Enemies Within: Communists, the Cambridge Spies and the Making of Modern Britain. Richard Davenport-Hines
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omnipotent and matchless that it is seldom mentioned. Whitehall was overwhelmingly masculine. The departmental culture was a body of assumptions, judgements, tastes and habits that, even when they underwent adaptation and reformulation, remained irrefragably male. No woman exerted any influence within any ministry. The security services were exceptional in employing women – Jane Sissmore, Ann Glass and others – in positions that mattered. Women were required to resign from the civil service if they married: their first thoughts must henceforth be for their husbands and their homes, so the Home Civil Service judged, and they should not be taking a salary into a household which already had a male breadwinner. The first marriage waiver was given to a principal at the Ministry of Labour in 1938. A year or so later Jane Sissmore, afterwards Jane Archer, became an outstanding exception to this rule. The former Oxford communist Jenifer Hart at the Home Office obtained a marriage waiver in 1941 with the support of her boss, Sir Alexander Maxwell, who advised her to announce in The Times that she wished to be regarded as married although she was barred by the civil service from being so. (She also endured sexual advances in the office from Sir Frank Newsam, who succeeded Maxwell as PUS in 1948.) Under wartime conditions most other women were required to resign on marriage, and were then re-employed as temporary civil servants for the duration of the war.
The married-women ban was formally lifted from the Home Civil Service in 1946, although it endured unofficially for many years longer. In the 1960s officials of the Civil Service Commission justified the bar in the Diplomatic Service on married women as necessary to clear the way for men to get promotion. The interdiction on married women continued in the Service until 1973. There were three women Cabinet ministers between 1919 and 1964 with a combined length of service of seven years. The first female PUS was installed at the suitably domestic Ministry of Housing in 1955. Although the bicameral Westminster legislature was idealized as ‘The Mother of Parliaments’, women were excluded from membership of its upper chamber, the House of Lords, until 1958. Such were the sacrifices expected of mothers that all the early life peeresses were childless. Hereditary women peers, unlike their male counterparts, were debarred from the Lords until 1963. The first woman judge was appointed in 1962, the first woman ambassador in 1976 and the first married woman ambassador in 1987; the first female chief of a security agency was Stella Rimington of MI5 in 1992; the Whitehall mandarins’ preferred club, the Athenaeum, admitted its first women members in 2002. Women were excluded from full membership of Cambridge University until 1948: the first all-male colleges there began admitting female undergraduates in the 1970s.
These facts were more important to departmental temper, to office procedures and to relations between colleagues than the fluid or ductile gradations of class. It is compelling to note that critiques of the Whitehall ministries – starting in earnest after 1951, when Burgess and Maclean absconded from the Foreign Office – as class-bound in their recruitment, sectional and exclusive in their operations, inimical to modern technological progress, averse to private enterprise were all written by men. The position of women in government employment was seldom raised before a woman prime minister took office in 1979. Even then, it was treated as an issue for women writers, whose criticisms were discounted, sometimes with contempt, as a minority issue – despite Disraeli’s axiom that the history of success is the history of minorities. The hegemony of class explanations belonged to a phase of thinking that should be long gone. As this book will show, gender exclusivity – not class exclusivity – helped men in their espionage for Soviet Russia. Whitehall’s response to the discovery of such espionage was fashioned by male affinities, not class connivance.
The ideal of fraternity among men was fundamental to the way that everything worked. Collin Brooks, editor of the Sunday Dispatch, was among thirty journalists invited to the Treasury for a briefing on gold-conversion policy in 1932. ‘We had tea and plum-cake in the Chancellor’s room, talking very informally over pipes,’ Brooks recorded. ‘It was an interesting confidential pow-wow, and a beautiful example of the informality of British government.’ This relaxed manliness in action required gender exclusivity: women subordinates may have prepared the tea and plum-cake, but they were not present to inhibit the men pulling on their pipes.27
Manliness can be defined in many ways: virility, fortitude, enterprise, aggression, logical powers, compassion, gullibility, boorishness, sentimentality, lumbering thoughts. ‘They can laugh at anything – including themselves,’ Vansittart said of his male compatriots. ‘They boast of their smallest possession, common sense, and win victories for which no foresight qualified them.’ Among colleagues, in offices and committees, nicknames proliferated as a way of bringing cheerful cohesion: ‘Waterbeast’, ‘Snatch’, ‘Moly’ and the rest. (Unaffectionate nicknames, such as ‘Sir Icicle’ for Alexander Cadogan, were not used openly.) Manly good humour was prized. ‘I doubt if he has a very powerful head,’ the Solicitor General, Sir Donald Somervell, said of the Home Secretary, Sir John Gilmour, in 1934; but ‘he has a very robust & humorous outlook … & knows how to deal with men’. This seemed preferable to the volatility of brilliance.28
Masculine hardness was especially valued by Conservative leaders: their admiration for fascists and Nazis was expressed in gendered terms. Speaking of ‘national glories’ to the Anti-Socialist Union in 1933, Churchill thundered: ‘I think of Germany, with its splendid, clear-eyed youths marching forward on all the roads of the Reich, singing their ancient songs, demanding to be conscripted into an army; eagerly seeking the most terrible weapons of war; burning to suffer and die for their Fatherland.’ He praised, too, the Italian hard man Mussolini for inspiring his fascists with their ‘stern sense of national duty’. This was men’s stuff.29
What of the officers and men who worked for MI5? Edwin Woodhall joined the Metropolitan Police at the age of twenty in 1906. Before the war he worked for the Special Branch squad protecting Cabinet ministers from suffragette aggression and for MI5. Later he was personal protection officer to the Prince of Wales in France. He described the auxiliary officers with whom he served in wartime counter-espionage as drawn from ‘the best class of educated British manhood’ procurable in wartime: ‘stockbrokers, partners of big business houses, civil, mechanical, and electrical engineers, artists, journalists, surveyors, accountants, men of travel – men of good family, men of the world. In fact, the finest types.’30
Typical of wartime MI5 officers was William Hinchley Cooke, who had been born in Germany to an English father and German mother. He attended school in Dresden and university in Leipzig, spoke German with a Hamburg accent and was fluent in French and Dutch. Like Woodhall he spent much of the war in counter-espionage on the Western Front. After his release from full-time government service, he had an attachment with the Birmingham city police; studied law at Gray’s Inn, but was never called to the bar; and then joined the staff of the armaments company Vickers, which gave him cover for travelling in Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Yugoslavia.
Vernon Kell sought the finest types for MI5: he liked men to be linguists, to enjoy outdoor life, to be shrewd readers of character, to be monuments of solid sense. In 1912 he recruited Reginald (‘Duck’) Drake, an army officer who spoke excellent French and passable German and Dutch, and whose listed recreations included hunting, shooting, beagling, skiing, golf, cricket, hockey, polo, otter-hunting, swimming, tennis and squash. Another recruit of 1912, Eric (‘Holy Willy’) Holt-Wilson, was an Old Harrovian, an instructor in military engineering at Woolwich Military Academy, a champion revolver shot and a keen skier. Holt-Wilson was seconded to the Inter-Allied Intelligence Bureau in Paris in 1915, and headed the Rhineland police commission after the Armistice. MI5’s first graduate recruit, in 1914, Maldwyn (‘Muldoon’) Haldane, studied at Jesus College, Cambridge and the University of Göttingen, spoke German, French and Hindustani, and gave his recreations as trout-fishing, rowing, rugby, walking, poultry-farming, gardening, history, ethnology, palaeontology and biology.