Britain, was once a country for, but now fails to say "Farewell" to an old documentary Film Director and 'Prince of the European Artistic Community', Peter Adam

Page views : 986
Why has Peter's death at the age of 90 in Sèvres, France, passed unregarded in the British press and certainly without an obituary marking the 31 years he spent contributing to the cultural life in Britain would warrant. In the 1970s and 80s, along with the reporters James Mossman and Olivier Todd, his was a recognisable face and voice in BBC television documentaries yet, apart from half a dozen French tweets, only Le Monde marked his passing with : 'Born in Germany, he had chosen British nationality and the English language to work as a documentary film maker for the BBC. His insatiable curiosity and immense culture predestined him to be a remarkable witness to his time.' 

When he retired from the BBC in 1989, having worked for the Corporation for 21 years, it had been a different story. David Attenborough who had worked as Controller of BBC2 from 1965–1969, paid tribute to him in saying : 'With gratitude to you for having done so much to help top establish the character and distinction of BBC 2.' 

Joan Bakewell, journalist and tv presenter said : 'Your contribution to the art of the television and through that, to rest of the civilised world, is outstanding. For your judgement sympathy and exquisite taste, my thanks.' The theatre director David Jones lamented : 'Here goes the prince of European artistic community and bright light to the benighted barbarians of Britain' and Melvyn Bragg, the then Head of Arts at London Weekend Television, said : 'France's gain, England's loss.'

Peter himself wrote : 'My life at the BBC was filled with affection for my work and my colleagues. Maybe the things I had been trying to do all those years with such stubborn tenacity were not totally in vain and the multi-faceted, middle-European egghead, with old fashioned respect for culture, was appreciated. I, the foreigner had been for a brief moment allowed to be part of television which was such a glory of British life. I finally belonged.'

Having arrived in Britain, Peter was fortunate in knowing Dr Patrick Woodcock who was 'everybody's doctor.' He recalled : 'For Patrick, art always rivalled medicine and his surgery was really the antechamber to his living room.' Taken under Patrick's wing he would be introduced to guests like Joyce Carey, Alan Bates and Sheila Hancock. In addition, 'Patrick also decided to get rid of my dreadful American accent.'  He also met the historical biographer Hester Chapman and actors Peggy Ashcroft and John Gielgud and 'thought that he was the greatest actor and wisest man I ever met.' 

He recalled : 'For me it was a formidable introduction to London theatre and literary life. Playing the role of the scoundrel and charmer I had quickly learned to participate in conversation and not be impressed.' He met Franco Zeffirelli who was in London directing Judy Dench and John Stride in Romeo and Juliet and recorded that 'we became instant friends' and his friendship with painter Keith Vaughan led him to meet the young David Hockney.

It was in 1961 that at the age of 32 that he made his debut as a film director working for a small film company called 'Television Advertising.' He confessed his advert for Spanish margarine wasn't that good, but his cigarette commercial with actress, Fenella Fielding, won a prize in New York.

More important : he was able to watch and learn from John Schlesinger and Dick Lester when they directed, persuaded the cutting editor to teach him his trade and Tony Shaffer, whose brother and identical twin was Peter and who a few years later wrote 'Sleuth,' instructed him in writing.

In 1964 when the TV Commercial company went bust he was taken on by A.B.Pathé to look after their German commercial side and directed over a hundred commercials. Between 1964-65 he was out of work, then in 1967 he dined at Peter Shaffer's and : 'At the table sat a man who would change the course of my life, the journalist James Mossman. Two weeks later I was employed by the BBC.'

James became his mentor and was, according to Peter, 'one of a breed of reporters of passionate integrity and journalistic brilliance' and in 1968 Peter was employed as a researcher for 3 programmes James was working on for 'Panorama' entitled 'Democracy on Trial.' He arranged an interview with student leader Rudi Dutshke and the Observer called the resulting programme 'The Best tv Documentary of the Year.'

He now moved to the magazine '24 Hours' as a producer and made a film about Czech refugees who had fled to Vienna after the Russian suppression of the 'Prague Spring' and another on the Farnborough Air Show, which was shot with no commentary, but with a pop song in its place. Then came his 'Old People' about the plight of the poor in 1960s London. Fyfe Robertson, who supplied the commentary told him : "You're different lad. Make sure the institution serves you and not the other way round."

