John Branston kindly sends me another of his profiles of twentieth century literary figures published in the Morning Star. This is the full version of the article, including some material cut from the print version. Also by John on this blog:Patrick Hamilton: Love and Death in Publand
Was the Propaganda War fought on the playing fields of Eton? John Branston investigates an improbable anti-nazi propagandist inside MI5.
An Oxford Spy
This month marks the centenary of the birth of Brian Howard, the brightest of the 'Bright Young Things', incontestably the most brilliant wit of his generation, an Etonian aesthete and 'new symbolist' poet, who was also a colossal snob who toadied up to peers of the realm, and a drunkard and cocaine addict. So, you may ask, how was such an indiscreet individual recruited into Britain's secret intelligence service?
After all, Howard, the notorious, louche, dandified teen-age protégé of Edith Sitwell, and disciple of Gertrude Stein, is remembered more today for providing the model for Anthony Blanche, the social butterfly in Evelyn Waugh's 'Brideshead Revisited', than for his far more sombre role as a spy in MI5 during WW2. Yet, in Howard's dedicated social climbing at Oxford, his exclusive pursuit of the university's younger peerage, lies the secret of his value as a spy in the highest echelons of the British Establishment.
'Put your trust in the Lords' was the ironic motto on a banner in his Oxford undergraduate rooms. Howard's characteristic biting wit when a student can be heard in his mocking plea, recalled from one his 'tuft-hunting' expeditions: 'I say, has a rather tall peer with a head the size of a walnut passed this way?'
So why did Howard later spy on his 'own crowd' of aristocratic 'swells'? Well, judged by his spymasters, within his glittering smart set a number of crypto-nazis and collaborationists had yet to be 'outed'. (Howard joined MI5 in 1940, the year Mosley, Britain's blackshirt fascist leader, was imprisoned.)
As the writer Maurice Richardson remarked, 'Howard saw, long before most of his contemporaries, the dangers of fascism ... and was one of the first to denounce Hitler's nazism as organised barbarism of the vilest kind ... in the early 'thirties he showed great personal courage.'
In 1931, in Germany, Howard had become influenced by novelist Thomas Mann's loathing for Hitler and he filed anti-Hitler articles to the British press.
Specifically, as a Jew (he was bullied at Eton for his Jewishness), and due to his wider confraternity with Germany's persecuted Jews, Howard was granted deeper insights into the nazi's national ideology than many journalists of his time.
Howard's shrewd understanding of the German psyche sprang, ironically, from a long period of psychoanalysis in Germany in the late 1920s, at the behest of his powerful mother who hoped to 'cure' Brian's 'homosexualism'.
In Waugh's 'Brideshead', when Anthony Blanche (a.k.a. Howard) is 'debagged' by Oxford athletic 'hearties', he quips, 'If you knew anything of sexual psychology you would know that nothing would give me keener pleasure than to be manhandled by you meaty boys.'
Despite such flippancy parodied here, Howard's acute political prescience is revealed in his journalism of the 1930s.
Howard's first scoop was an interview in 1932 with Hitler's press chief, Dr Hanfstaengl.
Howard: 'Why this hatred of Jews?' Dr Hanfstaengl: 'Jews! Jews! Because they made the English and American theatres into sewers, Ours, too. Look at Reinhardt. Muck!' (The word 'scheiss' for 'shit' was used here. Howard is referring to Max Reinhardt, the Austrian theatrical entrepreneur who was of Jewish descent. My father, Heinrich Braunstein, was within Reinhardt's creative circle in the 1930s.)
Later, in 1939, Howard assisted the release of a number of anti-nazi Germans imprisoned in France.
In 1940, Howard was recruited into MI5 as an undercover 'outside contact' to report on pro-nazi personalities.
His political acumen must have been respected by MI5 because, in the early years of WW2, Howard's dark apprehensions from the 1930s were reflected in a series of astonishingly sophisticated anti-nazi propaganda scripts he wrote for BBC radio.
These scripts were some of the earliest to broadcast the facts of the genocidal 'eugenics programme' of the Third Reich. During this time he renewed his acquaintance with the spy, Guy Burgess, a fellow Old Etonian, and also a BBC correspondent. They would meet in the Ritz basement bar, 'L'Abri' (the 'Shelter'), the writer, Michael Nelson, once told me.
Burgess, one of the Soviet's 'Cambridge Five' spy ring, had studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, and he and Oxonian Howard knew each other in 1937, in Germany.
Instructed by his Soviet controllers, Burgess had tactically joined the Anglo-German Fellowship in the 1930s as a cover to conceal his youthful conversion to Communism within a left-wing students' coterie at Cambridge. He had close links with the German Propaganda Ministry.
