The Bedbug (12 page)

Klop tried his hand at anything that might make money. He became bookkeeper to the theatre impresario André Charlot. In his heyday, Charlot’s West End revues had helped launch the careers of Beatrice Lillie, Jack Buchanan, Gertrude Lawrence and Jessie Matthews but by the time Klop joined him he was struggling to escape from bankruptcy and reduced to staging round-the-clock semi-nude shows in Soho. The appointment did not last long.
⁹²
He tried his hand at writing short stories, but could not get them published, and served briefly as the art critic of the
News Chronicle
where his views on modern art were too acerbic and he was sacked.

Peter Ustinov, still at daggers drawn with his father, admits to a pang of sympathy for the humiliation Klop clearly felt at his inability to earn a living. Unfortunately this resentment manifested itself in outbursts of anger interspersed with periods of sullen withdrawal and denunciations of his teenage son for laziness when his school reports revealed a lack of academic prowess. In due course Nadia would come to Peter’s rescue by recognising that her son’s talents lay elsewhere and encouraging him, much against Klop’s wishes,
to move at the age of sixteen to the London Theatre Studio drama school in Islington run by Michael Saint-Denis, for whom she had worked on set design.
⁹³
. Saint-Denis’s other protégés included Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Alec Guinness and Michael Redgrave. Nadia financed Peter’s theatre apprenticeship from the sale of paintings or from savings scrimped from house-keeping money. Encouragement for Peter’s dramatic inclinations came not from Klop but from his great uncle Alexander Benois who wrote to him:

For two centuries our family has been sniffing around the theatre. We have designed for it, we have composed for it, we have conducted in it, and we have applauded and we have slept. At last one of us has had the incredible audacity to clamber upon the boards himself!
⁹⁴

Nadia was increasingly in demand. In the autumn of 1933 she had been commissioned by the poet Walter Turner to design scenery and costumes for his play Jupiter Translated at the open-air Mercury Theatre in Notting Hill, West London. The play was not a success but it led to a new opportunity for Nadia. The Mercury Theatre was run by Ashley Dukes, older brother of Paul Dukes, the MI6 officer active in St Petersburg at the time of the Revolution. Ashley’s wife was Marie Rambert, who had danced with Nijinsky in the Ballet Russe and was already becoming one of the commanding figures of modern British ballet. She commissioned Nadia to work on scenery and costume design and thus began a long collaboration, which in turn led to further work for the Royal Ballet and Dame Ninette de Valois.

Her paintings were finding an audience, too. Family holidays were spent in the south of France, where she could work on her landscapes. They befriended the American artist Thalia Malcolm who had a studio at Vence, in the Alpes-Maritime region, a few miles from Nice. It was during a solo visit there one summer that Klop had a narrow escape while being driven at high speed by the
Tory MP Arthur Duckworth in his Bentley. They ended up in a ditch, with scarcely a scratch, having narrowly missed tumbling over a precipice on the outside of a bend.
⁹⁵

Nadia’s work was praised for its ‘unabatingly conscientious thoroughness’ but she did not lack a sense of humour. Among her commissions was a series called
Three Little Pigs
, seen playing tennis, rowing and cycling in an exhibition of art for children.
⁹⁶
She was working all hours in her studio on commissions which varied from landscapes to nudes of their German cook Frieda. Klop was always keen for her to paint nudes of his girlfriends. Nadia, unsurprisingly, did not share his enthusiasm although she obliged on some occasions – among them a portrait of Klop’s MI5 colleague Joan Chenhalls. Nadia was a member of the New English Art Club, as was James Bolivar Manson, director of the Tate Gallery, who acquired one of her paintings through the Contemporary Art Society. Augustus John was another admirer of her work. Klop seems to have enjoyed mixing in this milieu and regained his earlier penchant for art dealing. He was helped by Manson who introduced him to an elderly collector in Fulham with a dilapidated house full of treasures with which he was willing to part at modest prices. Klop also got to know Daan Cevat, the son of a Dutch art dealer, who was just starting out and became a leading expert on Rembrandt. He brought drawings from Holland for Klop to sell, among them works by Rubens, Delacroix, Ingres and Tintoretto.