He now found himself summoned to the Controller of BBC 1, Paul Fox, who asked : "You still have a German passport Peter ? The BBC has to send someone to Biafra and that someone can't be British This is a dangerous job and a big one."
He was given the French reporter Olivier Todd and a French film crew and the resulting programme was watched by an audience of 7 million viewers and was considered by Peter to be one of the best programmes he ever made. Paul Fox told him that it was a great piece of work, but his own judgement was that 'each frame told such a powerful story , it would have been difficult to fail.' It gave him a big boost to his career : 'In Lime Grove I had suddenly moved to the forefront. Jim was very proud. I now sat at the table of the top journalists.'

Peter now became a British subject and recalled : 'In order to work permanently at the BBC I had to become a British subject.' He made 'Cuba after 11 Years' for '24 Hours' before moving to the arts magazine 'Review' to work as one of its 4 producers and made programmes about André Malraux, Nureyev. the Netherlands Ballet and another film about Cuba, 'Art and the Revolution.'

In 1970 when Visconti was filming 'Death in Venice' with Dirk Bogart, he flew to Venice to interview the director on location before making 'Visconti at Work.' In his autobiography, published in 1995, he said that 'Review was am honourable effort to deal with the arts on television and by today's standards positively highbrow.' 

For another programme he filmed a whole sequence on Andy Warhol with coca cola bottles on a shelf and brillo pads in a supermarket and was instrumental in introducing Warhol to David Hockney. It was about this time that the comedy actor Kenneth Williams introduced him to Joe Orton.

Most of the interviews with the likes of Kurt Vonnegut, Graham Greene, John Updike and a 'bird-like' Murial Spark' were done in the studio, but those filmed in Peter's flat in Earl's Terrace featured Edward Albee, Peter Shaffer, John Gielgud, Doris Lessing and Mick Jagger. The latter was in a 'tweed suit and gave the impression of being frightfully respectable, although he complained about the tea which was poured out of grandmother Adam's silver tea service.'

After the suicide of James Mossman he made his documentary dedication in the shape of his film 'To Be a Witness,' and asked Peter Shaffer to write the script in which he said of James : 'A man who left behind in the guts of many us the feeling of a presence so authentic, so dazzling, so warm and so original that we know we will never encounter its like again.'

In 1972, at the age of 43, with his time with 'Review' coming to an end, he reflected that he had made 32 programmes in two and half years, with his film about 'Man Ray' giving him the greatest pleasure and ended with 'Royal Dreams : Visconti and Ludwig of Bavaria.'

His next venture was all his own. Entitled 'Them and Us' he recalled : 'For my first work I proposed to make a series of programmes about the culture in the European Community, which we were finally about to join 'The 'series broke new ground for the BBC. Each part was ninety minutes long, made by a very small team and used foreign crews.'

He knew it wouldn't be easy : 'I was not a writer and I had an accent, which was a serious handicap. I was a good battler, a sly diplomat and a puller of strings.' In the event he presented 'Them and Us : Germany' the first programme in the series which covered other European states and which would occupy him for the next two years and bring him : 'much joy, many good and some bad reviews and even some fame.'

In 1976 he made 'Spirit of Place : Lawrence Durrell's Greece' which featured the author Lawrence Durrell and in which he interspered with his questions and considered it to be 'a turning point in my career, even in my life. It made me discover the pleasure of writing.' His programme was nominated for a British Academy Award for 'Outstanding Service to Television.' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIOjaroRfEI&t=2m45s

In the same year he started work as the Editor of 'Arena' and said : 'I wanted Arena to be a programme about the nature of the theatre and of writing, not one which passed judgement' and in his first programme, Kenneth Tynan discussed with him and Claire Bloom the notion of great acting which he recorded as a 'disaster' and concluded that : 'I realised that to make a weekly programme with big names on a shoe-string budget would not be easy.' 

Interviews followed with Jeanne Moreau and Simone Signoret, but his tenure with 'Arena' was short lived and he left and joined 'Omnibus' which the BBC saw as a 'prestigious arts programme' for which he made 'Signs of a Vigorous Life' about the German cinema and 'Festa in Montepulciano' in Tuscany.

