fact that he gained – ‘more than a little surprised’ ̶ Molotov’s and Stalin’s approval for him and his wife to attend a conference in Brussels in 1933 suggests a deal was done. In fact, Gamow wrote a memoir titled My World Line [that I read since I originally published this piece], which totally finesses the whole drama in a way that makes his escape from the Soviet Union seem like farce.

Gamow and his wife, Rho, were so desperate to leave the Soviet Union that, in the summer of 1932, they attempted to row in a kayak across the Black Sea to Turkey, but were beached by a violent storm. They also inspected the Finnish border in Karelia to see where they might cross. Despite these escapades, Gamow, on receiving an invitation to attend the October 1933 Solvay International Congress on Physics in Brussels, applied for a visa for Rho and himself. Through Bukharin, he arranged an unlikely interview with Molotov, then President of the USSR, to make his case. Gamow tells the story thus: “Here I told him the truth, nothing but the truth, but not the whole truth. ‘You see’, I said, ‘to make my request persuasive I should tell you that my wife, being a physicist, acts as my scientific secretary, taking care of papers, notes, and so on. So I cannot attend a large conference without her help. But this is not true. The point is that she had never been abroad, and after Brussels I want to take her to Paris to see the Louvre, the Folies Bergère, and so forth, and to do some shopping.’ He smiled, made a note on his pad, and told me to come back a week or so before I would leave, adding, ‘I don’t think this will be difficult to arrange.’”

To imagine that the gloomy and unhumorous Molotov would find such an explanation engaging is high comedy. In fact Gamow did experience difficulties getting his passports, and they arrived shortly before he was due to leave. He disingenuously observed, nearly forty years later: “Thinking back now, I still cannot figure out how it happened that I got the second passport. It seems likely that the wires had crossed somewhere.” It looks very much as if Sudoplatov was right, and the condition of his going was committing to a mission to steal Western nuclear secrets. As Gamow writes elsewhere (p 93): “It became a crime for Russian scientists to ‘fraternize’ with scientists of the capitalist countries, and those Russian scientists who were going abroad were supposed to learn the ‘secrets’ of capitalistic science without revealing the ‘secrets’ of proletarian science.” Gamow never went back to the Soviet Union, yet claimed that he was able to maintain good relations with Soviet consulate personnel in Washington. On page 131, he writes: “In fact, during that winter [of 1934], Rho and I kept up contact with the consulate, and even went to movies with some of its members, criticizing the Hollywood productions. The case of Kapitza only strengthened my decision not to return to Leningrad.” If Gamow really had absconded without permission, it would gave been utterly foolhardy for him to present himself at the Soviet consulate.

(Another interesting tidbit is that Gamow presents a fetching photograph (p 49) of a very alluring young lady sprawled on his lap in a ‘private room at a restaurant’ in Leningrad, with his good friend Lev Landau – who won the Nobel prize in 1962 ̶ acting as ‘the hired musician’. The lady is Yevgenia Kannegiesser, who was to become Rudolf Peierls’s wife: Landau was a close friend of Peierls as well. Gamow coolly notes that Yevgenia ‘eventually married a German theoretical physicist, Rudolf Peierls, and left Russia’, as if he really didn’t know Peierls at all, which is not how Peierls represented their relationship. Gamow is a phoney.)

While Sudoplatov may not be normally be considered a wholly reliable source, it would appear that he was probably accurate in this case, and we could conclude from Gamow’s own clumsy testimony that he had a justification for being mentally tormented. What does Mann therefore say about him? Well, he admits he knew him. On page 70 of his memoir, he writes: “During this latter period of my stay in Washington [1950] we became very friendly with Professor George Gamow and his wife Rho, and I attended one semester of his course of lectures on nuclear physics at George Washington University, which helped me to keep in touch with my fast-fading profession.” All well and good. But Mann also adds something about the caricature incident. Describing a party hosted by Mann himself, on November 25, 1950, he writes: “Guy Burgess gate-crashed the party on the excuse of bringing Kim’s secretary. It was the only time he entered our house but while he was there he got hold of a book by George Gamow entitled Atomic Energy (a subject on which he occasionally tried to sound me out!) and drew a caricature of one of the guests on the inside of the cover, and as psychologically interesting one of Stalin eating a marble table of the type one might find in a side-walk café in France.” All this sounds very bogus: the jokey aside, the deliberate indication that Burgess had never visited before (Lownie notes that Burgess was a close friend of Mann’s at the time, citing a colleague of Mann’s, Arnold Kramish, who encountered them together in Washington several times), Burgess’s ability to select the right book, Mann’s omission that the caricature described Gamow (even though he reproduces the text in his book, also). It surely sounds as if Burgess and Mann both knew Gamow, and that the relationship probably went back further than Mann claimed, i.e. that he was able to fit in a semester of lectures during this short time. Mann was probably recruited by Gamow.

Moreover, other things in Mann’s testimony do not ring true. One major problem I have is with his membership of the Technical Committee of the MAUD project on atomic weaponry (which was the name given to the activity before it was transferred from ICI to the government, and became the Tube Alloys project, late in 1941). Mann resigned almost as soon as the Committee was set up, in May 1941. He writes (p 20): “In the spring of 1941, under the strain of the hit-and-run raids, I began to feel dissatisfied with my work on the uranium project, and I went to discuss it with the Rector of Imperial College, Sir Henry Tizard. Sir Henry had been chairman of the Technical Sub-Committee of the Air Defence Research Committee since the mid-1930s and had, I understood, played a great part in pushing the development of the spitfire and of Robert Watson-Watt’s radio direction finding, each of which had stood us in good stead on the Battle of Britain. I told him that I could not believe that an atom bomb would be developed in time to win the war against Germany and I felt I ought to get into other work more directly concerned with the main objective. Sir Henry agreed and so I entered into negotiations with the Ministry of Supply in London while continuing to give my lectures at the Imperial College. I started work at the Ministry on 12 May, although the correspondence showed that the negotiations continued until 29 June in order to clarify whether or not my work at the Imperial College constituted ‘an outside interest’!”

Is this not extraordinary, that an eminent scientist should be allowed to run away from a project of such national importance, based on such a whimsical excuse, at a time when native British scientists were urgently needed on the project, especially when Mann was so closely involved with the key figures on the project, Rudolf Peierls, Basil Dickins and G. P. Thomson? Mann adds: “After 12 May, when I went to work at the Ministry of Supply, I had not, as far as I remember [always a sign of the selective memory at work. Coldspur], taken any part in the work of the MAUD Technical Committee, but I had apparently remained a member of it.” Yet on December 22, 1941, J T C Moore-Brabazon, of the Ministry of Aircraft Production, writes a letter to Mann, saying that the report of the MAUD Committee has been examined by the Defence Services Panel of the War Cabinet Advisory Committee. He appears to be thanking Mann for his efforts, writing: “Inasmuch as the completion of the examination of this project by your [sic] committee, and the acceptance, in the main, of your [sic] recommendations, move the whole matter to the stage where large scale experiment and possible production are now our principal concern, a new organisation has been set up on this basis, and I think the time has come to wind up the MAUD Committee. In doing so I would like to take this opportunity of thanking you for the tine and thought which every member must have devoted to this very difficult problem, in preparing, in such a short time, so clear and concise a summary of the whole question. Although the Committee are now disbanded I am sure that the new organisation under D.S.I.R. can rely upon your co-operation at any time when they may want your help or advice” (from Appendix A of Mann’s book). Moreover, Mann merits no entry in Margaret Gowing’s official history of Britain and Atomic Energy: he is simply listed as one of the Technical Committee in a footnote to page 48 of Volume 1.

This is all very strange. Why would Moore-Brabazon be thanking Mann so profusely if he had been an absentee and reluctant contributor? Why Mann would want to diminish his efforts and expertise is also puzzling, unless he wanted to give the impression ̶ as he carefully notes elsewhere ̶ that he was no longer active in atomic research: “Thus ended my association with nuclear physics until the end of the war . . . “. But this was obviously not so, as he was sent to Washington in the late summer of 1943, to serve in the British Central Scientific Office in Washington. This account, again, does not ring true, as he informed his boss at the Ministry of Supply that he was resigning before he even received the USA-based job offer. Maybe, like Burgess, he had friends in high places.

