Agent Molière

The Life of John Cairncross, the Fifth Man of the Cambridge Spy Circle

Geoff Andrews

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781838606763
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Biografie in ambito politico

The Cambridge Spies continue to fascinate - but one of them, John Cairncross, has always been more of an enigma than the others. He worked alone and was driven by his hostility to Fascism rather than to the promotion of Communism. During his war-time work at Bletchley Park, he passed documents to the Soviets which went on to influence the Battle of Kursk. Now, Geoff Andrews has access to the Cairncross papers and secrets, and has spoken to friends, relatives and former colleagues. A complex individual emerges – a scholar as well as a spy – whose motivations have often been misunderstood. After his resignation from the Civil Service, Cairncross moved to Italy and here he rebuilt his life as a foreign correspondent, editor and university professor. This gave him new circles and friendships – which included the writer Graham Greene – while he always lived with the fear that his earlier espionage would come to light. The full account of Cairncross's spying, his confession and his dramatic public exposure as the 'fifth man' will be told here for the first time, while also unveiling the story of his post-espionage life.

Chapter 1

A Scottish education

Lesmahagow is a small town situated on high ground in the Clyde Valley, 25 miles southwest from Glasgow, in South Lanarkshire, on the road to England. Its name is derived from a sixth-century Welsh saint Machutus or Mahagw, and in Gaelic it means an enclosed or walled area. The arrival of Benedictine monks in the twelfth century provides the early origins of the village settlement, with its community formed around the church of St. Machutus. It was they who both bequeathed the village’s name and planted the fruit trees in the surrounding fertile land that was ideal for farming. Lesmahagow subsequently became a useful coach stop on the way to Glasgow, but it was the coal industry that brought people to the area in the period of Victorian prosperity. The growth of the Coalburn collieries, a short distance away, had implications for the character of the village and its relationship to the fast expanding port of Glasgow, whose rapid development was crucial in driving wealth in the Victorian era. By the time John Cairncross was born in 1913, ‘The Gow’ had contributed to the prosperity of Glasgow’s economy, in an area increasingly defined socially and economically by the mines at Coalburn.

However, Lesmahagow’s place in history had already been partly shaped by the religious dissent of its inhabitants, including the seventeenth-century Covenanters who were imprisoned for their beliefs. Later, Lesmagahow’s nonconformist religious convictions were manifested in variants of Presbyterianism, and in the nineteenth century its temperance hall was the meeting place for many of the village’s social activities and gatherings, including concerts and talks, which gave it a distinctive social cohesion. A poem written in 1914 by Thomas Thomson, a former resident of Lesmahagow by then living in the United States, reflected on the ‘worthies’ of his village as he had left it fifty years previously. Partly written in Old Lowland Scots dialect, the first four verses give a flavour of the village, its characters and its sense of community.

The ‘Tam’ or Tom McCartney of the fourth verse had, at the time of Thomson’s departure in 1864, owned a draper’s shop cum general store in the village’s main street. In that same year, Andrew Cairncross, John’s grandfather, a chief buyer at Arthur and Company in Glasgow, came to live in Lesmahagow after marrying Tom McCartney’s daughter, Margaret. He helped his father-in-law run the village shop which they turned into an ironmongery. It was this shop that John Cairncross’s father would inherit, though little else came his way from his own grandfather. The nephew of a Chartist martyr from Strathaven hanged for leading a demonstration, Tom McCartney had accumulated some of his own wealth and property, though he later caused a family rift by marrying his housekeeper in his early eighties and making her the sole beneficiary of his estate. John Cairncross’s father, Alexander, as the eldest son, took on the responsibility of looking after the family ironmonger business, Cairncross and Menzies, to which he devoted his life, establishing himself in his own generation as a notable Lesmahagow ‘worthy’.

The status of the Cairncross family as well-regarded stalwarts of the local community was thus well established by the time John Cairncross was born. It was a solidly lower-middle-class background; he was not an ‘impoverished militant, working-class’ son of Red Clydeside, as he has sometimes been depicted by molehunters and espionage writers; he also did not, as some lazy Marxist discourse might put it, have a typically ‘petit-bourgeois’ upbringing. Social classes mixed and the Cairncrosses could count farmers and miners alike as friendly neighbours. His Presbyterian inheritance would leave its mark on the seriousness he and his family attached to education and the benefits a good schooling would bring: the importance of working hard, getting on in life and aspirations to achieve were ingrained at an early age. The dissenting traditions were there too, and perhaps his lifelong nonconformism had its roots in an ambivalence towards established authorities first aired along its rural lanes and moorlands. On the other hand, the closeness of the community, its seclusion from the city and broader cosmopolitan cultures would stimulate in him a restlessness for travel and exploration. In later life he would attribute his ‘argumentative temperament’ to an indirect consequence of ‘Presbyterian fervour’,¹ and believed also that it helped him acquire the doctrinal clarity he brought to his translations and editing work. However, there were other significant roots for what became an impressively highbrow family.