Then, between 1978 and 1981, a tumble of work followed which included 'Alexandria Revisited,' the interviews with Lotte Lenya and Lillian Helmann. He wrote and presented, his 'Homage to Kurt Weille and Burthold Brecht,' which was chosen for the Prix Italia. In addition, Lotte Lenya told him she liked his stage productions of 'Happy End' and Little Mahogany.'

1980 brought 'Artist at Work' which featured Edward Albee and David Hockney and the following year he directed 'The Soldiers' Tale' at the Festival Hall, which gave him the greatest satisfaction of his career and which received a review in the Guardian saying : 'It was just not of this world.' The following year he reprised it on the BBC with Ben Kingsley as the narrator.

By the time he started on his next series for the BBC he felt : 'my love affair with England began to wilt. Nostalgia and obsession with class was still he official ideology. In addition he felt that the decline of the BBC as the official safeguard of culture continued and he found that 'things became intolerably black annihilating all aspiration.'


In 1983 the BBC aired his series of six 'Master Photographers' in which he produced and conducted the interviews of some of the biggest names in European photography at the time, including : Jacques Henri Lartigue and Alfred Eisenstaedt, Andreas Feininger, Bill Brandt, Ansel Adams and Andre Kertesz.

In 1986 he wrote and produced his 8 part series : 'Architecture at the Crossroads' which examined the triumphs and failures of post-war architecture and included 'Doubt and Reassessment' , 'Stop the bulldozer' and 'Houses fit for People'.

In his last years in Britain he made 'Richard Strausss Remembered' :  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0ImK5CpSmo which won a GoldenStar for the 'Best Full Length Documentary' at the Houston Film Festival was narrated by John Gielgud.

He wrote and presented 'Architecture and Televison' and in 1987 came 'George Gershwin Remembered' :
https://archive.org/details/tntvillage_613700

His last work in Britain was 'Art of the Third Reich', which was nominated for a British Academy Award for 'Best Documentary of the Year.'  He was interviewed about his book of the same name by American  television journalist, Charlie Rose :  https://charlierose.com/videos/15579

Two years later, after 31 years in residence, he left Britain to follow his Argentinian lover Facundo Bo to France. At the time he asked himself : 'Was it not madness at sixty to give up work, friends, house, the country I felt totally at home in, even the language which had become my own ? It was a big step and all at once. And yet when I was asked qt a dinner party by a lady who did not know me : ' Mr Adam, why are you leaving ? I simply said : 'For love, and in this word lay the whole truth.'

Where did Peter come from ?

His cultural roots were in the Germany of the 1930s. Born Klaus-Peter in Berlin in 1929 along with his twin sister, Renate, the son of a Protestant mother, Luise and German father, Walter, who was a State Councillor and legal advisor to German Chancellior  Brüning and worked at Ministry of Finance. Peter himself said : 'We were an affluent, respectable family and lived in a style which was certainly beyond the salary of a senior councillor, for my father came from a wealthy Jewish family.' 

The family lived in spacious accommodation along with their nanny, Dada and Peter had access to his father's library which included all of Walter Scott's novels and at night their parents enjoyed a social life which encompassed both Berlin theatre and opera house. However, the increasingly hostile attitude to Jewish people after the Nazi success in the 1933 Reichstag elections, forced them to move to Cologne, where Walter got job as legal advisor to the big department store, Schloss und Levi. Then, with his father's death from ling cancer in 1935, Luise took Peter and Renate back to Berlin.

He wanted to join the junior division of the Hitler Youth, but had been barred from admission because of his Jewish blood. With the coming of the Second World War his school, a French lycée, was evacuated to a mountain resort in Silesia where he now 'slept in a large dormitory with a bunch of rowdy boys, telling dirty jokes and discussing the world all night long. In winter, having won a skiing competition, he was barred from accepting his award when a Hitler Youth stepped in and said : "This prize isn't for Judenjunge." He was 11 years old and recalled : 'When I returned to Berlin, I was a changed person.'

Back in Berlin, given the run of his father's library he was 'quite intoxicated by the French Romantics, Lamartine, Musset, poems and novels in which the heroes always died and the heroines of consumption.' This must have been an antidote to the death and destruction around him and the British and American saturation bombing on Berlin when he was 14 in 1943. Years later he wrote : 'I remember those hopeless mornings, the sky still black with smoke. People in torn or burnt clothes, carrying a few bundles, searched for survivors, walking aimlessly among the ruins covered in dust and plaster, unable to grasp what had happened.'

