Читать книгу Enemies Within: Communists, the Cambridge Spies and the Making of Modern Britain - Richard Davenport-Hines - Страница 30

Slocombe had been born in 1894, and grew up in the semi-industrial northern districts of Bristol called Horfield and Bishopston. He was baptized in a Wesleyan Methodist chapel. His father was a commercial traveller (who left an estate worth only £268 in 1929). He attended the Merchant Adventurers’ Technical College at Bristol, where his best friend was a lively peasant boy from Touraine on a government scholarship. In July 1909, aged fifteen, Slocombe was appointed as a boy clerk in the Post Office Savings Bank, behind London’s Olympia, which had recently been converted from a hippodrome into an exhibition centre for motor-cars and furnishings. According to the 1911 census, he lived nearby at 63 West Kensington Mansions, as a friend rather than a lodger, with Emma Karlinsky, who had come to England from the Crimea in 1909 with her two daughters, Fanny and Marie. Her husband Joseph was an attorney at Yalta and business adviser to a grand duke.

Young Slocombe arranged nearby accommodation for his French friend, who had meanwhile adopted the name of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. He was proud of being the sculptor’s most intimate English friend: when he started a Post Office Savings Bank internal magazine, a Gaudier-Brzeska drawing decorated its cover. Slocombe’s sonnet raging against tyrants and celebrating the assassination of the Russian Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin in 1911 was published in the Marxist magazine Justice. ‘Nobody then foresaw’, Slocombe recalled a quarter of a century later, ‘the day when the theories contained in the badly printed, red-covered volumes of Marx’s Das Kapital would become the official religion of a hundred and sixty million people seated astride Europe and Asia.’¹⁷

As an impressionable youth, Slocombe was drawn by the anarchism of Kropotkin. He found a mentor in a stern, gloomy Scottish-Italian recluse, who lived, worked and slept in a book-lined cellar under a Hammersmith tailor’s shop. This underground cell, which daylight never reached, was the haunt of nihilistic young workmen, French, Russian and Spanish exiles, and the anarchist Errico Malatesta, who had escaped from an Italian prison-fortress and worked as an electrician in Soho. Slocombe’s youthful eagerness won him the trust of ‘men who lived in dread of informers, who distrusted strangers, who walked warily from bitter knowledge of the world’s prisons’. He learnt the mentality and methods of the plotters who created European despotism. ‘When, long afterwards, I met Mussolini for the first time, we met on common ground,’ he claimed. ‘We spoke the same secret language, the language of the men working blindly in cellars, in prisons, writing burning words to be printed on small and hidden presses, talking burning words at street corners, ardent, disdainful, self-righteous.’¹⁸

In 1912, aged eighteen, Slocombe married seventeen-year-old Marie Karlinsky, who was pregnant with their son Ralph. He joined the staff of the Daily Herald at about the same time, and the Royal Flying Corps as a second-class mechanic in 1916. He had a winter digging roads in Lincolnshire before deployment in France, where he spent eighteen months in intelligence translating German military wireless messages. When the first attempts were made to bug prison cells with microphones, Slocombe was told to eavesdrop, and felt relief that the stone paving of the prison cells caused such echoes that the indiscretions of captured German aviators were incomprehensible. He found headquarters life to be monotonous, and compared the staff officers to golfing stockbrokers.¹⁹