Nigel West’s Historical Dictionary of British Intelligence does not help much. It describes Mann’s career only from 1948 onwards, suggesting that he was approached by a Soviet diplomat in 1961, and that his subsequent meetings with that person were monitored by the F.B.I., but it says nothing about the earlier espionage activity, apart from referring to what Boyle wrote. West concludes his entry on Mann by writing: “Having successfully repudiated the allegations, Mann retired to Chevy Chase, Maryland, and later moved to Baltimore, where he died in March 2001. In 2003, documents retrieved from the KGB archive suggested that Mann may have been a Soviet spy codenamed MALLONE.”

Another hare left unchased. Will someone please haul Wilfrid Mann in?

The normal set of Commonplace entries can be found here, and a few more examples of the Hyperbolic Contrast here. (October 31, 2015)

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September 30, 2015 · 4:37 pm

Some Diplomatic Incidents

I was prompted to read a compilation of essays titled Telling Lives, edited by Alistair Horne, this month. It consists of biographical profiles by writers, all of whom have at one time held an Alistair Horne Fellowship at St Antony’s College. It is a lively collection, which provided sketches of some familiar characters, but also introduced me to a number of persons I knew very little about, from Carole Lombard to Bram Fischer.

Two items caught my eye especially. The first was written by D. R. Thorpe, in his essay on Alec Douglas-Home, and he provides commentary on the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. It runs as follows: “The mood of dazed anxiety in those weeks reminded some of the period leading up to Munich, though Home’s regular contacts with Sir Frank Roberts, the British Ambassador in Moscow, gave him insights into what the ordinary Russian people were thinking, which proved so different from those in Havana and London. When Kennedy’s ultimatum about the missiles were made public Frank Roberts told Alec Home that there was no sign of panic buying in Moscow and that people there were going about their business in an orderly manner. Roberts interpreted this correctly, as a sign that in the end Khrushchev would back off from full-scale nuclear confrontation.”

Could this be serious? ‘No signs of panic buying in Moscow’, when there was nothing to buy in the shops in the first place? ‘What ordinary people were thinking’, when they had no access to independent news, and were discouraged from thinking? I recalled my visit to Leningrad and Moscow a few years later, in 1965, when the citizens were so desperate for Western goods that I had a furtive night-time encounter with a youth my age, at which I exchanged a couple of nylon shirts and some Bic pens for some useless roubles that had to be spent before I left the country. So Soviet citizens went about their business ‘in an orderly manner’. What did Frank Roberts think would happen if those same good people went about in a disorderly manner? That the KGB’s goons would come up to them and say: ‘Move along there, sir, if you don’t mind’? I could not believe that our diplomatic intelligence was in the hands of such amateurs. Just as useful as reading the entrails of dead chickens, I should have thought.

And then, a few days later, I was reading the extraordinary memoir by Heda Margolius Kovály, Under A Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968. This is a searing account of a young Jewish woman who is arrested by the Nazis in Prague in 1941, and shipped off to a concentration camp, whence she manages to escape while all her relatives are killed. After harrowing and dangerous times back in Prague, when the war is over, she watches how the Communists stealthily seize power, and sees the obnoxious ideology bring out the worst in all citizens. Eventually, her husband, who worked as an economist for the government, is arrested, falsely accused, sentenced to death in the Slansky trials, and soon after executed. (I shall leave you to discover the full story.)

What hit me between the eyes were the following sentences, as Kovály describes the struggles of the Czech economy: “There were endless lines in front of stores. There were shortages of practically every household staple. Every few months, there were new rumors about an upcoming currency devaluation. People would panic, buying up everything they could find. The chaotic economy and the constant barrage of ideology drained all pleasure from honest work.” So there was ‘panic buying’ behind the Iron Curtain. But I still wonder whether Soviet citizens would have been informed enough by their masters to be able to detect how serious the missile crisis was, and that their leaders had a firm grasp on the tiller. And if they did ‘buy up all they could find’, and stuff it in those avoska bags, I bet it would have been useless things, like clothes-pins and miniature busts of Lenin, as opposed to the flashlight batteries and toilet-paper that their Western counterparts would have started hoarding.

The other anecdote concerned Sir Isaiah Berlin. In his Introduction, Alistair Horne gives a brief profile of a man whom I have followed very closely in the past three years, and writes as follows: “An honorary fellow at St. Antony’s, Isaiah was truly a Don for All Seasons; he could, and would, talk at any level whatsoever to make his interlocutor feel prized beyond belief. At a first meeting my wife expressed alarm at finding herself seated next to such an august academician at a St Antony’s dinner. I reassured her, ’Don’t worry, he’ll take charge!’ Looking up from my end of the table, I was relieved to see them in lively conversation with each other. When afterwards I asked what they’d talked about so busily and what Isaiah’s opening gambit had been, she said, ‘As we sat down, he said, “Tell me, my dear, did you have many lovers when you were young?”’ – then proceeded to talk about his own, in extenso.”

Now, again, I find this extremely unlikely. First, I think it very bad taste of Horne to relate this anecdote, even if it were true, as it shows appalling manners. Ladies and Gentlemen who have not been met before do not discuss their past sex lives (well, not in the environment that I grew up in – perhaps it is different with St Antony’s intellectuals.) I would expect Horne’s second wife (for it was she) to have been insulted by such a question, rather than feeling ‘prized beyond belief’. And I do not believe that Berlin, who had developed a canny knack for fitting into whatever milieu in England he found himself, whether playing cricket at St. Paul’s, or gossiping over the port at All Souls, would have been crass enough to make this an opening gambit in his dinner-time conversation. Moreover, evidence has it that Berlin’s sex-life developed quite late, so in extenso seems hardly the right phrase to use to describe it, unless the esteemed historian of ideas was fabricating somewhat. In his biography of Berlin, Michael Ignatieff reports on Berlin’s first sexual encounter with a woman (I shall have to leave the possibilities of what happened with Guy Burgess unexplored, although Berlin did complain, perhaps facetiously, that Burgess never made a pass at him), but leaves the lady in question unidentified. It took Nicola Lacey, in her 2004 biography of Herbert Hart, to confirm for all of us that the personage was none other than Herbert’s wife, Jenifer, the Soviet agent. Henry Hardy, who knew Berlin very well, tells me that this affair (which went on for several years, until Berlin married Aline Halban, née de Gunzbourg, an event that severely upset Mrs Hart) began in 1949, but that it was not certain who initiated it.

The affair with Aline Halban itself is an interesting tale. Berlin had first espied Aline Strauss (her husband had been killed) on the SS Excambion, sailing from Lisbon to New York, in January 1941. After the war, during which Aline had met and married Hans Halban in Canada, they came to England, where Halban succeeded in being elected to one of the initial fellowships at St Antony’s College. The College (for graduates only) had been founded in 1950 by a bequest from a successful French businessman with merchant interests in the Middle East, Antonin Besse. After some preliminary stumbles in negotiation between Besse and the University, Bill Deakin (married to the Rumanian Livia Stela, known as ‘Pussy’, so-called for her very feline grace, I am led to believe, who was the inspiration for Ian Fleming’s Pussy Galore) had taken over the Wardenship of the College, impressing Besse with his common sense and vision. Deakin, who had worked with Isaiah Berlin in Washington during the war, was a historian who had seen fierce action with SOE among the guerrillas in Yugoslavia, and had acted as literary assistant to Winston Churchill in the latter’s historical writing. While Deakin had been a fellow at Wadham College, many of the initial staff members were from New College, and Isaiah Berlin had been very active in advising the Warden on appointments and administration.

Halban was offered a Fellowship: when interviewed in 1994 by Christine Nicholls, the historian of the college, Berlin said that it was because Lord Cherwell had thought it a good idea that a scientist be represented – a somewhat surprising explanation, given that the mission of St Antony’s was to improve international understanding, and diplomacy had not been the strongest arrow in Halban’s sleeve. Maybe the fact that the elegant Mrs Halban would be able to join in social events was an extra incentive. Indeed, Headington House had its uses. As Nicholls’s History of St Antony’s College reports: “The grandest social event of all was the ox-roasting. In 1953, at the time of the Queen’s coronation, an Anglo-Danish committee, on which Deakin sat with a Danish chairman, wanted to do something to thank Britain for its help in wartime. The chairman asked Deakin whether his college would like to roast a Danish ox ….. Hans Halban and his wife Aline, who had a large house with land on Headington Hill, agreed to the roasting taking place there.”