After school, in the afternoons he was assigned to a local hospital where he pushed recovering soldiers in their wheelchairs in the local park and read them Rilke's 'Cornet' : 'Riding, riding riding. And courage has grown so tired and longing so great.' He recalled the he : 'looked down the long room of beds. In each of them  lay a shattered existence, a broken body, betrayed and sacrificed. These were my enemies : they had fought Hitler's war, not mine. What sense did all this make ?  I often cried at night, lost and confused, not unlike those soldiers.'

In 1944 the family were moved to  the village of Tressdorf in Austria, where Peter, barred from attending school, was taught Latin by the local priest and English and French by his brother, who worked as a waiter. It was here that, at the age 16 he had his first experience of gay sex with a young officer who was a war journalist. Then, with the War over, back in Berlin he recalled : 'Thank God for Zeni. She was much older than me, that is three years older. She had done a stint as a chambermaid in Innsbruck and was versed in the art of lovemaking.'

Times were tough for the family in Post-War Berlin and in 1946 he experienced what many Germans had experienced before : cold and hunger, but he was now back at school - a mixed comprehensive and experienced the previously banned works of Brecht, Kafka and Thomas Mann.and took advantage of the small libraries oped up by the Americans in their sector of occupied Berlin with their American magazines and books like Steinbeck's 'East of Eden.' He recalled that he 'became Americanised almost overnight.'

It was at this time, he recalled : 'I came out of the closet before ever going in. Luise was a great help of course. She had many homosexual friends and once made the classical remark to some of my gay friends staying in our house  :"I don't mind your friends trying on my dresses, but I like them to put them back on the hanger."'

In 1949 he enrolled at the Free University of Berlin to study German, French Literature and the History of Art and two years later moved to Paris and enrolled at the Sorbonne to study a Cours de la Civilisation Française tailored for foreign students. It at this time he first met Cocteau who introduced him to Colette and he took to travel. On his 24th birthday on the Italian island of Ischia he met W.H.Auden in a hot spa and in conversation : 'I realised how little I knew about English Literature. It was from Auden that I heard from the first time the names Isherwood, Spender and E.M.Forster.'

He returned to Berlin in 1953 and earned money modelling sweater, suits and raincoats to sustain himself while he studied for his doctorate at the University and earned the prestigious title of 'Herr Doctor'. On a visit to St. Tropez he met the young Françoise Sagan and recalled : 'We used to drive in her convertible S Jaguar to Restuarant Palmyre to the sound of a barrel organ.'

He now worked as a small time diplomat for the Europa Union in Bonn, preparing the German population for joining the Common Market. He recalled that he was in his element : 'It was a job that brought me together with different nationalities and had a certain glamour attached to it. We were received by the Mayor of Paris in Berlin. Once I danced with the Queen of the Netherlands, another time I shook hands with the Italian President.'

In 1956 he travelled to the United Stated and got a job at $100 a week working for an advertising agency in Madison Avenue, New York. He found that : 'With my usual gregariousness, I soon encountered new friends. John Emery, actor and ex-husband of Tallulah Bankhead' and 'at Tamara's I also met Richard Barr, a prominent theatre producer, and a young playwright, Edward Albee.' 

He stayed in the States for two years and, at the age of 29, sailed for Britain.


Another forgotten talent :

Sunday, 11 October 2015

Britain is no longer a country for and omits to say "Goodbye" to an old and once revered TV presenter called Michael Dean

Britain is no country for more and more old men, with greater and greater needs, serving longer and longer sentences in prison

In Britain, in England and Wales in 2019, the number of prisoners, both men and women, over the age of 50 has almost tripled from 4,824 in 2002 to 13,617 in 2019. In fact, about 16% of prisoners were over the age of 50 as of June 2019, compared with just 7% in 2002. Just 4% were women. In addition, over 1,600 were old men of 70 and over with oldest at 104. Tougher prison sentences and the rise in the number of those convicted of historic sexual offences are believed to be part of the reason for the ageing prison population.