This experience served Burgess well when, after working for the BBC until 1938, he joined Section D of MI6 as a propaganda expert assigned to recruit new agents to British intelligence.
Hence, given the two men's common social background (truly 'Old School'), I believe the documentary exactitude of Brian Howard's dramatised 'news-cast' propaganda was derived partially from Burgess's 'insider knowledge'. Throughout the war Burgess worked for the BBC, yet between 1939 and 1941 he was engaged on MI5's war propaganda.
So it's highly likely that Burgess was feeding additional classified material to Howard when this improbable dramatist and MI5 snoop was commissioned to write scripts for the BBC's 'Black Gallery' propaganda broadcasts.
What strikes us as odd is the stark contrast between the maturity of Howard's calculated vilification of nazi ideologues in his early broadcasts and the flipside of his shrill campery which echoed that of the so-called Homintern. (Cyril Connolly boasted of having invented the term 'Homintern' for an international network of influential homosexuals whose bias he defined as 'homo-communism'.)
There is vituperative satire, which seems to verge on self-excoriation, when Howard parodies nazi anti-Semitic propaganda in his radio scripts. His Goebbels-like rabble-rouser declaims: 'Conscience is a Jewish invention. Like circumcision, it mutilates man.'
Howard's propagandising was cleverly conceived as character assassination calculated to defame. Such a BBC script was entitled 'Baldur von Schirach', broadcast in 1942.
In 1933, von Schirach was appointed leader of the Hitler Youth movement, destined to number 8 million members. In 1940, Hitler appointed him Governor of Vienna. During his rule, 185,000 Jews were deported to Polish ghettos, a deed described by von Schirach as a 'contribution to European culture'.
Thus we can apprehend Howard's deep abiding compassion, and the full force of his fury, when, in his radio documentary, he has the anguished voice of one of von Schirach's victims, a small child, cry out: 'I am dead ... A State Doctor killed me in a little shed ... it was called the Hitler Room. I don't think he can know about it. Do you, Herr State Youth Leader?'
The radio narrator continues his attack on von Schirach: 'You got back into favour with Hitler ... You set the Hitler Youth to burning the synagogues, and knocking down Jews in the street...'
Howard also exposes Hitler's state programme of enforced sterilisation, expressed through the poignant words of a young German mother: 'I am one of the young women who was sterilised by the State ... My child died before it was even conceived. For Hitler.'
This BBC broadcast also includes references to the de-Christianising of Germany. Von Schirach wrote national prayers in praise of Hitler, so we can understand the intent of other radio voices in an exchange between a German schoolmistress and her indoctrinated pupils: 'Who, children, is it that most reminds us of Jesus?' Answer: 'The Fuehrer!' Question: 'And who most reminds us of the disciples...?' Answer: 'General Goering, Doctor Goebbels, and Captain Roehm!' etc.
(This catechism of the Trinity reflects the statement by the Reich Minister for Church Affairs, Kerrl, delivered in 1937: 'There has now risen a new authority as to what Christ and Christianity is. This new authority is Adolph Hitler.')
Howard's broadcast contained highly precise data: addresses of von Schirach's private residences and details of his close relationship to Hitler.
So, my contention is that in Howard's scripts we recognise a most bizarre conjunction of two ex-Etonians who, for a brief span, were bound together in a common cause.
In this unusual alliance further ironies abound. When Burgess escaped to the USSR, a newspaper manhunt was launched, and by the strangest of coincidences, which made world headlines, it was the Oxford spy, Howard, while staying in Asolo in Italy, who was mistaken for the missing Cambridge spy.
Perhaps our last thought of this 'Odd Couple' of espionage should be the memory of these two alcoholic counter-propagandists propping up the basement bar below the Ritz in wartime.
(In the Ritz, the 'Shelter' bar was dimly illuminated by makeshift chandeliers formed from old champagne bottles with candles stuffed in their necks.)
We can imagine them listening to the nasal drawl of their opposition, the fascistic propagandist, 'Lord Haw-Haw', broadcasting from Germany. (The sandbagged Ritz bar was one Lord Haw-Haws favourite targets for attack, sneering that only plutocrats could enjoy such luxuries.)
And there we shall take our leave of them: two extraordinarily flamboyant ex-Etonians, a revolutionary and an anti-fascist, each wearing a private smile, and each raising a glass in secret salute to his next devious brain-washing scheme, and to his own infinite guile.
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John Branston's father served in the British Army throughout WW2 and was an interpreter during the interrogation of nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg Trials; he was a colleague of Max Reinhardt, mentioned in this article.