Klop’s new profession dovetailed neatly with the cover needed for a secret agent. A number of art dealers found their way into MI5 and MI6 before and during the Second World War. In 1935 Klop’s old friend Clifford Norton had introduced him to what Nadia described as ‘a prominent person from one of the ministries’. Most likely, it was Guy Liddell of MI5 who took him on as a part-time agent. They were anxious to know about potential German infiltrators among the expatriate community in London and Klop was ideally placed. Apart from his journalistic
contacts, Klop was in demand as an after-dinner speaker in the German colony in London.
⁹⁷

Klop and Nadia’s flight from Russia in 1920 had been part of a mass emigration. Around two million left the country, the majority prosperous, educated and part of the cultural elite. Soldiers, peasants and the poor had neither the means nor the incentive to escape but for the bourgeois ‘former people’, whose homes were being requisitioned, who received the lowest level of rations and who found themselves reduced to hawking their remaining possessions on the streets, it was their best hope of survival. Many had never before had to face the exigencies even of cooking a meal, or earning a living. That’s what the servants and the serfs did. And for those who had taken up arms against the Bolsheviks in the White Russian armies, as some of Nadia’s relatives had, to return to face the Red Terror of the Cheka meant almost certain death.

The largest number, possibly 400,000, settled in France, where labour shortages after the First World War meant work could be found; 150,000 went to Germany, where inflation meant family treasures realised higher prices; and more to the countries bordering the new Soviet Union on the Baltic, in Eastern Europe and to the Balkans. They did not want to stray too far; they expected to return quite soon when the chaos of the revolution led inevitably to collapse.

By comparison, only about three or four thousand came to Britain. Despite its business ties – and the close relationship between the two Royal Families – Britain had fewer cultural and social connections to the old regime. Nevertheless the new community followed a similar pattern to that elsewhere, not wanting to fully assimilate or lose their old national identity. They had a very distinct social order to observe.

The Russian colony in London strove to replicate the structure of the old, pre-Revolutionary Russia, including the court, headed by Tsar Nicholas II’s sister, the Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna. She had arrived in Britain with her mother, the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, aboard HMS
Marlborough
. The ship had been
sent to rescue them from the Crimea at the request of King George V, whose mother Queen Alexandra was the empress’s sister, after the Tsar and most of his family had been executed at Ekaterinburg. Xenia was virtually penniless, sold most of her royal jewellery and lived out her life in grace and favour homes in Windsor Great Park and at Hampton Court Palace.

If she was the figurehead, the Golytsin – or Galitzine – family were the focal point of the colony’s social life. Prince Vladimir Golitsyn and his wife Ekaterina chose to settle in England so that their sons, Nicholas, George and Emmanuel, could attend public schools. To pay the fees Prince Vladimir opened a shop in Berkeley Square, in Mayfair, selling Russian objets d’art. During the 1930s Klop would find himself in the same line of business. The Golitsyns were patrons of the Russian Red Cross Society and one branch of the Orthodox Church. The princess was a descendant of the British King George III and so had an entrée at Court and became an arbiter of social acceptability. At government level, Eugen Sabline, who had been chargé d’affaires at the Russian embassy at the time of the Tsar, was allowed to retain a kind of diplomatic status and he and his wife Nadezhda Ivanovna turned their home in Brechin Place, South Kensington, into an unofficial embassy and museum filled with portraits, maps and ephemera of the Imperial regime. Red Cross, Orthodox Church and official business could be conducted there. With his Europe-wide contacts with the Russian émigré community, and personal access to the Duchess Xenia, Sabline was to prove a useful informant when Klop joined MI5. After her husband’s death in 1949, Mrs Sabline applied for British citizenship. One of her sponsors was Sir Edward Reid, a former financial adviser to MI5, whose wife was also of Russian descent.

