An Old Friend in Unfamiliar Company

 

If this blog has a tutelary deity, I suppose it is Frank Birch. He was Historian of Room 40 after the First World War, and, after being Head of the Naval Section (HNS) at Bletchley Park, became the Historian of British Sigint in the Second World War. He and I share the distinction of being the only in-house historians of British Sigint to have entries in the IMDB, though with 48 credits as an actor and one as a director, I think it is fair to say that his is a more prolific record than mine; and the IMDB doesn't record his successes on the inter-war stage, particularly his renowned Widow Twankey. He was a Fellow of King's College and a lecturer in history at Cambridge University, and sufficiently interested in racehorses to publish an account of racehorse pedigrees in 1926.

Penelope Knox is quoted in Birch's DNB entry describing him as a 'a many-sided human being—a rather dull historian, an acceptable drinking companion, a mysterious private personality, a brilliant talker and a born actor'. This is a very rare description of Birch as a rounded person. For Siginters, he is HNS and Head of the Historical Section, the man who didn't want 'Music While You Work' played in his building; for historians of the cinema, he is a bit-part player in a few dozen minor British films; for genealogists he is the husband of the Hon Vera Benedicta Gage, daughter of the fifth Viscount Gage.

So it comes as a major surprise to find him appearing in files released by MI5, and, what's more, not as just a name, but playing a minor part (ironically, just as in his film career) in the story of the Cambridge Five.  From interviews with Floral Solomon (KV 2/4634-5) MI5 learned that Birch had been living with Aileen Furse for a while before the war. On 4 September 1939, at Aileen's behest, Mrs Solomon invited Birch to a lunch she was hosting in order to introduce him to Kim Philby, who wanted to work in intelligence. (According to Mrs Solomon, Birch appeared to have been quite open about his work in Room 40.) At that point Philby was working for The Times. According to a 1971 summary of the Solomon case "Afterwards BIRCH saw PHILBY alone and thought him quite suitable for intelligence work but thought he had too good a job at the time for him to try to recruit him".

Was this a polite put-down? It's tempting to think that Birch would think that being a journalist was inferior to being an intelligence officer in GC&CS, but 'Times Correspondent with the BEF' was an impressive job description, and given that little relevant material was being produced at Bletchley at the start of the war, it may well be that Birch was giving an honest opinion.

What difference might it have made if Philby had, in fact, been recruited to Bletchley Park? My guess is very little: he would have learned little of any practical value to the Soviet Union – certainly no more than Cairncross got access to a couple of years later (as I recounted here), and like Cairncross, would have pressed for a move to London to get a job of more value to his controllers. Any competent Soviet Sigint official would have been able to infer British capabilities from the material it was producing, and a job in London where processed Sigint reporting was crossing his desk along with other intelligence material and assessment of its value would have been more valuable.

As for Birch: it looks as though nobody thought he was other than an innocent in this matter. Aileen left him for Philby, eventually becoming the second Mrs Philby and mother of his five children.

Another couple of GCHQ names appear in another of the recently released files. Before an interview with Lord and Lady Rothschild (reported in KV 2/4632) Peter Wright was asked to ask them about Gerry Morgan (who had been a member of the Cambridge University Socialist Society in the later twenties and early thirties) and Barbara Duckworth Maclean (who was a contemporary of Lady Rothschild at Newnham College, and had been on the 'Aid to Spain' Committee). They weren't known to the Rothschilds, and I imagine this was simply an attempt to check whether anybody who had been a bit pink at Cambridge might have developed into something more ideologically sinister.

With the exception of some of GCHQ's Directors and a very small number of Bletchley veterans, most of the hundred thousand or so British Siginters since 1914 are just names, possibly with a very small amount of information attached about where they worked. What really is strange is to meet them in such an unfamiliar context.