Kim Philby Read online

  Some accounts have suggested that Kim had a bad time at school. I would say he had a rather easy life, particularly in his later years. He was never a popular figure, but neither was he unpopular. People accepted that he was something of a loner, who had erected barriers around himself, and were not disposed to ill-treat him or try to knock him into a different shape. There was little hint at this time of the convivial and gregarious Kim of the 1940s. He had something untouchable about him, a kind of inner strength and self-reliance that made others respect him. Nobody ever mocked him for his stammer. But between Kim and perhaps half a dozen people there was a strong mutual antipathy. This was notably true in the case of our housemaster, the Reverend Kenneth Luce. He did not have a lot to do with our daily routine – he came more into my life as a form master for two terms than as housemaster at any time – but he made a strong impression on us; whether it was of Christian dedication and moral fervour or of sanctimonious self-righteousness depended on your outlook. Once from my nearby cubicle I heard him trying to persuade Kim that he ought to be confirmed. Kim let him carry on for several minutes before revealing that he had never even been baptised. Luce, recovering, tried to shrug it off by saying that that could easily be arranged, but thereafter it seemed that he never pursued the subject with the same drive; perhaps he reckoned that he would have to convert the parents as well as the boy.

  One account I have read describes the battle for Kim’s soul in much more dramatic terms. Kim was ‘badly mauled in the struggle’ and later allegedly claimed to have suffered something like a nervous breakdown. I find this hard to accept. He seemed to have little difficulty in holding his position as one who was prepared (because he had no choice) to attend services, but not to go further than that. He certainly did not change his beliefs: he allowed that the prayer book had some value as a ‘handbook of morality’ but nothing more. Luce himself was a so-called Modern Churchman (he had been chaplain to Bishop Barnes of Birmingham), which in some people’s eyes was halfway to agnosticism, and was perhaps inclined to take a less dogmatic view than other headmasters in Orders might have been.

  Kim was not brilliant at school. No doubt he was handicapped at the start by his youth – he was only twelve and three-quarters when he entered in 1924 and might have done better to have waited another twelve months – and by ill health in his first year. Scholars were expected to pass School Certificate at the end of their first year, or their second at the latest, but Kim took three years to get over this hurdle. I have a school list from Lent term 1927 – his eighth – which shows him still in the Shell (the School Certificate form); he is placed fifteenth out of twenty-three boys, a little below a later Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford but above a later Bishop of London. He had only two years left after School Certificate, but in those two years caught up rapidly.

  College, although the smallest house and consisting entirely of King’s Scholars, was rather good at games. Kim, while far from outstanding, was by no means a rabbit. If he had not abandoned games in his final year – an option available to a senior – he might have made a reasonable mark at soccer and cricket. He was a fair goalkeeper. At cricket he played in the school 2nd XI – I recall especially his bowling action: front facing, round arm, head and chin raised high as if he were peering over a wall, and with a distant air of meditation even at the moment of releasing the ball. He used to field on the offside. I wish I could report that his regular position there was third man, but I think he was more usually to be found at deep extra cover – itself appropriate in its way. Like many of us King’s Scholars, he played a lot of Eton fives. The gymnastic prowess ascribed to him in one account has vanished entirely from my memory, but he was a keen boxer. I have documentary evidence – rare in this narrative – to show that he was in the team that boxed against Tonbridge School in March 1928, and was beaten. ‘Philby got off with a thick ear, against Campbell, who was at least half a foot taller than himself. He was handicapped by a shorter reach than that of his opponent, and was on the defensive most of the time.’ Kim was not often on the defensive, then or later.

  Unlike practically everyone else in College, and indeed in the school, Kim never joined the Officers’ Training Corps. Thereby he saved himself not only a good deal of trouble, but also the appalling discomfort of the uniform of those days, invariably known as ‘the million’ for some facetious reason to do with fleas. I am not sure why Kim stayed out of it. He can hardly have taken up a pacifist attitude at the age of twelve. Perhaps it was simply an offshoot of St John Philby’s non-conformist philosophy. I, with one or two others, left the corps at the end of my third year for pacifist reasons, but I will not deny that a secondary motive was the alternative it gave me of playing fives on the two corps afternoons, Wednesday and Friday. Probably it was on those afternoons that Kim was to be found in the gymnasium.