Dr Mary Turner, Reader in Health Services research at Huddersfield University said : "People tend to get longer sentences, even in older age, now than they might have done in the past and there are now more older people going into prison than there are being released. We can't just see these numbers going up and up and trying to cope with it in a prison environment so we're going to get to a point where we have to think of alternatives and we have to find solutions." She said options could include building secure care homes and considering alternatives to custodial sentence for older offenders.

Mark Fairhurst, the National Chair of the Prison Officers Association also said the system was failing to meet the needs of elderly inmates : "We need more disabled access cells situated at ground floor level. We need 24-hour health care and we need proper training for staff."


A former prison officer said that when he started work older prisoners were transferred to less secure jails when they approached the end of their sentences, but that had changed. "Now you're getting older prisoners starting big sentences and the young prison officers are coming straight from university, with very, very little life experience and then they're having to deal with major traumatic events like somebody dying in front of them or caring for somebody that is at the end of their life." The Prison Officers Association confirmed that more and more inmates were either frail, or incontinent or had dementia.

Ex-prisoner Ken Denton, from West Yorkshire where he was housed in an over-50s wing at the prison. He said : "When you look at some of the prisons, you know, they're three or four landings high, thin ladder stairways, how do you expect an elderly person to climb them? When they come in, you are assessed and they'll say well you should be located 'flat' but if there's no space where you going to put somebody? How can you put somebody at second or third landing? You can't, it's inhumane."

He went on : "I saw people with cancer, saw people with diabetes, long term prisoners that need their medication but can't get to their medication because the medication hatch is on the second floor and they've got to go to a lift but they can't get into the lift because there's no staff to take them. If you needed a wheelchair, it might take you three to four months to get a wheelchair because one had to be designed for yourself and it also had to come from the specific local authority in the area you came from."

Apparently, according to the the Prison Service, all is well and it has said : "An ageing prison population poses particular challenges, which is why we work closely with local councils and health care providers to make sure we meet the needs of elderly prisoners. Last year, a report by the Chief Inspector of Prisons found there was good work ongoing to adapt prisons for older inmates, and we have updated guidance for governors on how to best support them."

This doesn't quite square with Chief Inspector Peter Clarke, who took a different view when he said : "It feels to me as if they're trying to shoehorn this problem into existing accommodation instead of thinking more radically." He also said : "The Prison Service has so far has said that it's not going to develop an overall strategy to deal with this issue. When prisoners get older, less capable physically or infirm, they don't provide an escape risk, they still have to be held in custody very often and it's not to say they wouldn't present a risk to the public if they were completely at liberty. But the question is : Do they need to be held still in levels of security which are not needed for their physical capabilities and which inevitably are very expensive as well?"

Needless to say, in Brexit-obsessed Britain and with pressure on the Government to spend more money on schools, hospitals and social care, improving the conditions of an increasing number of old men in prison will gain little sympathy with the public and form a very low priority in terms of additional spending. For this group, Britain is very much 'No Country for Old Men.'

Brexit Britain, is no country for an old Master of Spy Fiction called John le Carré.

Page views : 634

John is about to publish his 25th novel, 'Agent Running in the Field', at the age of 87. It has a plot line that is based covert collusion between Trump’s USA and the British Security Services with the aim of undermining the democratic institutions of the European Union.

Interviewed back in the summer he said : " I think it would be impossible to write at the moment without speaking from within the state of the nation. We are part of it. I'm part of it. I'm depressed by it. I'm ashamed of it and I think communicates itself in the book. inevitably. I'm disconcerted by sense of loyalty. I don't know where to place it. I am extremely concerned by the rise of nationalism which is quite different from patriotism. For nationalism you need enemies and for patriotism you need your one conviction and that's the difference."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07qzltx

His attitude to Brexit is expressed by one of the characters in the new novel who says : “It is my considered opinion that for Britain and Europe, and for liberal democracy across the entire world as a whole, Britain’s departure from the European Union in the time of Donald Trump, and Britain’s consequent unqualified dependence on the United States in an era when the US is heading straight down the road to institutional racism and neo-fascism, is an unmitigated clusterfuck bar none."

In the interview he said :"What really scares me about nostalgia is that it's become a political weapon. Politicians are creating a nostalgia for an England that never existed and seeing it as something we could return to. It's used in the rhetoric of the day, particularly on the Conservative side, I believe, as a polemical weapon - that we've got to go back to the good old days, which means restoring the dignity of the British labourer and patronising concepts of that sort, which are completely impractical in our industrial age."