Though Alexander Cairncross’s own ambitions were constrained by the realities of running a business, his younger brother Tom became a Church of Scotland minister and, as T. S. Cairncross, met with some success as a poet and author. Between 1901 and 1907 he was a minister of Langholm South United Free Church, located just 8 miles from the English border, where he became an early mentor of the renowned poet Hugh MacDiarmid (then known as Christopher Grieve), imbibing in his young protégé, who attended his church, borrowed from his library and taught at his Sunday school, a strong sense of Scots border identity. Along with the certificates for bible knowledge, MacDiarmid, by his own admission, owed a debt to the Reverend Cairncross for introducing him to modernist verse, notably his own poetry on Langholm and the borders. This influence was at its height when MacDiarmid was in his early teens but was also evident in some of his later poetry, and he remained in touch with T. S. Cairncross until after the First World War; he included some of the latter’s poetry in his Northern Numbers annual of 1920.²

Their paths would diverge radically in later years, as T. S. Cairncross made clear his ideological opposition to socialism, while MacDiarmid, whose politics evolved from Scottish nationalism to communism, later renounced the religious doctrines of his former mentor, seeing in his work both a sentimentality and an implied superiority of the Covenanters, who held the key to knowledge and wisdom. T. S. Cairncross produced, in addition to poetry, books on the mission and role of ministers, the elements of a good sermon and the task of reviving religion in a secular and ‘commercial’ world. Along the way, he researched his own family history, discovering links between his ancestors and Walter Scott and uncovering what he took to be a ‘Cairncross motto’, with which he prefaced some of his ideas and values: ‘Recte faciendo neminem timeo’, or ‘I fear none in doing right.’ It might be said that John Cairncross adopted a similar principle in later life when explaining why, on anti-fascist grounds, he had decided to pass confidential material to the Soviets at the time of appeasement and during the Second World War.

Alexander Cairncross may have relinquished any academic interests in order to keep the family business going, but he clearly held such ambitions for his children and recognized the virtues of higher education for Scottish lower-middle-class families. He married a local schoolteacher, Elizabeth Wishart, whom he had met at a mutual improvement class, and her conviction that education was the key to advancement made an early impression on him. ‘It has been mutual improvement ever since,’ Alexander Cairncross later recounted to his family.³ Indeed, John Cairncross’s mother was the primary parental influence on his early development, and his memories of childhood centred on her as the source of intimacy and contentment. Like many women of her generation, she invested a lot of her own hopes and aspirations in the prospects of her children. Formerly a teacher at the village upper school, she encouraged a love of learning in sons and daughters alike, which was maintained in later generations. Two of Cairncross’s sisters, Margaret and Elsie, took university degrees and became schoolteachers; two of his brothers became university professors, a post he would briefly hold himself. Academic ambitions were clearly nurtured and expanded over subsequent generations. It was ‘quite an intellectual family’.⁴ His mother’s efforts were the more commendable given the burden of bringing up a large family – a task relieved by their live-in maid. In addition to encouraging her children with their studies, it was left to his mother to supply what he later called the ‘special feeling of harmony’ in his early life.⁵

By contrast, he acknowledged that he never enjoyed a close relationship with his father, partly a consequence of the age difference between them.

As my father married late, by the time I was born he was old enough to be my grandfather. This, coupled with a Scots restraint, made for a lack of intimacy between us. … My trouble was that, being the youngest, I never got to know him well and had little knowledge of his many virtues which I would have appreciated had I been in closer contact with him.⁶

He felt his father was constrained by the values of an earlier generation and was not in any sense a role model or significant influence on his youngest son. Nor was he a particularly good communicator. Cairncross senior, in the recollections of his children, was not given to unnecessary fraternizing. After a hastily murmured grace, conversations at mealtimes were often discouraged, curtailed abruptly, or ended prematurely with an unexplained proverb, a habit which irritated his youngest son. At mealtimes, at least, possible horizons were left unexplored. Aside from his interest in bowls – he was the president of the Lanarkshire Bowling Club – he remained immersed in his business and its accounts. His aptitude for figures meant he was a reliable consultant on tax affairs, which enhanced his esteem in the village.⁷ Alexander’s religious observance, in a village which had maintained its nonconformist inclinations by accommodating three different Presbyterian congregations, included taking the family on its weekly church visit, where he would record the attendance and make notes of the sermon, perhaps out of deference to his younger brother.

The infant school, which John Cairncross entered at the age of five, was at Turfholm, situated at the poorer side of the village beyond the River Nethan. It retained some Victorian features in the period after the First World War when Cairncross first became a pupil. With one main room accommodating up to seventy or so pupils, some discipline was inevitable and the ‘tawse’, a long leather strap, was still in use for punishing misdemeanours. Nevertheless, in these early classes, consisting of large numbers of boys and girls, there was, he recalled, ‘an egalitarian spirit’, unimpaired by any serious social divisions.⁸ Despite differing economic circumstances, friendships developed between children of farmers, miners and shopkeepers. Resources were limited (classwork was still conducted by chalking answers on slates), but educational success was widely valued as the main route to social mobility. As the youngest in a family of eight children (four boys and four girls), whose nearest brother Alec was only two years his senior, John Cairncross felt that he was sometimes compared unfavourably to his siblings. Nevertheless, he impressed in his early schooling, with his retentive memory constantly earning good marks and a sound basis for his proficiency in languages.

