BOOK OF THE WEEK

SPIES AND STARS

by Charlotte Bingham (Bloomsbury £16.99, 272 pp)

Charlotte Bingham’s father John was a member of MI5 and the inspiration for George Smiley; he carried a swordstick and went about ‘doing covert security work in defence of the nation’.

We are told that he possessed a deceptively mild manner, and that his silences and low voice were full of implied threat. ‘He never gets angry,’ says Charlotte, ‘and people who don’t get angry are always to be feared’, though I don’t see how that explains Hitler, or even my Welsh mother.

John Bingham doesn’t have much opportunity to be cross or show his mettle in Spies And Stars. Indeed, the secret service seems a rather jolly family affair, as Charlotte is herself employed in her dad’s office, where the biggest crisis is jamming the typewriter with six sheets of carbon paper. (Younger readers, if they can control their hilarity and incredulity, will need to be told what a ‘typewriter’ looked like and what ‘carbon paper’ was used for.)

Author Charlotte Bingham (pictured) recalls working for her father John during the Fifties to recruit secret service agents

There’s always plenty of time for coffee breaks, cigarette breaks, long lunches and cocktails. Top Secret files are scattered about, or deliberately lost by being chucked down the lift shaft during staged fire drills, which are the department’s sole excitement.

Having given the Cold War a lot of thought, Bingham and his fellow security officers have decided that if Europe were to be swamped by Russians ‘intent on exterminating us’, then the most dangerous moment is at the weekend — ‘that is the time to invade a country, when they’re enjoying lunch’.

The purpose of Nato, therefore, and the nuclear deterrent, is to safeguard the Yorkshire pudding.

Meanwhile, though the good people of Britain ‘would always choose washing machines and a telly over Communism’, there remains the small danger of enemies within, and MI5 and MI6 liked to try to keep on top of the possible infiltration by moles, monitoring anyone they felt may be ‘intent on bending minds and hearts towards Stalin’.

The subject of this jaunty book is the world of the theatre. Charlotte, who tells people she’s merely ‘a secretary at that War Office place’, befriends actors, directors, producers and playwrights, because such characters are all too often suspiciously Left-wing. Most of them, in any event, are out of work, dine on cornflakes, and are in need of funds — so Charlotte and her father recruit them before agents from behind the Iron Curtain think of doing so.

A letter from Bingham (typed as often as not by Charlotte) goes out to a susceptible person, saying, ‘If you care to come to the Cleveland Hotel on a date of your choosing, I may be able to help you with something of interest regarding your future.’ I can just hear Alec Guinness murmuring that in a voice-over.

John Bingham (pictured) gave a man named Harry the task of disguising himself as a Labour voter who sells newspapers in the hopes of uncovering any suspicious activities

By the way, I don’t know where any Cleveland Hotel may be, as in my experience intelligence officers used the Lansdowne Club in Berkeley Square for these rendezvous.

The book is set in the Fifties, and the Shaftesbury Avenue and Denham Studios atmosphere is well caught: Laurence Olivier is putting on verse plays, theatre-in-the-round is coming in, ‘kitchen sink’ dramas are on the horizon, as is the growth of commercial television and the explosion in soap powder advertising. To MI5, these cultural and social developments were potentially perilous. The socialist revolution of the Attlee government, student agitators from ‘red brick’ universities waving placards, sitting down in Trafalgar Square and banning the bomb, and ‘angry young men’ like John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter and Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim sounding off —what if new high-brow plays and novels, let alone popular entertainment, were suddenly rife with ‘humourless Stalinist toadies’?

Bingham’s specific target here is a chap simply known as Harry. Happily, Harry is a perfectly old-school conservative. He has appeared in respectable black-and-white war films, where English actors are always playing Nazis, and he with alacrity becomes an ‘undercover agent’ for Charlotte’s father, learning about aliases and passwords.

Harry disguises himself as a typical Labour voter (a beard, a grubby shirt: the Corbyn look) to sell copies of the Daily Worker at High Street Kensington Tube station.

Charlotte (pictured) recalls being impressed by a figure called 'Sir' who could take a draught of his drink while smoking a cigarette

His task is to take note of his regular customers. Codes and messages are to be hidden in matchboxes, sold by an apparently blind man. Parcels containing secret documents are later collected from a dead letter drop and marked as ‘lace doilies’.

An interesting theme running through Charlotte’s book is the way espionage is basically a histrionic trade — pretence, mimicry, camouflage, bluff, blending in with the background. ‘You would be surprised’, says the author’s father, ‘how much people will confide to a stranger after a pint or two, especially if he listens to them. Not many people are good at listening.’

Harry masters the art, and we rather leave the clandestine, foggy Le Carre realms behind when Spies And Stars shifts into being a bouncy, jolly-hockey-sticks romp, as Charlotte and her recruit explore and encounter the eccentric denizens of provincial repertory theatre, West End farce, music hall and finally Hollywood — where a Red is anyone who thinks ‘poor people should have food on the table’.

Flamboyance is the keynote. Though few, if any, are Stalinists, many of the personalities we meet are serious boozers, opening the gin bottle at 10.30 am. Charlotte is particularly impressed at the way a figure called ‘Sir’ (‘which is how Laurence Olivier used to be known) could take ‘a deep draught of his drink at the same time as pulling on a cigarette’.

SPIES AND STARS by Charlotte Bingham (Bloomsbury £16.99, 272 pp)

Though Harry was supposed to report back to John Bingham any suspicious activities, little occurs, save drugged drinks (avoided) and a honeytrap (averted). We are told that Russian agents ‘can put razor blades in stuffed cabbage and no one ever notices until the pudding’, but we don’t see this happen.

I can’t really believe Billy Wilder drank ten Martinis during the Academy Awards, nor that Burt Lancaster lived exclusively on chocolate cake. But it rings true that ‘Richard Burton always says just because a woman says yes, you can’t always be sure she’ll follow through,’ though Elizabeth Taylor did.

This whimsical memoir is much exaggerated, I should think. But that is not a criticism. Behind the masks of narrative invention there is a lot of fact here about Cold War surveillance techniques and prevalent Establishment attitudes. I loved it.