"I saw the film 'Dunkirk'. I thought it was, consciously or otherwise, an offensive piece of propaganda. It excluded, for instance all the Lascars who went across in their boats and it pretended that the small boats rescued everybody from Dunkirk. It was itself a prize piece of reconstructive nostalgia and it did'nt quite happen that way."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-eMt3SrfFU&t=1m44s

"The rest is something I can hardly bear - the wallowing in the '39-'40 experience. We're back to the Blitz. For Heaven's sake, how long ago was that ? I just remember the Blitz. I'm 86 and it's somehow the notion that we were all behind it all the time; that we won single handed."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvxPid5xB3Y&t=0m09s

"Who remembered, watching all those D-Day celebrations, that 30 million Russians died; that the Russians got to Berlin before we did and that there was a Second Front, which coincided with D-Day, in Russia, launched by the Russians which was enormously successful and absorbed a huge amount of Nazi troops."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdvfJFU7lvE

“The wonderful right wing military historian, Max Hastings, points out that we were bad fighters, that we were extremely badly organised, and our contribution in terms of blood and wealth and material was – I can’t say trivial, but tremendously small by comparison to the sacrifices of the other major powers. We were on the winning side by the end, but we were really quite minor players.”

Brexit Britain is no home for the planned new figures in a French sea by an old sculptor called Anthony Gormley

You might think of Anthony, who 69 years old, as a quintessentially English sculptor whose 'Angel of the North' stands on a hill over Gateshead as a symbol of Britain’s northern identity and on the other side of the country on the Mersey Estuary, his group of 100 cast iron solo figures at Crosby beach has become part of the landscape.

The truth is that he is, in fact. a quintessentially 'European' sculptor, who on the eve of Britain’s potential departure from Europe, is planning a new and dramatic installation  on the beaches of Northern France. He wants to erect a group of seven huge sculptures, made from iron slabs, on the coast of Brittany which will look towards Britain, the potentially 'lost island of Europe.'

He has said of the project : “I am very excited about this, after all, how do you understand yourself other than by your relations with your nearest neighbours?” He has also said : “We all know the EU is inefficient, but most human institutions are inefficient and that doesn’t mean we should not be part of their improvement. I sincerely hope this moment of utter instability and lack of movement just disappears and we get on with making a sounder, safer, more just world because without the help of our neighbours we can’t do it.”

The site planned for his new work is a peninsula and archipelago of small islands that jut into the Baie de Morlaix in Finistère, near to the site of an ancient burial cairn rediscovered during quarry work in 1955.

Soon he will travel to Brittany to meet marine engineers and harbour authorities and to inspect tide levels at the sites. He said his seven giant figures would be made with up to 30 iron slabs balanced on top of each other. “They are sort of massive houses of cards, but made out of blocks that do actually cohere. They are an attempt to say something about the human condition – that we are all provisional. We stand up, but we are always in danger of falling over.”


The entire project would reach out more than 7km into the sea and a similar sculptural form was used by him on a beach at Kimmeridge bay in Dorset until waves destroyed it, but he has likened the shapes he plans to install in Brittany to those now displayed in the first gallery of his major new show at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

The project has yet to win final approval from the French authorities, but Anthony understands President Macron is supportive. Ostensibly designed as a response to a vast neolithic grave site nearby at Barnenez, its modern resonance,as a gesture of farewell to Britain after Brexit, is clear.

“We belong to Europe, geologically as much as anything else. We were only separated five thousand years ago. The whole idea that somehow we can go it alone by making greater relationships with the former Commonwealth and with our friends and cousins in America is just ridiculous.” 

Britain, according to an old Spy Master called Sir Richard Dearlove, should be no country for the old Master of Spy Fiction called John le Carré

The former Head of MI6, 74 year old, Sir Richard Dearlove has criticised the 87 year old John le Carré for trading his experiences in the intelligence services to write books. Sir Richard joined MI6 in 1966 and was its Head from 1999 until 2004 and drew a contrast between those he described as the "primary myth makers of British intelligence : James Bond and John le Carré." He said that although Bond had his benefits, when it came to Le Carré, although the Smiley series of novels “have some quality, he is so corrosive in his view of MI6 that most professional Secret Intelligence Service officers are pretty angry with him. He flips the coin of reality. Intelligence organisations are based on trust between colleagues. His books are exclusively about betrayal.”