The choice of Fellows was a little eccentric. A certain David Footman was elected at the same time as Halban. His expertise lay in the Balkans and the Soviet Union, but he had been dismissed from the Secret Service because of his support for Guy Burgess. Intriguingly, Deakin, who enjoyed fraternizing with Secret Service personnel, had said he wanted a Soviet expert who was free of any commitment to Marxism, and therefore welcomed Footman to the college. But there were questions about Footman’s loyalty: the Foreign Office did not give him a clean bill of health, and Sir Dick White (who headed both MI5 and MI6 in his career) admitted he should have been more sceptical about his trustworthiness. Footman had had contacts with the Soviet spy-handler Maly, and, when Guy Burgess defected, Footman was the first to be notified of the event by that dubious character Goronwy Rees, close confidant of Burgess; Footman in turn informed Guy Liddell – Victor Rothschild’s boss in MI5.

Thus the first appointments at St Antony’s were very much made by an old-boy network, about which Berlin must have eventually had misgivings. As early as 1953, he was to write to David Cecil, when looking for advice on career moves: ‘In a way I should prefer Nuffield because St Antony’s seems to me (for God’s sake don’t tell anyone that) something like a club of dear friends, and I should be terribly afraid that the thing was becoming too cosy and too bogus.’ His words got back to the sub-warden at St Antony’s, James Joll, who had also lectured at New College and had been a pupil of Deakin, and Berlin was duly chastised. (James Joll was later to receive a certain amount of notoriety by virtue of his harbouring Anthony Blunt when the latter was being hounded by the Press after his public unmasking.) In any case, the chroniclers at the college did not seem surprised when the Halban marriage fell apart. Aline’s son Michel Strauss confides that his mother used to have trysts with Isaiah, before their liaison became official, in a flat in Cricklewood (a touch that would have delighted Alan Coren). Michel also informs us that Hans Halban had been seeing Francine Clore (née Halphern), a cousin of his mother’s, in the 1950s, ‘at the same time my mother was seeing Isaiah Berlin’. The gradual dissolution of the marriage, and the new re-groupings, were becoming obvious to their friends. The History laconically reports: “Halban remained at St Antony’s until he resigned on October 1, 1955, upon taking a chair at the Sorbonne. When Halban resigned his fellowship and left for Paris, he asked his wife to choose between Paris and Berlin. She determined on the latter and became Isaiah Berlin’s wife.” The marriage was a very happy one.

But they were a pretty rum lot, after all, these St Antonians. I expected to see Freddie Ayer in the wings – and Iris Murdoch taking notes.

As an epigram to Berlin in this whole affair, I conclude with the following lines (with apologies to Philip Larkin):

Sexual intercourse began

In nineteen forty-nine

(through no clear fault of mine) –

Between the release of Welles’ ‘Third Man’

And the launch of ‘What’s My Line’.

The usual set of Commonplace entries to be found here. (September 30, 2015)

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August 31, 2015 · 10:33 am

The Undercover Egghead

The September issue of History Today contains my article on Isaiah Berlin, titled ‘The Undercover Egghead’. (see http://www.historytoday.com/antony-percy/isaiah-berlin-undercover-egghead ) Regular readers will recall that this was the subject of a seminar I led at Buckingham University almost two years ago, and that I had been struggling with the editor of the magazine to get it published after a premature announcement he made last September. Under the terms of my copyright agreement with the magazine, I am allowed to post it the piece on my personal website, but the software I use to maintain my website sadly does not permit the importation of documents of this size. Readers who are interested, but are unable to find a copy of the magazine, can contact me at antonypercy@aol.com for the PDF.

I am pleased with the outcome. I like the artwork. A few errors crept in (for instance, the dating of the photograph of Berlin: he died in 1997), but nothing else significant, I think. I would update the text a little if I re-wrote it now, as I have discovered new facts about my subject, but I did not want to provoke any further delays, and my latest findings will find their place in my thesis, to be completed shortly.

I shall be very interested in the response. Already, I have heard of fascination by Berlin-watchers who had suspected something was not quite right with the great man, but hadn’t been able to put a complete picture together. Maybe the picture will never be complete, but I think my research shows that a more comprehensive biography of Berlin is required, something more piercing and more analytical than Michael Ignatieff’s homage of 1998.

I want to express here my thanks to Henry Hardy, Berlin’s chief editor, amanuensis and curator of the Berlin flame (see http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/ ). While not always understanding my methods, and sometimes being out of sympathy with what he calls my ‘conspiracy-mongering’ approach, Henry has always been extraordinarily helpful in responding to my inquiries, and has graciously allowed me access to some texts that have not been published. It may be a fortunate coincidence that the fourth and final volume of Berlin’s Letters is being published next month: I hope that the publicity surrounding that event, and the appearance of my piece, is mutually beneficial. Henry invited me to the launch party for the volume, but I could not justify the trans-Atlantic journey.

Berlin’s stature as a dignified spokesperson for personal liberties must remain questionable, and I believe the research process will continue, as new observers and historians add their own perspectives, and offer the fruits of their research. Was Berlin an ‘agent of influence’ for the Soviets? My conclusion is that he was probably persuaded, through the threat of harm to his relatives in the Soviet Union, into providing some information to them, but I can’t help concluding that his encouragement of the respectability of Marxist study, as revealed in his 1939 book on Marx, was his own endeavour, although probably encouraged by his friend Guy Burgess. I leave the rest for my thesis.

Meanwhile, a renowned Sovietologist died this month – Robert Conquest. (A few years ago, after reading a couple of his works – ‘Reflections on a Ravaged Century’, and ‘the Dragons of Expectation’ ̶ I wrote a long letter to him in Palo Alto, posing some questions that arose from my reading, since I was about to set out to that area to visit our son. I hoped to meet him, and shake his hand. He did reply, but did not answer my questions, and said he was too busy to see me.) What caught my eye from the obituaries of this great man – who educated the western world about Stalin’s crimes in books such as The Great Terror ̶ was the fact that he had been for a short time a member of the Communist Party. Now part of the research for my doctoral thesis has involved the analysis of why British Intelligence was not able to detect Soviet spies in its midst, even with the help of hints of identification from the Soviet defector, Walter Krivitsky. Since Moscow was very particular about the commitment of its spies – and their couriers as well ̶ candidates would have had to show a fierce dedication to Communist principles and rigour before they were recruited. But this did not have to involve membership of the Communist Party: in fact it was preferable if the agents were never associated with the CP, as it made them less traceable. It is nevertheless a fact that each agent must have undergone a period when he (or she) demonstrated openly strong leftist sympathies – Blunt, Burgess, Philby, Cairncross, Maclean, Long, etc. etc. ̶ before their recruitment was approved by Moscow Centre. They all had such a phase, mainly in Cambridge University clubs, Maclean even confessing to his selection board for a diplomatic career, in a bold moment of semi-candour, that he had not completely shed such beliefs. On the other hand, Jenifer Hart was a secret member of the Party. Yet MI5 had enough to go on to vet all these people.

So what about those who did join the CP, if only for a short time? Denis Healey (b. 1917, still going strong) was one notorious example who lasted a lot longer. He joined in 1937, but stayed there for a few years, seeing out the Nazi-Soviet pact, and not resigning until after the fall of France in 1940 (why then, o beetle-browed one?). He was still rambling on about ‘revolution’ after the war, yet turned out to be a respectable middle-of-the-road politician. (My professor has hinted to me that Healey was actually employed by MI6 all this time, which might just be plausible, I suppose, although the cover seems to have been taken a bit too far.) Was Robert Conquest’s flirtation just a youthful fling, after which he became disillusioned? But then he was recruited by MI6, and went to Bulgaria. How did they know it was just a fling? Or had he joined the CP with MI6 guidance? That would appear unlikely, as his cover would then have been blown for any undercover intelligence operation overseas. It all just shows what a careful methodology has to be applied by counter-intelligence officers trying to determine a suspect’s true beliefs and motivations. I wish I had had the chance to question Dr Conquest about it all before he died.