  He was prankishly inclined. One evening, in his ‘box’ or small partitioned-off study, he had the idea of baring the wires of his reading lamp, connecting them to drawing pins and inviting several of us to give ourselves mild shocks; why we were not electrocuted I do not understand. Later, during prep, there was an enormous blue flash from Kim’s box. The lights went out all over College, and, or so we believed, over a large part of the City of Westminster as well. By the time the candles arrived, Kim had managed to conceal all evidence of his misdeeds, and the cause was duly diagnosed as a faulty reading lamp.

  Kim had a considerable sense of humour, but in some ways a peculiar one. Much that others found funny he did not. He displayed more than a hint of schadenfreude, a characteristic that remained with him all the time I knew him. He derived a fairly harmless enjoyment from the discomfiture of others, and had a mocking tongue; but he was never one to bully the smaller or weaker – his targets were usually larger than himself.

  Kim and I were not particularly close friends at school, until perhaps his last year. I do not know what drew us together. Neither of us was homosexual and there was never, now or later, the remotest sexual or physical attraction or even romantic attachment between us. We seemed to agree on few things. There was always considerable reserve, and one that persisted into afterlife. We did not even use Christian names until after he had married Lizy.4 Surnames were more commonly used then than now among schoolboys and undergraduates, but even so, with everyone else I knew well it was first names.

  Two things, however, formed an early meeting ground – an interest in professional soccer and cricket, and music. It was with Kim that I saw my first professional soccer match – Chelsea against Clapton Orient at Stamford Bridge. He was an Arsenal supporter, I a Chelsea one. At cricket we were both Surrey fans. Naturally we had our idols – mine was Gloucestershire’s Wally Hammond, whom as early as 1924 I had seen make a superlative 174 on a bad wicket, an innings that remains with me yet – but for Kim, always individualist and unpredictable in his likes and dislikes, it was the Surrey professional Andrew Sandham, a highly solid and dependable batsman but hardly glamorous. By contrast, Kim also nursed a passion for Tallulah Bankhead, surpassed only by my infatuation for Janet Gaynor.

  My musical education at Westminster (I was never a performer) came largely from Kim and another friend of mine, Jock Engleheart. Their tastes were almost diametrically opposed. Jock was a fine musician with such absolute pitch that if a choral piece were transposed a semitone to make it easier for the first tenors or second basses he found it quite difficult while singing from a score to check himself from reverting to the original key. He had two gods: Bach and Delius. Kim liked neither of these – Bach, he said, never developed, you couldn’t tell early works from late – but it was from Kim’s records that I first heard most of the standard classical symphonies, concertos, sonatas and chamber music, though little or no opera or choral or vocal works. In his last year he bought one of the best gramophones that those days could offer, with a huge specially designed horn, and spent his games-free afternoons buying, or more usually borrowing on approval, records from shops in the Charing C
ross Road. His favourite work at the time was the César Franck symphony, and his favourite composer, then as later, Beethoven.

  I said earlier that Kim was not a homosexual. I was amazed to read that, after leaving school, he apparently claimed that at Westminster he had ‘buggered and been buggered’. I find it difficult to believe either that such incidents took place, or, even more, that he would ever have spoken of them in this way, or at all – Kim, who was so private that one never observed him using the lavatories, the doors of which had to be kept open; it was a lasting mystery how he performed his bodily functions at all. He was never at any time given to sexual boasting, confession or fantasy. Even in later life he seldom discussed his ordinary heterosexual relationships. Nor can I imagine who could have been the other party, or parties. There were plenty of romantic friendships at Westminster, but Kim appeared aloof from all such diversions. Moreover we had remarkably little privacy in College. Although in the dormitory we each slept in a separate cubicle, the curtain that formed the door ended two or three feet from the ground, and there were strict rules about not entering someone else’s cubicle. There was nowhere to go for country walks, no haystack to retreat behind. It is true that anything could have happened at weekends, when boys who lived in London could go home. But homosexual relationships and romantic friendships at public schools are seldom totally secret for long, if at all; and Kim’s name never came up in this connection. Perhaps I was simply naïve, and all sorts of things went on under my eyes that I never knew about. But unless strong evidence is produced, I shall continue to disbelieve the story.

