Codename Intelligentsia

The Life and Times of the Honourable Ivor Montagu, Filmmaker, Communist, Spy

Russell Campbell

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780750987059
• eBook ISBN:
  9780750988445
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

He was the son of a hereditary peer, one of the wealthiest men in Britain. His childhood was privileged; at Cambridge, he flourished. At the age of 21, he founded The Film Society, and became a pioneering standard-bearer for film as art. He was a collaborator of Alfred Hitchcock, rescuing The Lodger and later producing his ground-breaking British thrillers The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, Secret Agent and Sabotage. He directed comedies from stories by H.G. Wells, worked in Hollywood with Eisenstein, and made documentaries in Spain during the Civil War. He lobbied for Trotsky to be granted asylum in the UK, and became a leading propagandist for the anti-fascist and Communist cause. Under the nose of MI5, who kept him under constant surveillance, he became a secret agent of the Comintern and a Soviet spy. He was a man of high intelligence and moral concern, yet he was blind to the atrocities of the Stalin regime. This is the remarkable story of Ivor Montagu, and of the burgeoning cinematic culture and left-wing politics of Britain between the wars. It is a story of restless energy, generosity of spirit, creative achievement and intellectual corruption.

1

PROLOGUE

intelligentsia, n. The part of a nation (orig. in 19th-cent. Russia) that aspires to intellectual activity and political initiative; a section of society regarded as educated and possessing culture and political influence.

Oxford English Dictionary

‘IN EVERY society,’ as the German sociologist Karl Mannheim observed, ‘there are social groups whose special task it is to provide an interpretation of the world for that society. We call these the “intelligentsia”.’ This is the case history of a member of the British intelligentsia in the twentieth century. It focuses particularly on the interwar years, a period that extended, in the case of someone like Ivor Montagu who identified closely with the Soviet Union, to the entry of that country into the war against Hitler in June 1941. As biography, it is deliberately partial. It deals very little with Montagu’s personal life. It focuses on two of his existential passions, film and left-wing politics, and all but ignores two others: zoology and table tennis. It pays scant attention to his work as a translator and literary agent. Apart from a skimpy epilogue, it halts abruptly at a point when he still had more than half his life to live. But within the delimited time span, it seeks to explore in depth his role as an active participant in the cultural and political ferment of the era.¹

‘The fact of belonging to the same class, and that of belonging to the same generation or age group, have this in common,’ Mannheim wrote, ‘that both endow the individuals sharing in them with a common location in the social and historical process, and thereby limit them to a specific range of potential experience, predisposing them for a certain characteristic mode of thought and experience, and a characteristic type of historically relevant action.’ Montagu’s class was that of the liberal, progressive wing of the bourgeoisie, with a newly acquired aristocratic tinge; his generation that which grew up with the art form of the twentieth century, the cinema, and which in their youth experienced, if from afar, both the horror of the Great War and the exhilaration of the Russian Revolution. As this book will reveal, Montagu would, like others of his time, become (semi-) detached from his class through a conscious act of rebellion and throw in his lot, as a freelance intellectual, with the proletariat.²

The intelligentsia, Arthur Koestler was to write, are ‘the liaison agents between the way we live and the way we could live according to the contemporary level of objective knowledge.’ Those who were ‘snugly tucked into the social hierarchy’ obviously had ‘no strong impulse towards independent thought’, while ‘the great majority of the oppressed, the underdogs, lack the opportunity or the objectivity or both, for the pursuit of independent thought.’ And thus it is that ‘the function of independent thinking falls to those sandwiched in between two social layers, and exposed to the pressure of both.’³

Codename Intelligentsia is a study of Ivor Montagu as such a ‘liaison agent’, a go-between. It is the story of a young man from a privileged background who set out on his journey through life possessed of a desire both to immerse himself in the cultural life of modernity and to rectify social injustice. The following pages will disclose where the journey took him. It is a tale of the times.

*

‘Of what use is Siberia to Russia?’ is question III of the 7-year-old schoolboy’s Geography examination. His answer follows: ‘Russia sends her prisoners to Siberia, where they work, and there is hardly any colder and more horrible place than Siberia.’⁴

It is 1911, and the young Hon. Ivor Montagu is doing well in his first year at Mr Gibbs’s preparatory school in Sloane Street, central London. When the results come out, he tops the class in Geography, as well as in Bible Lessons, Arithmetic, Reading, and Grammar. Backing this up with second place in Tales, English History, and Recitation, and third in Natural History and Dictation, he comes first overall. Only a sixth in Picture Study, and a lamentable ninth in Writing and French, blot his copybook.⁵

