The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [157]
I would like to find a publisher for Crane’s memoirs. A broadcaster and historian of your standing, prepared both to validate the book’s authenticity and to make its existence known to a wider public, would be of incalculable value. I do hope you will consider visiting me in Stoke, where alas I am confined to barracks in a retirement village, battling on at the age of 92.
Should you wish to contact me, please send a message to the PO Box listed above. Since this letter is personal to you, I would be grateful if you would respect its confidentiality.
Yours sincerely
Douglas Garside
Crane sealed the envelope, found a stamp in the kitchen, walked out into a damp Staffordshire morning and dropped the letter into a post box less than a hundred metres from his front door.
Kirsty didn’t see a thing.
Acknowledgements
My deepest thanks to Melissa, to my mother and father, and to Stanley and Iris. To Julia Wisdom, Rachel Rayner, Emad Akhtar, Anne O’Brien and all the team at HarperCollins. To Keith Kahla, Dori Weintraub and everybody at St Martin’s Press. To Tif Loehnis, Luke Janklow, Will Francis, Rebecca Folland, Kirsty Gordon, Claire Dippel and their colleagues at Janklow and Nesbit. To Emily Hayward and Tanya Tillett at the Rod Hall Agency. And to all the staff at The Week.
I am also very grateful to Melinda Hughes, Sam Loewenberg, Craig Arthur, Matthew Beaumont, Maxim Chernavin, Rory Carleton Paget, Annabel Byng, Tom Miller, James Owen, Guy Walters, Rupert Allason, James Holland, Alanna O’Connell, Giles Waterfield, Jonathan, Anna and Carolyn Hanbury, William and Mary Seymour, Grant Murray, Cal Flyn, Josie Jackson, Tom Cain, Sue and Stephen Lennane, Christian Spurrier, Annette Nielebock, Boris Starling, Nick Stone, Ali Karim, Michael Stotter, Nick, Bard, Chev and Viki Wilkinson.
The following books were very useful: Their Trade is Treachery by Chapman Pincher (New English Library, 1982); The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 by Professor Christopher Andrew (Allen Lane, 2009); My Five Cambridge Friends by Yuri Modin (Headline, 1995); The Crown Jewels: The British Secrets at the Heart of the KGB’s Archives by Nigel West and Oleg Tsarev (HarperCollins, 1999); Anthony Blunt: His Lives by Miranda Carter (Pan, 2002). During his talk at Daunt Books, Sam Gaddis ought to have acknowledged the debt he owes to the scholarship of Peter Truscott.
C.C. London 2010
A note on ‘The Cambridge Five’
While studying at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the 1930s, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and John Cairncross were recruited by Moscow Centre as agents of the Soviet NKVD. They became known as ‘The Cambridge Five’.
Burgess would go on to work for the BBC and for the Foreign Office. Maclean, the son of a prominent Liberal MP, also joined the Foreign Office and was First Secretary at the British Embassy in Washington DC between 1944 and 1948. Philby became an officer in the Secret Intelligence Service (better known as MI6). Blunt, a world authority on the paintings of Nicolas Poussin, worked for MI5 until 1945, at which point he was appointed Surveyor of the King’s Pictures (and, later, the Queen’s Pictures). During World War II, John Cairncross worked as an analyst at Bletchley Park. All five men passed vast numbers of classified documents to their handlers in the NKVD.
In May 1951, Burgess and Maclean boarded a ferry in Southampton, England, and defected to the Soviet Union. Their disappearance caused an international uproar. They had been tipped off by Blunt and Philby that MI5 were about to expose Maclean as a traitor. Four years later, Philby held a
press conference at which he denied being the so-called ‘Third Man’. He was exonerated in the House of Commons by the Foreign Secretary, Harold Macmillan, and continued to