The usual set of Commonplace items can be found here. (August 31, 2015)

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July 31, 2015 · 12:42 pm

Magna Carta and Pluralism

“Magna Carta has everything going for it to be venerated in the United States. It is old, it is English, and, because no one has actually read the text, it is easy to invoke for current needs.” (Tom Ginsburg, in NYT, June 15)

Regular readers will recall my old Oxford pal (indeed the only Oxford pal with whom I stay in regular contact), Derek Taylor. Whenever I am in the UK, I try to look him up at the Old Stables in Stow-on-the-Wold, although, if he hears I am coming over, he does sometimes abscond sharply to his retreat in Spain. Derek has now published a second book, titled ‘Magna Carta in Twenty Places’, which appeared in the UK in time for the octingentenary, and in the USA at the beginning of July.

If history is arguably all about sex, power, wealth and religion, I would assert that we pupils got short shrift in 1950s Britain. Sex was obviously a taboo subject, and religion was only slightly less shy-making, as I suspect the masters were probably a bit embarrassed about all the absurd Catholic-Protestant clashes that endured through the centuries. Moreover, they had to be sensitive to the fact that the religion of their charges could have been all over the map, even though Whitgift School had been founded by an Archbishop of Canterbury, and – quite correctly – such beliefs should have remained a private affair. (I remain amazed, however, that so many obviously smart and educated persons, encouraging their pupils to think inquiringly, should have accepted all the superstitions and mumbo-jumbo of religion so unquestioningly.) Thus my recollection of History was a set of dreary topics that did not string together, with major wars interspersed with boring descriptions of devices that peasants used to till the land. ‘One damn thing after another’, as Arnold Toynbee said of history, but I always wanted to know how things had arrived at where the current textbook started off, and what motivated all the agents in the drama. No wonder my mind wandered, wondering whether the rain would interfere with cricket practice.

Derek obviously had a great teacher, and, what’s more, unlike me, he paid attention. He dedicates his work to Stan Revill, who must have been a marvellous man to learn from. Derek brings the evolution of the Magna Carta alive by visiting twenty places, from The Wash to Washington, D.C., from Acre to Angoulême, that either affected its creation, or were influenced by its reality – and myth. He starts off in fine and typical style with a wonderful inspection of Ernest Normand’s iconic depiction of the scene at Runnymede, which ‘represents the classic myth of “bad” King John, the “upright” barons, and Magna Carta as the “birth of democracy”. He has a deep knowledge of the time, and the leading actors, and brings a journalist’s keen eye for today’s physical world to bridge the realities of life eight hundred years ago with the often forgetful world of the 21^st century, equally dissonant in so many ways, but in a very different manner.

Magna Carta had been mythologised, and misunderstood, according to Derek, but he reminds us that it does represent the rule of law, and the assertion that even despots should be subject to it. It’s a strong lesson to citizens of the UK and the USA in particular that we should be grateful that we have term limits, and impeachment processes, and regular elections that give us a chance ‘to throw the current lot out’, as opposed to so many other countries around the globe. (Isn’t that what President Obama has been saying this week in Africa? Although his address to the ‘Muslim World’ a couple of years ago made the same Cameronian mistake, as Western pluralism should be inclusive of Muslims, like anyone else.) I am not competent to judge Derek’s historical analysis: from my reading of the July 2015 issue of History Today, a special edition on the Magna Carta, I would say his opinion of King John is a little more indulgent than that of Sean McGlynn’s, while his textual analysis is more incisive. Derek’s version of America’s adoption of the Carta’s symbolic value is close to Alexander Lock’s interpretation. But Derek’s narrative is much livelier. (A third piece in the magazine, by Graham Seel, head of history at St. Paul’s School, explores a canvas by Charles Sims of King John at Runnymede that hangs in St. Stephen’s Hall. Derek does not mention this work, but it provides a fascinating contrast to Normand’s more familiar and romantic creation. It would be an absorbing exercise to compare the two.)

Derek writes with tremendous verve, and has a fine ear for well-balanced sentences. He has been slightly let down by his publisher, who sadly did not ensure that the legend on his map corresponds to the chapter titles identifying the places, and I would have liked to see a bibliography. No doubt these issues will be addressed in the forthcoming paperback edition. (Every reviewer has to find at least one quibble.) Never mind. Derek’s is a fine accomplishment. His book is a wonderfully entertaining account for anybody – especially those whose impression of the Charter may have been coloured by romanticised schoolboy lessons or by pious hyperbole from politicians. Please take a look at http://www.derekjtaylorbooks.com/ and order your copy.

I have been taking a particular interest in Britain’s form of liberal democracy recently, as part of my doctoral thesis addresses the question of why it was not strong enough in the 1930s to provide a coherent and vigorous philosophical antidote to the twin horrors of totalitarian Fascism and Communism. (For the time being, I shall leave my analysis for the thesis.) Thus I was intrigued by David Cameron’s recent pronouncements about promoting ‘British values’ in the face of Muslim extremism. I can’t help feeling that Cameron is still caught up in all the misguided multi-cultural jargon of the Jenkinsite 1970s, what with his references to the ‘Muslim community’ and ‘Muslim leaders’. For the essence of a modern pluralist society is that we should not compartmentalize – and thus stereotype ̶ large groups of individuals into separate ‘communities’ , nor should we look for self-appointed ‘leaders’ to represent their interests. I am an atheist, but I am not a member of the ‘atheist community’ [I think you mean the ‘AHAA community’, namely Atheists, Heretics, Apostates and Agnostics. Ed.], and I do not look to ‘atheist leaders’ to represent my interests. I have an MP, or a senator, or a representative to do that for me, and I know he or she will not share all my beliefs, but it is his or her job to speak for all his or her constituents. And what about those members of a ‘community’ who ‘intermarry’, or reject the faith they were brought up in? They will feel marginalized and lost. Moreover, is it not true that some of those ‘leaders’ are the ones responsible for the mayhem, as the government of Tunisia is finding as it tries to clean up the mosques of radical influences?

I also noticed that an imam from Leeds told the BBC that he found Cameron’s speech redolent of ‘us versus them’ thinking, and I believe he is right, in that respect, at least. Religious beliefs should be a private affair: the secular laws of the land should apply to everyone (no tolerance of local shariah law, or Jewish courts, or Christian prayers at civil events, for example) and we should recognize the fast-growing trend of an increasing proportion of the population (in the UK and in the USA) defining themselves as religious non-believers, as well as more and more citizens who are offspring of so-called ‘mixed marriages’ (a term I deplore). Such persons are left out of these dim and depressing artificial sociological categories. Cameron needs some fresh advisors, and some fresh advice. Dismantle the Ministry for Communities! Stop stereotyping! Don’t listen to self-appointed ‘Leaders’! Respect Individual Rights, not Group Rights! Coldspur has Spoken!

The normal set of Commonplace items are available for inspection here. (July 31, 2015)

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June 30, 2015 · 5:34 pm

Surveying Lake Tahoe

Several weeks ago, the New York Times published a travel piece about Lake Tahoe, that body of water that straddles the California-Nevada border. The article included an astonishing claim – that the lake contained enough water to cover the whole drought-ridden state of California to a depth of fifteen feet. At the time, I found it hard to believe, but was too busy to perform the research and calculations that would verify or refute this assertion. So I was not surprised when, a couple of weeks ago, the paper issued a correction that stated that the lake would cover the state to a level of fifteen inches, not feet.

Is this still credible? After all, Lake Tahoe is the size of a small English county, 191 square miles, something between Rutland and the Isle of Anglesey. California is almost 164,000 square miles, almost double the area of Great Britain. Lake Tahoe must be very deep, right? Well, its average depth is given as 1000 feet (its maximum being 1644 feet), offering it a volume of 36 cubic miles (1000/5280 *191). The multiple of California’s area over Tahoe’s is 858.6 (164,000/191). Spreading Tahoe’s water over the area of California gives 1.164 feet (1000/858.6), or about fourteen inches. So the revised claim is fairly accurate.