Sir Richard said that while reading Le Carré’s memoir ' 'The Pigeon Tunnel : Stories from My Life,' he had concluded that the author was “obsessed with his membership of the Secret Intelligence Service. He was only in the service for three years and something must have happened to him while he was there to breed this cynicism. I rather resent the fact that he has traded on his knowledge and reputation and yet the feeling I get is that he really rather intensely dislikes the service.”


John did not take all this lying down and responded by saying that : 'Sir Richard is not sound on the details of my career — dates wrong, duration wrong, scant mention of my years in MI5 or my extramural work for both services. But he claims, rather quaintly, that since I only served a mere three years in MI6 (not true), I was scarcely qualified to write about the service anyway. My books, he goes on to complain, are “exclusively about betrayal.”  Something, he says darkly, “must have happened to me to breed this cynicism.” Well, yes, actually it did.'

Born David John Cornwell in 1931, it was  after studying foreign languages at the University of Bern in Switzerland when he was 17 to 18 years old that he joined the Intelligence Corps of the British Army garrisoned in Austria, working as a German language interrogator of people who crossed the Iron Curtain to the West. In 1952, he returned to Britain to study at Lincoln College, Oxford, where he worked covertly for the British Security Service, MI5, spying on far-left groups for information about possible Soviet agents.

It wasn't until he was 27, in 1958, that he became and MI5 officer and ran agents, conducted interrogations, tapped telephone lines and effected break-ins and it was three years later that, still an active officer, he began writing his first novel, 'Call for the Dead.' By this time he had transferred to MI6, the foreign-intelligence service, and worked under the cover of Second Secretary at the British Embassy at Bonn.

 He then transferred to Hamburg as a political consul and it was there that he wrote 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' as 'John le Carré 'in 1963. He left the Service the following year to work full-time as a novelist, because his intelligence-officer career was brought to an end as the result of the betrayal of British agents' covers to the KGB by Kim Philby, the infamous British double agent.


According to John, he first picked up his cynicism at the age of 30 when George Blake was unmasked as a spy in 1961 after he had decided to become a Communist and work for the KGB while a prisoner during the Korean War. 'I had barely finished my basic training when George Blake, a longstanding and greatly treasured officer of the service, was exposed as a Russian spy. The taxpaying public wasn’t allowed to know it at the time, but Blake had consigned several hundred British agents to prison, death, torture, or all three. Exactly how many hundred he couldn’t be sure, as he later declared from his safe haven in Moscow.'

That cynicism was increased when 'Kim Philby was exposed, although again the scale of the damage was just too much for the public to swallow. Add together all the MI6 agents and the MI6 special operations that Philby betrayed over his 30 years of working for MI6 and the Kremlin, throw in Blake’s few hundred or so, and we’re safely into the thousands: liquidated, imprisoned, or missing believed interrogated.'

With his knowledge of the damage caused by Blake and Philby it is little surprising that John said : 'So yes. Something did happen to me, and it would have happened to Sir Richard if he had been around at the time, which he wasn’t.'

As to Sir Richard's point that "most professional Secret Intelligence Service officers are pretty angry with him" John rejected this by saying : 'Soon after Sir Richard’s retirement as Chief, his successor, Sir John Scarlett, invited me to dine with some of his senior staff. I was flattered, but felt queasy about what I had read of the service’s alleged role in the run-up to the Iraq War. So I said thanks, and reluctantly declined.'

In addition, another Intelligence Chief, David Spedding : 'invited me to lunch with his directors at the service’s new headquarters. He later visited us in Cornwall. He kindly believed that, due in part to my novels, MI6 had assumed a sensible place in the public awareness : human, fallible, aspirational, contentious, and part of real life.' Also, Antony Duff, 'a former Director-General of MI5 and a longtime friend, thought my books were trash but harmless.'

John concluded : 'Take your pick. One thing is certain. When my new novel comes out next month, Sir Richard and his notional colleagues are going to be mad as bedbugs. But thanks all the same for the much-needed publicity at this busy time in the publishing year.' 
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/07/exclusive-john-le-carre-new-novel-brexit-intrigue-agent-running-in-the-field