Slocombe wrote an empurpled ‘Letter to Lenin’, published in the Daily Herald of 24 August 1918. ‘Your first proclamation, after the Second Russian Revolution, was a deep blast upon the Bugle of the Army of the World’s Freedom,’ he apostrophized Lenin. ‘You are aiming, as I believe sincerely, at the liberation and the redemption of man. The hate you have been shown by the rich, the monopolists, the concession-hunters, the feudalists, the diplomatists and the Press of all countries – German and allied alike – is a sure sign of your earnestness in the cause.’ These ebullitions seemed suspicious to the security services in London, but Slocombe’s commanding officer Lieutenant Colonel Harry Goldsmith defended him to Stewart Menzies of SIS: ‘he was a M.T. [motor-transport] driver, but having crashed a senior officer into a ditch, was taken off cars & put to clerking. He is an educated man & … writes verses, patriotic & not bad at that for the Tatler.’ Goldsmith, who was a future military ADC to King George V, continued with the tolerance that often characterized authority’s attitude to oddballs: ‘I don’t think he is a bad chap on the whole, & I am rather inclined, if you agree, to talk to him myself & tell him I know he wrote this article addressed to Lenin & ask him if he think it’s playing the game to butter up a fellow whose actions caused very heavy losses to the French & ourselves by setting free troops hitherto employed on the Russian front, who is now assisting the Germans to enslave the Poles & Ukrainians etc.’²⁰

After demobilization in 1919, Slocombe returned to the Daily Herald as news editor. ‘He was a timid and anxious man,’ recalled Francis Meynell, ‘until he grew a beard to hide his receding chin. The change was immediate and remarkable: he became master of his scene.’ In the spring of 1920 Slocombe went as the Daily Herald’s special correspondent in Paris, which he loved as the capital of rumour. His work took him roaming in Europe: everywhere he resisted standardization and vapidity. The suicide of millionaires and dethroning of monarchs enlivened him. He liked to meet currency smugglers, concession-hunters, bankers-condottieri, political grafters, stock-exchange tipsters, swagger beaux, faithless men with awkward principles, and idealists who uttered only flippancies. He savoured the furtive exiles found in every European capital, ‘nursing midnight dreams of liberty, power and martyrdom’ and conjuring vengeful conspiracies.²¹

A Home Office warrant was issued in 1921 to intercept letters to Slocombe’s house at Sutton in Surrey on the grounds that he was bringing Bolshevik literature into Britain and communicating with ‘leaders of the Red Trade Union International movement’. In 1922 a major international conference was held at Genoa to promote the economic stabilization and revival of central and eastern Europe, and to reconcile European capitalism with the Bolshevik economy. Shortly before the conference convened, Ewer sent Slocombe ‘hints about Genoa for your private ear’ which he intended to be passed to Soviet contacts. These hints comprised information from Edward Wise, a civil servant who was Lloyd George’s economic adviser during the Genoa deliberations and sympathetic to Bolshevism, that London hoped to use the Genoa meeting to parlay an agreement between the Soviet Union and the other European powers. The French embassy in London reported in 1923 that Slocombe had visited Lausanne under the alias of Nathan Grunberg. The French tied him to Clare Sheridan, who was reputed to have been his lover. His expulsion from France was contemplated in 1926 after he was seen in regular meetings with a Bolshevik agent.²²

Slocombe’s sister-in-law Fanny Karlinsky was the object of further suspicions. She won a scholarship to St Paul’s Girls’ School in Hammersmith, and read modern languages at Somerville College, Oxford in 1913, but fell ill and spent much of 1914 in the French Pyrenees recuperating. During 1916–19 she worked as an Anglo–Russian translator and interpreter. In 1919 she became a telegraph coder and decipherer for ARCOS, and worked in its offices for twelve years. She was anonymously denounced to Special Branch in 1924 for her alleged association with Edith Lunn, wife of Andrew Rothstein. There were two separate code-rooms in ARCOS offices, one for purely commercial traffic and the other for political messages: Fanny Karlinsky claimed to have worked only in the first room. She was present during the police raid of 1927, was listed for possible expulsion to Russia by the authorities and had her application for British citizenship denied. She continued working for ARCOS until 1931, when she refused orders to return to Russia and was stripped of her Soviet passport. Guy Liddell, then still in Special Branch, noted in 1928: ‘although she is not a full member of the Party, she is in close touch with party circles and ready to assist in any way she can’. MI5 suspected her of being a sub-agent of Lenin’s State Political Directorate, the GPU. Later she ran a boarding-house, but in the 1950s needed an allowance from Slocombe in Paris to keep her from privation.²³