So I got to thinking about other freshwater lakes. The largest in North America, Lake Superior, is 31,700 square miles in area, not as deep as Tahoe, but still providing 2903 cubic miles in volume. The greatest in the world in volume is Siberia’s Lake Baikal, which, while only 12,248 square miles in area (one and a half times the area of Wales) contains 5700 cubic miles of water, as its average depth is 2500 feet, with the deepest section reaching over a mile (5387 feet), well above the highest mountain in Britain, Ben Nevis. Thus, if the 15-inch claim is correct, the water in Baikal could cover the whole of California to a depth of 200 feet (5700/36 x 1.25). Perhaps President Putin could spare some for those long-suffering Californians? (While in California, one of the books I read was Ian Frazier’s Travels in Siberia. Frazier quotes Dr. Sergei V. Shibaev, director of the Siberian Geophysical Survey at the Russian Academy of Sciences, in downtown Yakutsk, as saying: ‘But all other rivers in Yakutia are extremely pure, with reserves of water for all mankind. There is a deficiency of freshwater on the planet, as is known. We in Yakutia have freshwater here.’)

I thought I should check out Lake Tahoe. As it happened, we travelled to San Jose, California, in June, to visit our son and his family, now consisting of five – wife Lien, Ashley, now three years and eight months, whom regular readers will recall from ‘An American Odyssey’, and the twins, Alexis and Alyssa, whose second birthday we celebrated while we there there. We broke our visit to spend a few days in South Lake Tahoe, a drive of about four hours away from San Jose, and ascended the gondola (a ski-lift in winter) to a height of about 9000 feet, where I was able to take the pictures below. Yes, you could easily fit Rutland into the lake – including Rutland Water, Europe’s largest man-made lake when it was constructed in 1971 – and, with a highpoint of 646 feet, the county would easily be submerged in Lake Tahoe. Truly multum in parvo, as Rutland’s motto goes.

Lake Tahoe, looking North towards Nevada

Looking West towards San Francisco

Julia and I at Lake Tahoe

Meanwhile, Ashley and the twins gave us great pleasure: we hadn’t seen them for eighteen months. After some initial shyness, they took to us very well. It is astonishing to me that Lady Ashley, at that age, could be so facile with an iPad and iPhone. I do not believe such skills are ‘in her blood’ or ‘in her DNA’, as that would mean a magical transfer of genetic material some time between the birthdates of her four grandparents and her arrival on the scene, but she has taken to them with complete confidence. (Her father’s working for Apple, and her mother’s aptitude in the same area, may have something to do with it.) However, I was able to introduce her to some new gadgets – a ‘non-scrollable, foldable, combustible information delivery vehicle’ (commonly known as a ’newspaper’), as well as a ‘single-function photographic device’ (a ‘camera’). Ashley was intrigued by both items, as she had clearly not seen either of them before. I present a few photographs of our visit.

James, Lien, and the girls at the twins’ 2nd birthday party

My three grand-daughters and I

The girls overpowering their father.

Sylvia and I at Father’s Day Dinner at Morton’s

A few new Commonplace entries for the month, to be found here. June 30, 2015

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May 31, 2015 · 6:29 am

Remembering Mr. Popper

In the early 1950s, Mr. Popper travelled each day from Hampstead in North London to Coulsdon, Surrey, where he taught arithmetic at St. Anne’s Preparatory School. I was a pupil of his, and enjoyed the kindly way that he encouraged us to develop facility in the rapid manipulation of numbers. I was only about seven or eight at the time, and did not understand why Mr. Popper spoke with a thick accent. On one occasion, however, my parents invited him and his wife to come to supper: they were always welcoming to new members of staff, and my father (a schoolmaster himself) in particular had an interest in the backgrounds of everybody. I do not now recall whether I witnessed the event myself, or whether my parents told me about it afterwards, but Mr. Popper was so overcome by the occasion that he burst into tears.

My father must have explained that Mr. and Mrs. Popper were Jews, and had suffered so much, that the tranquility of suburban life in 1950s England, compared with what they had lost back in Austria (or was it Czechoslovakia?), and the relatives who had disappeared in the Holocaust, must have suddenly made him distraught. This was the first time I had heard about Jews, and gained some understanding of what happened to them under Hitler. My father did not explain things naturally: as an only child himself, I believe he thought that my brother, sister, and I should discover things ourselves. I remember that he bought me a stamp album, and an envelope full of stamps to be sorted and inserted. There was just one page in the album titled ‘Germany’, and I recall being confused about all the different manifestations of stamps from that country – the German Democratic Republic, the Federal Republic of Germany, the stamps with Hitler on them (denoting the Third Reich), and some even earlier, featuring a heavily whiskered gentleman. How could I sort these out? I did not venture to ask my father, and he did not want to volunteer the information. It was not until some time after, when I discovered a Stanley Gibbons catalogue in the public library, that I understood there were several different countries involved, and I could bring some order to the collection.

I did not think of Jews as a separate group of people then, and have rarely thought so since. Most of the boys at school were somewhat menacing (and the rest probably rather weird), and one treated all of them with suspicion. So long as one avoided the bullies, or those who ridiculed you excessively, you didn’t think twice about where they came from, or what their religion was, or how odd their names were. They were just boys. And people like my parents did not mix much: in the corner of our street were various neighbours with whom they did not socialize: not the Ks, as they were Catholics, or the Ws, since Mr. W worked in advertising, and was not a professional; not the Ls, who came from the North, and were thus provincial; nor the Hs, who lived next door, but turned their noses up at us, as their house was somewhat grander, and they moved in better circles. Thus we mixed solely with my father’s and mother’s old school friends and their offspring, and a few scattered relatives (not many of those either.) Above all, we were cautioned never to mix with anybody who was ‘common’, which might mean poor pronunciation and vulgar talk, inappropriate dress, as well as nasty habits like chewing gum, or reading the Beano or the Dandy, or even getting interested in soccer rather than rugby football. We knew where we belonged. Strange as it may seem, that was how life was in 1950s England – strictly compartmentalized in a fashion that Orwell so neatly described. Yet my parents were very hospitable to Mr. and Mrs. Popper.

I thought of Mr. Popper when recently reading Madeleine Albright’s moving memoir about her roots in Czechoslovakia, Prague Winter, where on the one hand, all the Wilsonian nonsense about self-determination of nations, and, on the other, Hitler’s odious racial theories, came to a head. What on earth was the definition of a Jew at that time? As Albright writes: “According to the laws of the republic, Jews had the right, but not the obligation, to declare Jewish nationality. Roughly one half did, while the remainder identified themselves as Czechoslovak, German, Hungarian, Polish, or other. Although the Jewish population made up less than 1 percent of the country, it accounted for more than a third of capital investment and 10 percent of students at university. It was hardly a monolithic group; the rate of marriage outside the faith was the highest in Central Europe, and there were constant debates about worship obligations, ethics, language, social customs, dietary restrictions, and politics. With Hitler next door, many Jews with relatives living elsewhere used those contacts to emigrate. Several thousand moved to Palestine. Still others sought, often in vain, to obtain visas for travel to the West. Thinking to improve their chances of obtaining passage, some converted to Christianity or obtained forged certificates of baptism – which were readily available from the growing (and ecumenical) anti-fascist underground.”

This confusion is echoed in a message sent by the British ambassador in Prague to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, on February 15, 1939: “I was informed that there is a difference of opinion between German and Czecho-Slovak Governments on the interpretation of expression ‘person of non-German Volkszugehörigkeit’ [translated here as ‘race-participation’] in article 3 of optional [sic] Agreement insofar as it applies to Sudeten Jews. Germans contend that it applies to Jews of every description. Czechs contend that it applies only to those Jews whose mother-tongue is Czech, in other words that the majority of Sudeten Jews, whose mother tongue is German, are not entitled to opt for Czecho-Slovakia. The matter is to be referred to mixed commission provided for in article 13 of Agreement. I have thought it well to bring foregoing to you though the point is perhaps academic as even if Sudeten German Jews are allowed to opt they will be threatened with losing their citizenship under decree No. 15 – see my dispatch No 54.”