It is a promising start for the man who was to be called (by Michael Balcon, the renowned film producer) ‘one of the first real intellectual artists of the cinema’, and (by Rachael Low, doyenne of British film historians) ‘an exceptional man in many ways and a brilliant film maker’. He was, wrote the critic Geoff Brown, ‘the period’s most dynamic, visible, and well-connected fighter for art cinema’. If he was not to receive honours for his work in film, by the end of his life Montagu had been awarded the Order of Liberation, 1st Class (Bulgaria), the Order of the Pole Star (Mongolia), and the Lenin Peace Prize, and inducted into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame. He had a ‘warm and certainly idiosyncratic charisma’, declared the Communist footballer Jim Riordan, and Balcon, with whom he worked for a number of years, responded to his ‘warm and generous nature’. ‘Ivor Montagu was an idealist,’ concedes journalist Ben Macintyre in a recent book, ‘but his actions were treasonable.’⁶

Ivor Goldsmid Samuel Montagu was born in London on 23 April 1904 to a banker, Louis Samuel Montagu, and his wife Gladys Helen Rachel, née Goldsmid. He was the third son: Stuart had been born in 1899, and Ewen in 1901. A daughter, Joyce, was to follow in 1909. Montagu was the family name, but hadn’t been so for long. Ivor’s paternal grandfather had been born (in 1832) Montagu Samuel, but he was enrolled at school by mistake as Samuel Montagu, and it was decided to keep the change. The boy, son of the Liverpool watchmaker/pawnbroker Louis Samuel, became a budding young financier and founded the merchant bank of Samuel & Montagu, later Samuel Montagu & Co., in 1853. In 1894, the year he was created a baronet, the switch was formalised, and he was granted a Royal licence to assume Montagu as a surname.⁷

Set up as a bullion broking business at the time of the Australian gold rush, the bank did well, and Samuel Montagu prospered. He became Liberal Member of Parliament for Whitechapel from 1885 to 1900, espousing causes of social justice including aid for the poor and the small farmer and the municipalisation of public utilities. He was also active in facilitating the emigration of Jews persecuted in Eastern Europe, and in the provision of working-class housing. In 1907, despite his belief that the hereditary peerage was an obstacle to social reform (he was treasurer of the National League for the Abolition of the House of Lords), he was made a baron, the second Jewish peer in Britain after Rothschild. There were claims, of course, that he had bought his titles. In his autobiography, Ivor simply notes that his grandfather ‘was widely celebrated for philanthropic exercises, no doubt there were the usual contributions to the party funds.’⁸

The newly minted aristocrat thought of calling himself Lord Montagu, and made enquiries with the existing Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, who replied, ‘I have no objection to sharing my name with you, if you will share your money with me.’ So instead he became the first Baron Swaythling, named after the village and railway station adjacent to his country seat at South Stoneham, near Southampton. This name-switching was observed with acerbic wit, possibly tinged with anti-Semitism, by Hilaire Belloc, who composed a ditty on the subject:

Montagu, first Baron Swaythling he,

Thus is known to you & me.

But the Devil down in hell

Knows the man as Samuel.

And though it may not sound the same

It is the blighter’s proper name.⁹

Ivor’s father, Louis Montagu, inherited the title on Samuel’s death in 1911. The 2nd Baron Swaythling, who carried on in the banking business, was a less public figure than the 1st. He did not run for office, but was a Liberal in the family tradition and took his seat in the House of Lords (while expressing his belief in a unicameral legislature). Active in Jewish causes, he was a leading figure in the League of British Jews and served as President of the Federation of Synagogues. In religion Louis was staunchly orthodox (although he disobeyed the injunction not to mix dairy products and meat, claiming to have found a passage in the Bible which vindicated his position). A man of solid build, ‘opinionated’ and ‘stubborn’ according to Ivor, he was a keen shot and excellent golfer, loved fishing, and was President for a time of the Hampshire County Cricket Club. At home he entertained frequently, played bridge, enjoyed jigsaws, and collected japonaiserie.¹⁰

Lady Swaythling, Ivor’s mother, was ten years younger than her husband, having married at 19. Gladys Montagu was the daughter of the prominent Zionist Albert Goldsmid, the first Jewish colonel in the British Army and the founder of the Jewish Lads’ Brigade. Ivor describes her as ‘very pretty, gay, charming, vivacious … constantly ready to laugh and pleased by jokes.’ She managed the large household, being ‘perpetually, visibly, busy’; she was a popular Society hostess, took singing lessons, was an enthusiastic fencer, and worked for charity. Amongst her close friends was Princess Victoria Mary (‘May’), who became Queen Mary when her husband acceded to the throne as George V in 1910. Both Ivor’s parents were accomplished linguists: Gladys knew French and German, with ‘smatterings of Hebrew, Spanish and Italian’, while Louis spoke fluent Japanese. They were a happy couple.¹¹