  Kim grew up very quickly in his last two years. By the final year he had become bored with everything the school had to offer, though he must have continued to work hard to get his close exhibition to Trinity, Cambridge. He was not made monitor – an honour, or chore, imposed annually on four out of the eight or nine seniors, i.e. scholars in their last year. Luce, who was responsible for making the selection, was notorious for excluding anyone of a strongly independent turn of mind. Forceful characters like John Winnifrith,5 with a good academic and athletic record, were passed over. But to be fair I think any housemaster would by then have regarded Kim as too little concerned in College life to be eligible.

  Kim’s career at school does not bear out the theory sometimes put forward of a son under pressure to live up to the standards of an overdominant father. St John Philby had been captain of the school and for two years a member of the cricket XI. Kim was uninterested in trying to emulate either of these successes, nor did he give the impression of having turned his back on them because he know he would fall short of his father’s achievement: it was merely that he thought he had better things to do. Kim’s stammer has also been attributed to early fear of his father. But since thousands of children with a dominant parent don’t stammer, it could hardly be the cause. In any case I do not believe that St John Philby did ‘dominate’ his son, certainly not by the time he reached Westminster. Kim at school was tough, self-reliant and self-confident. His father was abroad most of the time, and must have seen relatively little of his son.

  St John Philby at this period was widely known as an Arabist of unorthodox views, though he had not yet made his celebrated crossing of the Rub’ al Khali, the ‘Empty Quarter’ of Arabia. Kim showed no great interest in the Middle East, but admired his father’s expert knowledge of Arabia and the Arabs, by comparison with what he saw as T. E. Lawrence’s romanticism. I had chosen Revolt in the Desert (the shorter version of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which had not yet been published) as a school prize and asked Kim what he thought of it. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I found the first sentence so magnificent that I never really managed to read the rest.’ One small service rendered by Kim to his father during his schooldays is acknowledged in the introduction, dated August 1928, to one of St John Philby’s best-known books, Arabia of the Wahhabis, later republished. Kim was responsible for a number of small line drawings – architectural elevations and the like – that appear in the book. Like everything he did on paper, they are neat and accurate.

  What brought us together? I think it was partly the attraction of opposites – Kim the quiet rebel, me the rather conventional boy enthusiastically involved in school life. I began to be intrigued by someone who seemed to reject many of the things I automatically accepted, but who was not in the least a dropout. What he on his side saw in me I don’t really know. Perhaps he found in me a useful sounding board for his developing views. Perhaps he simply liked me. Though he was not my closest friend at school, he was undoubtedly different from the others. I would have been surprised to learn that the friendship would last another third of a century; and astonished that one day I would be writing a book about it.

  Notes

  1. The Westminster School uniform for scholars was tails, a white bow tie and a top hat.

  2. A noted Arabist and explorer.

  3. St John Philby, Arabian Days: An Autobiography, Robert Hale, London, 1948.

  4. Lizy (née Friedman), Philby’s first wife.

  5. Later Sir John Winnifrith, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Ministry of Agriculture.

  2

  NEW FRONTIERS

  Kim went to Trinity College, Cambridge, in the autumn of 1929, while I returned to Westminster for my final year. My father had died in May, after a long illness, and my family had left Somerset to return to the London area, though we did not have a proper home for another two years. Kim, unlike most of his school contemporaries, was not in the habit of revisiting Westminster once he had left it, but we met during the Christmas holidays of 1929–30 and made a tentative plan to travel on the Continent after the summer term was over. We did not meet in the Easter vacation of 1930 (he went to Hungary), and must have made the subsequent arrangements by letter, because the next time I saw him was at our rendezvous at Nancy in eastern France at the beginning of August. I recall, however, that before Kim left England my uncle, A. A. Milne, who had taken my family under his wing since my father’s death, invited him to lunch so that he could vet his nephew’s friend. Kim evidently passed the test.