It is difficult for a reasonably enlightened citizen of a pluralist democracy in 2015 to imagine that politicians seventy-five years ago seriously thought about, and discussed, people in this manner. But they did. And some still do: the New York Times (echoing the absurd U.S. Census Bureau) can think of people solely in terms of pseudo-racial categories. Moreover, in the past couple of weeks, I have read the obituaries of three persons in the New York Times who touched this Jewish question: Peter Gay (the historian), Elisabeth Bing (the childbirth expert), and Anne Meara (the comic actress). The families of both Gay and Bing, growing up in Germany, did not realize they were Jewish until Hitler declared them so. Anne Meara was born a Catholic, but converted to Judaism a few years after marrying her Jewish husband, Jerry Stiller. I also recall Victor Rothschild, an agnostic, requiring his fiancée, Barbara Hutchinson, to convert to Judaism in order to please his own grandmother, as Jewishness is carried only matrilineally, and Grandma would have died on the spot if she thought her grandson was marrying outside the faith. What nonsense!

That is why the terms ’Jew’, ‘Gentile’, ‘Semite’, ‘co-religionist’ all have no meaning for me. I suspect I have ‘Jewish’ ancestors somewhere, but who cares? To confirm this point, Albright concludes her study of Nazi and Communist oppression of Czechoslovakia with some words from the great Jan Masaryk, half-American son of the country’s founder and someone far too level-headed to be a successful politician. They were addressed to his companion, Marcia Davenport, in 1947:

“You’re no more full-blooded what you think you are than I am. I must be Jewish somewhere, though the presentable story doesn’t say so. And you? How the hell do you know who you are?

I don’t.

And neither does anyone else who comes as far back as he can tell, from the parts of Europe that were the battlegrounds of the Napoleonic years. You think you have no Czech ancestry. You’re wrong. Some forefather of yours came through there as a conscript in the Russian armies, and if he didn’t leave a souvenir on some local slečna, then it was the other way round and some Czech in the Austrian army had a bit of fun with some pretty girl in Galicia whom they married off to your great-grandfather. You’re like everybody else whose people fled to America in the eighties and nineties – all the villages and synagogues with the family records were burnt up in the pogroms. Nobody knows anything . . . As for the nobility with . . . their thousand-year genealogies, there you get into the fun-and-games department . . My father was the son of a Slovak coachman and a Moravian housemaid, who were serfs. I can’t prove what the blood of their parents was and neither can anyone else.”

How right Masaryk was! Sadly, the great humanist met his reward the following year by being defenestrated by Stalin’s creatures, in one of their shabby attempts to stage-manage a suicide. The reasonableness of him and his kind could not avert the horrors of Hitler or Stalin. We all too loosely use the term ‘inhumanity’ to describe behaviours that are plainly human in origin. The pain and suffering of Mr. Popper and his relatives were indeed very real, and I dedicate this piece to their memory.

(As I was completing this piece, I read a searing and very positive review of Nikolaus Wachsmann’s history of the Nazi concentration camps, KL, in the Times Literary Supplement of May 22. Jane Caplan writes: “Behind the numbing totals that are the stock-in-trade of Nazi history lie the individuals whose suffering is incapable of calculation.” Indeed.)

A small set of Commonplace entries for the month can be found here. (May 31, 2015)

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April 30, 2015 · 3:49 pm

Richie Benaud – My Part In His Success

“So. Farewell

Then Richie Benaud,

Unbeaten Australian

Captain and much-loved

TV commentator.

Dust to

Dust. Ashes to

Ashes.”

So began E. J. Thribb’s moving eulogy to Richie Benaud in Private Eye. I was saddened to read of the death of that most urbane and modest of cricket commentators, who seemed to be a permanent part of ‘Test Match Special’ each time I returned to the UK. It was forty years ago this summer that I had the pleasure of meeting and chatting to the great man, at an occasion which may have been forgotten by all other participants, if any of them are still around. It was an event that deserves a mention in the archives of the Summer Game.

My fellow slow-bowler in the Old Whitgiftians Cricket Eleven, Bob Horn, had invited me to substitute for him in a team of ‘Cricketer Cup’ players designated to play a team of Internationals. (The Cricketer Cup was sponsored by the Cricketer magazine, and was a knock-out tournament between independent schools that was played each year.) Believe it or not, this match had been arranged to celebrate the millennium of the Little Missenden Parish Church, in Buckinghamshire (all very Wodehousian). Why this particular church deserved such recognition, I have no idea, but Wikipedia confirms that the Saxon foundations of the establishment were shown to have been laid in AD 975, which confirms that the match must have been played in the summer of 1975. Now Bob Horn had an excellent pedigree: he was in Holy Orders, editor of the Church Times, an Oxford man, who played frequently for Surrey IIs. And I? Well, I was a complete unknown quantity, having, after an undistinguished cricket career at Whitgift School, and then blossoming somewhat at Christ Church, Oxford, made my way up from the Old Whitgiftian Fourth XI to a regular place in the First XI. But Bob must have had confidence in me to recommend to E. W. (‘Jim’) Swanton of the Daily Telegraph, the non-playing captain of the Cricketer Cup team, that I would be a worthy substitute for him. I did have to telephone Jim – at his house in Broadstairs, I recall – to gain his approval, and receive instructions as to how to proceed to the game.

Now description of such events could rapidly fall into Tinniswoodian farce. (‘What possible interest can it be to know that E. W. Swanton wears maroon corduroy underpants and has in his study the complete collection of the records of Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas?’ – Tales From A Long Room, p 76) But Mr Swanton was kind and inviting (though I did hear ‘Do You Want To Know A Secret?’ playing softly in the background), and put my mind at ease about the challenge ahead. Thus, a couple of weeks later, on a beautiful June day, I took a day off work, and drove up to Amersham to check out the cricket ground early. There was no one around, so I parked my 1969 Hillman Imp carefully behind a large oak-tree, and waited for everyone to arrive. When they did, everyone seemed to know everyone else – except me. There were Lords with their Ladies, and distinguished cricketers, including the Test Players Tony Lewis and Richie Benaud. I swore I espied Lord Lundy in the background: he must surely have returned from ‘governing New South Wales’, and had no doubt encountered Richie Benaud there, and plucked him out of obscurity. I suspect some of the aristocrats had never consorted with anyone in trade before, but no one asked me what I did (or even spoke to me for a while, as far as I recall), and admitting that, for a living, I administered databases in Wigmore Street would probably not have been a good conversation-starter.

I don’t recall much about the match, except that the Cricketer team batted first, and did not do very well. I went in Number 9, and notched up a few runs, but the highlight of my innings was playing a maiden over from Benaud. Benaud was fresh from his triumph at Old Trafford just fourteen years earlier, where a remarkable spell of 6-70 (including the bowling of my Old Whitgiftian captain at that time, Raman Subba Row, for 49) won the Ashes for Australia [see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOLY6k1vq3A] . He threw everything he could at me – leg-breaks, flippers, googlies, doosras, and one or two other concoctions I could not name, all in the space of six balls, yet could not dismiss me, as I refrained from trying to hoick him over mid-wicket, and kept my castle clean. I don’t think he was ever the same again, and soon abandoned the playing of the game to concentrate on his career in broadcasting.

Before lunch the great Jim (cryptonym ‘Gloria’) Swanton had addressed us in the changing-room: ‘We’ll wear our blazers, shall we?’, assuming that each would have brought his I Zingari or Free Foresters tribal uniform with him. Of course, I had no blazer, and that made me stand out as well. Anyway, I did get a bowl later, and Peter Marson (then one of the cricket reporters on the Daily Telegraph) turned down an absolutely cast-iron LBW appeal by me and the wicket-keeper, and the All-Stars won by about eight wickets. Afterwards, we listened to many highly amusing anecdotes about M.C.C. tours from Tony Lewis, while Benaud was the sole celebrity who chatted to me. We discussed bowling (I suggested that he was too square-on, and should raise his left shoulder a bit), and sundry other matters, including, if I remember correctly, Clive James’s use of metaphor and allegory. A charming man. I leave the final words for Peter Tinniswood, from The Brigadier Down Under, pp 12-13:

“Dear, dear Richie.

What a welcome he gave me when I left intelligence in his dinky little pigeon hole that I was staying at the same hotel as he.

He has literally showered me with courtesies and considerations.

I must be the only man privileged to have seen him ‘at his toilet’ as he bathes himself in asses’ milk and sprinkles his exquisite body with that rarest of rare perfumes, Essence of Sproat.