The Montagus and their Samuel relatives were part of a ‘West End Cousinhood’ of leading Jewish families who had made their fortunes during the expansionary imperial era of Victorian commerce. Others included the Rothschilds, the Goldsmids, the Montefiores, the Cohens, the Waleys, and the Solomons. Many had played prominent parts in the movement for Jewish emancipation.¹²

Politics was in the air in the Montagu household, Ivor relates. The boy rubbed shoulders with ‘the potentates and ministers who needed entertaining as part of my father’s financial routine.’ Uncle Edwin and Cousin Herbert were ‘rising meteors of the Liberal Party’: Edwin Montagu, Louis’s brother, was MP for Chesterton (West Cambridgeshire), private secretary to (and personal friend of) Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, and subsequently Under-Secretary of State for India; Herbert Samuel, Louis’s cousin, was MP for Cleveland and a member of Asquith’s Cabinet as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and later Postmaster-General (in 1909, as Assistant Home Secretary, he piloted the Cinematograph Films Act through Parliament). Ivor’s Aunt Lily (Lilian Montagu, Louis’s sister) was a campaigner for women’s welfare and a founder of liberal Judaism – much to her father’s dismay.¹³

The Montagu family home was 28 Kensington Court, in the West End. In his memoirs, Ivor describes in loving detail the ornate carved furniture, the lacquered cabinets, the marquetry, the chairs upholstered in scarlet silk and chestnut-coloured leather, the decorative tiles, the wooden panelling, the art nouveau fireplaces, the candelabras, the parquet floors. One feature particularly fascinated the young boy, a pokey servants’ lift, whose function was ‘to carry trays or washing baskets or themselves invisibly past the gentlemanly regions when untimely menial presence might offend convention’.¹⁴

Surpassing the London home in grandeur, however, was the 2nd Baron’s country estate, Townhill Park House. Adjoining Samuel Montagu’s South Stoneham property and bought by him towards the end of the century for Louis’s use, it comprised a villa dating from the 1790s and extensive grounds. The building was decaying; under Swaythling ownership, it was restored and enlarged in Italianate style by the architect Leonard Rome Guthrie in 1911–12, and after the war a music room and boudoir were added for Lady Swaythling. Most impressive of the renovated spaces was the elegant music room, in which works by Gainsborough, Turner and other artists were displayed, ‘perfectly illuminated’ against polished walnut panels of exquisite craftsmanship. The gardens, noted for their rhododendrons and camellias, were laid out by the leading designer Gertrude Jekyll.¹⁵

Townhill Park was a veritable fiefdom replete with cowhouse, dairy, stables, poultry houses, pigsties, potting sheds, barns and tool rooms. There were kitchen gardens, hothouses and orchards, and a retinue of menservants, gardeners, chauffeurs, maids, cooks, and nannies, as well as secretaries, accompanists, and tutors. Here, Ivor was to spend the weekends and holidays of his childhood and youth.¹⁶

Formalities were observed. Evening dress for dinner was de rigueur (Ivor was forever untidy and perpetually embarrassed by his mother smartening him up in public). There were annual rituals, like the cricket match in summer between the houses of Townhill and South Stoneham (Ivor loved cricket but was handicapped through lack of skill in batting, bowling, and throwing), the shooting parties in autumn (Ivor says he never shot for entertainment), and the New Year’s Eve balls (Ivor hated dancing, and disliked all physical contact). The young master was waited on hand and foot. ‘I was a spoiled brat,’ he admits. ‘I never cooked, washed up, made the beds, mended or tidied my clothes, cleaned my shoes.’¹⁷

Young Ivor’s interest in the cinema was sparked by the family’s ownership of a praxinoscope – an optical toy that, when rotated, gave an illusion of movement to its drawn figures of, for example, a horse and rider jumping. At the age of 4 or 5 he was taken by his nursemaid to Hale’s Tours, a simulated railway journey in which views filmed from a train were projected inside an imitation carriage. Later he saw pictures (in a ‘fleapit’ in High Street) starring Joh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary
• 1 Prologue
• 2 Cambridge
• 3 Film Culture
• 4 The Proletarian Cause
• 5 The Film Industry
• 6 Cultural Relations
• 7 Subversive Cinema
• 8 Hollywood
• 9 Trotsky
• 10 Commitment
• 11 Gaumont-British
• 12 Fighting Fascism
• 13 Moscow and Madrid
• 14 Agitprop
• 15 Espionage
• 16 Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Notes
• Picture Section