  This was the first of three Continental trips I made with Kim between August 1930 and April 1933. It has been suggested that his recruitment by the Soviet secret service might have taken place on one of these occasions, or at least preliminary contact made, which is why I am describing our travels in some detail.

  I had not been abroad before and was extremely green. My mother, who never set foot outside Britain in all her long life and distrusted foreigners, thought to provide some measure of insulation for at least the first day by buying me a first-class ticket from Victoria to Nancy (the only time I can remember travelling first class by rail, sea or air, except at public expense). Thus I arrived in style, to the amusement of an unshaven Kim, who met me at the station.

  The Cambridge term had of course ended some weeks earlier. Kim had bought an old motorcycle and sidecar and gone off to Budapest with a Trinity friend, Michael Stewart. Whether he distrusted my ability to get to Budapest under my own steam, or else thought I might like to see rather more of the Continent than the view from a train, I cannot remember, but he elected to leave Michael behind in Budapest and drive all the way back to France to fetch me. The bike broke down in the Black Forest and was left to be repaired while Kim came on to Nancy by train. He had been robbed of a camera and money by a German youth to whom he had given a lift, but was in good heart and we talked till long after midnight in the station restaurant before taking a train into Germany: hard class of course. There we picked up the bike and set off on our five-day journey eastwards, Kim driving and me in the sidecar.

  It has been said that Kim first learnt to ride a motorcycle in Spain before going up to Cambridge, and boasted later to friends that he had reached speeds of eighty miles an hour. I don’t believe this story, and it certainly could not have been on this machine. I think our highest speed on the entire trip was about thirty-five miles an hour, going downhill slightly out of contro
l. People don’t travel on motorcycles with sidecars nowadays, and fond though I became of the bike, I can see why. On the second day we had heavy rain which soaked not only ourselves but also our luggage. Most of Kim’s stuff was probably in Budapest but I had on the pillion a suitcase which was henceforth a sorry thing, as were many of its contents. The further east we travelled the worse the roads became. According to the Baedeker guide of 1905, ‘the roads of Austria-Hungary, on the whole, fall considerably short of the English standard, for the steamroller is unknown in that country’. By 1930 the steamroller had made its entry but it still had a lot to do. Somewhere in Austria our bike and sidecar began to lean ominously inwards towards one another. An Austrian garage did a rough patch-up job, and we managed to push on into Hungary and spend an exotic evening at Magyaróvár, all gypsy music and heavy red wine. But the next day the inward leaning was more pronounced than ever, and getting worse. After further attempts at garages, we decided to try a blacksmith. In the small town of Kisbér we found one who within an hour or two had hammered out and fitted a number of strong metal struts and bolts which not only restored each of us to a vertical position but were to last all the way back to England. We rattled into Budapest in fine style.

  This first of my three journeys with Kim was a light-hearted juvenile affair. Kim and I were eighteen, Michael nineteen. The other two had found a luxurious (by our standards) room in Károly király utca,1 complete with running water, almost unique in our various journeys. From this base we explored the city, walking the splendidly baroque Andrássy út, watching the fireworks rise above the ramparts of Buda, bathing in a swimming pool constructed in the flowing yellow Danube, lunching at a ridiculously cheap island restaurant where an orchestra most appropriately played the Franck symphony, buying hot Wiener schnitzel or goulash or kukuruz for a few pence from automatic machines, seeing Marlene Dietrich in A kék angyal, otherwise The Blue Angel, and meeting Hungarian friends whom Kim had got to know on his visit to Budapest in April. After several days of this we had to quit our room, which was booked for someone else. Our money was running low but we had no wish to leave Budapest. Fortunately among Kim’s friends were two brothers named Szegedi-Szűts. The elder, István, was a film cartoonist (some of whose work I saw later at the Oxford Film Society). The younger, György, among other things owned a garage where a number of cars were kept; he suggested we should stay there for nothing, sleeping in whatever cars appeared the most comfortable. We followed this excellent plan for five days, living mainly on chocolate and crisp white rolls.