He showed me also his superb and dazzling wardrobe, which is under the personal and constant supervision of the Keeper of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Dame Zandra Rhodes, second son of the immortal Wilfred.

But the highest honour of all was when he allowed me to attend the midnight devotions of Australian cricketers round the hotel consecrated barbecue.

Words cannot describe the ecstacy [sic] that overcame me as I listened to the ravishing plainsong of Rodney Marsh and the stirring tones of that finest of all evangelical preachers, the Rev. Dennis Lillee, as he launched into his celebrated sermon.

‘Take heed, all ye unbelievers . . . . “ [We regret that we have to cut this extract short, as this is a family-oriented blog. Chief Webmaster, Coldspur Enterprises.]

The normal set of Commonplace entries added for the month. (April 30, 2015)

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March 31, 2015 · 11:37 am

Isaiah Berlin – Too Hot To Handle?

Regular readers will recall that, in October 2013, I held a seminar at Buckingham University, delivering an address titled ‘Isaiah Berlin: The Undercover Egghead’. (see septemberspooks). This was an account of Berlin’s activities during WWII and after in the field of intelligence, enterprises that he severely downplayed when interviewed by his biographer, Michael Ignatieff. Soon afterwards, I wrote up my speech in article form, and sought to have it published, identifying ‘History Today’ as the most suitable outlet.

I have learned by now that the publishing world works in a most mysterious way, but, after a few months, and occasional prodding, I was delighted to learn that the editor, Paul Lay, had accepted the article for publication. I worked with his Picture Editor, and we selected a number of photographs, as well as a cartoon from Punch, for which copyright fees were paid. Then things went silent. I was surprised that no final copy was sent to me for review. However, in the September issue of the magazine, the text that appears in this image confirmed that my piece was due to appear in the October issue.

‘The Undercover Egghead” is on its way!

The October issue came out in mid-September, but my article was not there. I questioned Paul Lay by email, but he was evasive. As it happened, I had planned a visit to the UK in October, primarily to get my degree upgraded from a M. Phil. to a D. Phil, and my supervisor had encouraged me to use the forthcoming publication as support for my case. So I informed Lay that I would be in London, and would like to meet him to discuss it. The meeting took place; I learned that the Picture Editor had suddenly retired (without informing me); Lay himself had had concerns about the controversial nature of my piece, since ‘current history’ was a sensitive topic. (He had apparently been burned by a recent article on the Shroud of Turin, and did not want any repeat). He said that he had to pass the article to another Berlin expert for review; that expert had had one or two questions about unreferenced claims I made, but, once those were cleared up, he expected he would be able to publish in the December/January timeframe. On my return to the USA, I gave him the references he wanted, and all seemed fine.

Nothing has happened since. In January, my friend Henry Hardy (who was Berlin’s chief editor at the OUP, until he recently retired) inquired of Lay when the piece would come out, and Lay indicated March. It did not appear in March, or April. A further inquiry has gone unanswered. It is all a mystery. Is Berlin too hot to handle? Did he become so much of a ‘national treasure’ that any criticism of him is off limits? Are my revelations about the indiscretions of MI5 and MI6, and Berlin’s plotting with the Soviet spy Guy Burgess too uncomfortable for the Establishment? The censorship cannot be purely out of concern over the sensitivities of Lady Berlin, as that extraordinary lady died in August 2014 (aged 99). It is all very bewildering.

But the research continues. My degree was successfully upgraded, I discovered critical new facts at the National Archives in Kew, and I plan to complete my thesis later this summer. But should I expect to be stopped at Immigration (‘just a few routine inquiries, sir’) if I were to make a return visit to the UK?

* * * * * * * * * * * *

In one of those intriguing juxtapositions, I read in the New York Times about a week ago of two events: the death of Lee Kuan Yew, and the re-burial of Richard III. According to his obituary, in 2007, the former prime minister of Singapore said: “To understand Singapore and why it is what it is, you’ve got to start off with the fact that it’s not supposed to exist and cannot exist. To begin with, we don’t have the ingredients of a nation, the elementary factors: a homogeneous population, common language, common culture and common destiny. So, history is a long time. I’ve done my bit.” Well, the United Kingdom no longer has a ‘homogeneous population’ (but did it ever? what on earth could that mean, what with Celts, Danes, Normans, Huguenots, Jews, etc. etc.?), I am highly suspicious of claims about a single ‘common culture’, and I think it’s a bit capricious to talk about ‘common destiny’. But the UK does have a well-illustrated history and a strong sense of continuity, and I suspect it is that which drew so many people out for the parade and ceremony in Leicester. One does not have to be an ardent royalist, or a member of the Church of England, to recognize that there is something moving in being able to watch the body of a king who died over 500 years ago being carried through a city’s streets for a proper burial. Richard III was not a nice man, and his diabolical nature was impressed upon me (and maybe on many others) by Shakespeare, and by the account of the Princes and the Tower in Our Island Story. (I have very vivid memories of seeing, on a wet 1955 Thursday in Crowborough, Sussex, the film version of Shakespeare’s play, where Lawrence Olivier squirmed like an insect as he acted out the king’s death at Bosworth Field.) As reinforcement of that notion, I have also just read, in Nicola Lacey’s biography of the jurisprudential expert, Herbert Hart, that Hart considered Margaret Thatcher ‘the worst head of Government since Richard III’, an assertion that probably tells us more about Herbert Hart than it does about Lady Thatcher. The revisionists are already working on Richard: we shall probably soon learn that he liked to dandle young children on his knee (like Stalin), and spent most of his time quietly basket-weaving, and giving away his possessions to the poor.

The usual set of Commonplace entries: mostly about nationalism and communism. (Commonplace)

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February 28, 2015 · 11:58 am

‘All The News That’s Not Fit To Archive’

We relational database people are well-organized, methodical. We like analysis and business rules, strong notions of identity , the use of sets and non-significant keys, normalized designs and value-based links, precise versioning and time-stamps, and careful promotion of systems into production, with secure fall-back procedures. All that is tech-talk, but it means something in the real world. (One of the first articles I had published, back in 1980, in Datamation, was titled ‘The Importance of Good Relations’, which showed the link between solid database design and flexible business practices.)

Yet the Web has changed all this. When I first developed my website, under Microsoft’s FrontPage, there was some semblance of a test environment and a production environment. I would develop the site on my computer, and when I was ready, and had made sure all the links were defined, and pointed to real pages, I would upload the whole kit and caboodle to the host site, where the new system would replace the old, giving me the option of importing all pages that had changed (but admittedly with no easy fall-back to the previous version). No more. I now use something called WordPress, which I invoke on a remote server. It allows me to compose and save drafts of individual pages, but it is otherwise tightly integrated with the production system. If I promote a new page, it goes live immediately, and if I change it again ten seconds later, the page is immediately replaced, with the previous one lost for ever. (Unless it found its path to some entity called the Wayback Machine, which is described in a fascinating article by Jill Lepore in the New Yorker of January 26, 2015, titled The Cobweb: Can the Internet be archived?)

I mention all this in connection with my last plaint from the January blog, about the New York Times, and its practice of making changes to its electronic versions of articles after they have been published in the printed version (or the late printed version, since that happens, too. We in North Carolina get an earlier version than the people up in New York, for example.) The reason this concerns me is primarily one of research integrity, since there is no longer a ‘paper of record’ on which historians can rely. I made this point in an email to the Public Editor, whose office eventually acknowledged my inquiry, promised to look into it, but then withdrew in silence. So, after a couple of weeks, I checked out the paper’s Statement of Standards and Ethics, and wrote to the Vice-President of Corporate Communications. The essence of my message ran as follows:

“For there is a vital question to be answered: ‘What is the paper of record?’ Your slogan on the first page of the printed edition is still ‘All The News That’s Fit To Print’, but apparently some of that news is Not Fit To Archive. What happens when historians attempt to use the paper for research purposes? Do they have to keep separate clippings files, since the electronic version is unreliable, and has been purified in some way for later consumption? Is there an active policy under way here that should affect your Ethics statement? How are decisions made to ‘improve’ the content of articles that have already appeared in the printed edition? Why are these not considered ‘Corrections’ that would normally be posted in the relevant section? How often does this happen?”