In his early years he developed a strong interest in the history of Christianity, stimulated by Bible lessons and reinforced by the local environment of nonconformism. A prominent picture on the wall in the Cairncross dining room which portrayed a congregation abandoning the official church was a daily reminder of this. His brother Alec had been a very early convert to religious principles, who between the ages of five and eight studiously followed the commandments, obeying authority and seeking the rewards for good behaviour.

Heaven was a reality to be played for and that meant keeping commandments, ‘being good’ and doing as you were told. So I went through at an early age phases of religious experience not unlike those of the lower orders in earlier centuries, following a subservient moral code in the expectation of future but unknown benefits.⁹

Alec joined the Lesmahagow Boys Brigade which, like the scouts, had a religious side as well as an ethos of authority, organization and discipline. Through the Boys Brigade he was taken to camps, went on drilling exercises and marched with its band. Sunday school outings were other occasions where religion played a part in fostering notions of community and commitment.

John Cairncross, who on his own admission was in awe of his older brother – and, to a degree, remained so throughout his life – developed a more sceptical view of religion from an early age, notwithstanding his keen interest in its history and contribution to language and culture. This early scepticism suggested a wider search for greater intellectual freedom and an escape from narrow conventions and moral constraints.

I felt at odds early on with the inhibitions of a Calvinist society, and my aspirations were generally out of line with standard Scottish patterns. Strengthened by the pagan tradition which in Scotland flows just below the surface, I developed strong reservations about the prevailing Puritan morality.¹⁰

As they grew up together, he and Alec became more critical of religious doctrines, and in their own ways impatient with orthodoxies and prevailing dogmas. They welcomed emerging modern innovations, even if newspapers and the wireless were largely absent from home life. Their academic interests embraced the newer disciplines of political economy, English literature and modern languages. Yet there were some significant differences which originated in their early life. Alec, after outgrowing his early religious beliefs, was the more practical and rational of the two in the clarity and elucidation of his arguments and his problem-solving approach to study – an early example being his willingness to offer solutions to The Glasgow Herald’s chess queries.¹¹ He quickly won the respect of teachers as an impressive thinker with a good future ahead of him, even if his ambitions prior to university had been limited to chartered accountancy.

His younger brother ‘Johnny’, slight in build, redheaded, impulsive and, at times, impractical, presented a more challenging proposition for his teachers. Inquisitive, like his brother, he was less cautious and conservative and more likely to rebel. He was precocious, even poetical in some of his ideas and occasionally musical, filling some of his spare hours with piano lessons while his brother was absorbed in chess. These early interests eventually lead him down a different path to the one taken by his brother. The brothers both excelled at school, and it must have been to their mutual benefit that being so close in age they could share experiences, discuss their teachers and compare their grades.

When John Cairncross was born, the family lived in Pine Cottage in the village, which could barely accommodate the large family of eight children, two adults and a maid. In 1922, they bought Helenslea, a bigger house situated on a small slope, winding down to the main street of the village and Alexander’s Ironmongers. Space was still limited, with John and Alec sharing a bedroom and the maid sleeping in the kitchen. At home the Cairncrosses, like other village families, often adopted the local dialect, Old Lowland Scots, or Lallans. T. S. Cairncross, in his poetry, drew much from Lallans in his comments on Scottish identity and in articulating the predicament facing the people of the borders. In John Cairncross’s own estimation, the dialect was ideal preparation for his career as a linguist as it enabled him to appreciate different vocabularies and intonations, while loosening any inhibitions in speaking foreign languages. He was first introduced to formal French in the upper school by the formidable Miss Williamson, who combined rigorous testing of French verbs with Friday afternoon sewing lessons for the boys (while the girls did gym). More significantly, Miss Williamson’s class first opened his horizons to European culture, which from his teens became a growing obsession and the source of early aspirations to travel.

The school’s English teacher, Robin Macintyre, stimulated a lifelong passion for Shakespeare with the chance to act out scenes and explore the world of English literature, though the school buildings could hardly accommodate any theatre productions. The Cairncrosses had already made their mark in that subject. Andrew Cairncross, the elder of the four Cairncross brothers, was by the late 1920s already an English teacher at a neighbouring school. He would become a distinguished Shakespearean scholar, which he combined with teaching duties in Scottish secondary schools until later moving to the United States as a university professor.

John Cairncross’s early schooling had the wider benefit of exciting in him an interest in books and the habit of reading. Reading for him, as for others, was in its own way an escape, and the future bi...