I received a prompt response, but it was all very dismissive and casual:

“The change you noticed was simply the result of normal editing, which takes place constantly for news stories, both between print editions and for successive online versions. In this case, additional information (including crowd estimates) was added to the story between the early print edition and the final print edition, which meant something had to be cut for the story to fit in the same space. In most cases, the final print version is the one that remains permanently on nytimes.com, though in some cases a story continues to be updated or revised online even after the final print edition.”

So I countered as follows:

“But I must state that I think that you (and I am not sure who ‘you’ are in this case) are being far too casual about this policy, simply treating the process as ‘normal editing’. Is there an audit trail? Do you keep all versions? What changes are allowed to be made after the final print version? Why cannot the on-line version (which has no size constraints) include all the text? Is there any period of limitation after which no further amendments can be made? How do you plan to explain this policy to readers, whose ‘trust’ you say you value so much?

I am sure you must be aware of the current debate that is being carried on in the world of academic research, where annotations to URLs in serious articles often turn out to be dead links instead of reliable sources. A Times ‘page’ no longer has a unique and durable identity, which I believe is an important issue.

I look forward to some deeper explanation of this policy in the newspaper.”

Well, maybe I should get out more. As Sylvia would suggest to me: “You clearly need something better to do.” But I maintain that it is an important problem, not just concerning journalistic integrity, and getting the story right the first time, and not correcting quotations that the speaker wanted to withdraw (which we are told goes on). It is more to do with what is known as ‘content drift’ and ‘reference rot’. As Jill Lepore’s article states: “. . .a 2013 survey of law- and policy-related publications found that, at the end of six years, nearly fifty per cent of the URLs cited in those publications no longer worked. According to a 2014 study conducted at Harvard Law School, ‘more than 70% of the URLs within the Harvard Law Review and other journals, and 50% of the URLs within United States Supreme Court opinions, do not link to the original cited information.” A more subtle problem is that the links may work, but the content may have changed ̶ may have been edited, corrected, improved, revised, or sanitised. For researchers like me, this can be very annoying, as books these days frequently cite URLs rather than printed sources in their references, and when those pages do not exist, one feels cheated, and may also wonder whether they have been modified. The academic process has been debased. If one has text in the New York Times that is no longer on the archive, does it still exist? Is it still valid? Do I really have to maintain my clippings files, as opposed to an index of URLs? (To make her point, the Times Vice-President had to send me a scan of the two printed versions of the relevant page in question.)

We shall see. I haven’t received a follow-up to my second inquiry yet. Either the Times doesn’t believe it is an issue, or the managers there are having a big debate about the topic, which they don’t currently wish to share. I’ll provide an update if I do hear anything.

The normal set of Commonplace Updates this month. (February 28, 2015)

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January 31, 2015 · 12:17 pm

Turing and Cripps (and later update)

In our first visit to the movies for several years, Sylvia and I went to see The Imitation Game a few days ago. (What was the last film we went to see: Lawrence of Arabia? Brief Encounter?? I forget.) We enjoyed it very much: I could forgive most of the liberties taken with history, although the decision to introduce the spy John Cairncross in a case of double-blackmail, with the claim that MI6 had installed him deliberately so that he could leak secrets to the Russians, was palpably absurd and unnecessary. I have a special enthusiasm for Alan Turing, as readers of this site will recall from my posting here at the end of last November, and Sylvia was better able to understand the links between crosswords, cryptography and espionage that occupy the dark side of my character.

Yet you may not have noticed a brief annotation I made in July 2012, when I commented that the Times had published, on the exact centenary of Turing’s birth (June 26, 2012) a Listener Crossword Puzzle (’SUM’ – geddit?) that celebrated his achievements in imagining a universal computing machine. I was a little muted about this event, because the puzzle contained a blatant error, about which I am still sorely embarrassed. Both the Puzzle Editor and I had overlooked a tiny calculation error in the encoding of one of the answers.

Now, in my more thoughtful moments, I reflect on the phenomenon of ‘deliberate’ errors introduced as a means of communicating to the receiver that something is wrong. When the Nazis turned round captured SOE agents, dropped by parachute into the Netherlands in WWII, the radio operators ignored the lack of messages that would have confirmed they were safe, because SOE staff in London did not want to believe that their efforts had been sabotaged. Thus the famous Englandspiel, in which several agents died. A similar mistake happened when the CIA tried to infiltrate agents into Albania in the late 1940s and early 1950s. (See Operation Valuable Fiend, by Albert Lulushi.) And I have always wondered whether Kim Philby’s identification of the Secret Intelligence Service as MI5 (instead of the correct MI6) in My Secret War (p 32) represented a plaintive cry to his old mates that they should recognize that the whole memoir was being ghosted – or, at least, controlled – by the KGB. Lastly, when I noticed in the National Archive at Kew that a Report on the Communist Party written by the MI5 officer Jane Sissmore in 1935 was titled ‘Investigation by SS into Activities of the CPGB and Indentification [sic] of its Members 1935’, it occurred to me that this very capable and literate person may have inserted that error to indicate that she was very unhappy about compiling such a report. So maybe the error I made could be interpreted as saying ‘I am a Prisoner in a Listener Crossword Construction Factory and Cannot Get Out’. No, it was just a really clumsy boner.

* * * * * * * * * * *

One of the books I read in January was Tony Judt’s Ill Fares The Land. It was rather sad. Sad, because Tony Judt, who must have been a delightful man, died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, at the age of 52, in 2010. But also sad, because the book is an elegy to the decline of The Left and all its aspirations, at the same time betraying all the hopeless impracticality of the so-called social-democrat Left. (I have never been a member of The Left.) It is as if Judt and his kin think that we can all have secure jobs, and nice houses, and travel to work in environmentally-friendly transport, and enjoy free childcare and expert healthcare until we retire and enjoy safe inflation-proof pensions – all without having to worry about the sordid business of actually creating any wealth. The book is scattered with a number of unexplained clichéd terms: ‘social democracy’, ‘market failure’, ‘financial stability’, ‘social market’, ‘rational market management’, ‘endemic inequality’, ‘social justice’, and is liberally strewn with a host of semi-rhetorical questions suggesting that ‘we’ have to do something. It appears to emphasise the role of the nation-state, but says hardly anything about the European Community. Etc. etc.

I think I shall have to return to this subject next month. I am no economist, but I don’t think that matters, as economists disagree about all this stuff anyway. All I know is that I hope my financial portfolio does not hold any Greek debt. When I ponder over the question of how those poor Hellenes are going to pay back their 240 billion Euro debt, I think of Keynes and The Economic Consequences of the Peace, and what he said about economic slavery. (Is there a deliberate mistake here?) So, as an educational antidote to the maunderings of The Left, I borrowed David Stockman’s The Great Deformation; The Corruption of Capitalism in America from the Public Library, but, after reading one chapter, I decided life was too short for me to read 700 pages on economics, and took it back. And maybe we need Sir Stafford Cripps to remind us what Austerity really means. He was the authentic ‘Left’.

The normal set of Commonplace items appears for the month here. (January 31, 2015)

I don’t normally add late notes to my monthly post, but an odd thing happened today. I was reading in the New York Times about Podemos, the left-wing Spanish Political party, and a march it was holding in Madrid. Podemos’s leader, Pablo Iglesias, was accusing Prime Minster Rajoy of ‘wanting to humiliate our country with this scam they call austerity’. (Heigh-ho . . .) Furthermore, Rubén Aguilar, a Spanish telecom technician, was described as waving a Greek flag ‘out of solidarity’, and was quoted as saying: ‘We’re better off economically than our Greek friends, but we share their determinatiom to put the interests of people back ahead of economic goals like debt repayment.’ Yet this hardly inflammatory paragraph does not appear in the on-line version of the piece! What is going on? Is it now not allowed to suggest that debts to the EU and central banks may not be repaid?

I have sent a message to the Public Editor at the NYT to find out what is going on. (February 1, 2015)

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Mann Overboard!

Some Diplomatic Incidents

The Undercover Egghead

Magna Carta and Pluralism

Surveying Lake Tahoe

Remembering Mr. Popper

Richie Benaud – My Part In His Success

Isaiah Berlin – Too Hot To Handle?

‘All The News That’s Not Fit To Archive’

Turing and Cripps (and later update)

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