Although their network of friends spread much wider, and Klop’s was inevitably more bound up with the German colony, he and Nadia took some part in Russian social life. Peter Ustinov, who displayed an almost total lack of sporting prowess at Westminster School, recalls winning tennis championships at the Anglo-Russian
sports club ‘where septuagenarian Czarist officers would lob each other to a standstill in immaculate whites’. The club, at The Lindens in Hartington Road, Chiswick, was co-founded by the former Russian champion and tennis pro Count Mikhail Sumarakov-Elston. He was a cousin of Prince Yusopov, one of the assassins of Rasputin. Both had escaped from the Crimea in 1919 aboard HMS
Marlborough
with the Dowager Empress.

Among Klop’s contacts, who would serve him in good stead, was Captain Henry ‘Bob’ Kerby, later Conservative MP for Arundel and Shoreham. Kerby, a huge, bald-headed man with a lively sense of humour and pronounced right-wing views, was born in St Petersburg in 1914. His father, also Henry, was a forestry adviser to the Tsar and one of MI6’s first officers. After the revolution he had helped the Dowager Empress escape. Kerby and Klop kept in close touch with White Russian circles. The bewildering layers of intrigue that surrounded them, and the perpetual danger of infiltration by the Russian secret police, made them a treasure house of gossip from across the Continent covering a wide political spectrum.

Many of the Whites gravitated towards right-wing politics and Fascism as the best antidote to Communism. As a result, MI5 was constantly on the watch for signs of links between the White Russian community in Britain and Hitler’s emissaries, who saw political advantage in cultivating them. Klop helped keep an eye on the main claimant to the Russian throne, the Grand Duke Prince Vladimir Kirillovitch, great grandson of Tsar Alexander II. His parents had fled to Germany and then France after the Revolution but in the 1930s Vladimir came to Britain hoping to study at Cambridge. He was unable to raise sponsorship and instead was assisted by Buckingham Palace to find a job on the production line at the Lister diesel engine factory in Stamford, Lincolnshire. He occupied a workman’s house and used the name Vladimir Mikhailov. It was not a success and soon after the outbreak of the Second World War he returned to the family estate at St Briac-sur-Mer in Brittany. After the German occupation of
France alarm bells began to ring in London. There were rumours that Hitler might offer Vladimir a return to Russia as Tsar of a puppet Nazi regime. These fears were in part provoked by a batch of letters that Buckingham Palace handed over to MI5. One of them indicated that Vladimir was actively seeking foreign backers in support of his aspiration to restore White Russian rule. Klop was asked to find out Vladimir’s real intentions and, with the help of Sabline and the Grand Duchess Xenia, reported that, despite some resentment that Britain had not done more to support his cause, he was sitting tight in St Briac and not collaborating. In the event he refused Hitler’s offer of the regency of the Ukraine or to endorse the Nazi philosophy, and as a result was held in a concentration camp before being placed under house arrest at the home of his brother-in-law, Prince Louis Ferdinand, grandson of the German Kaiser Wilhelm II, and one of the focal points of German resistance to the Hitler regime.

Inevitably Sabline knew Admiral Nikolai Wolkoff, who had been naval attaché at the Russian embassy under the Tsar. In more straitened circumstances, the admiral became proprietor of the Russian tea rooms in Harrington Road, South Kensington. Like many of his compatriots, the admiral embraced right-wing politics in the quest for means to unseat the Communists. His daughter Anna, a dressmaker whose clients included Wallis Simpson, the future Duchess of Windsor, became an active member of the Right Club, a semi-clandestine pro-Nazi organisation run by Captain Maule Ramsey MP. One of MI5’s first successes of the Second World War was a classic infiltration exercise at the Right Club which led to the arrest of Anna and Tyler Kent, a cipher clerk at the US embassy. Between them they had been leaking British government secrets to the Italians, and thereby to Hitler. After a closed trial, Anna was sentenced to ten years in jail. One of the witnesses to her arrest was a very young Len Deighton, the future spy writer, whose mother was working at the tea room.

It was one of Kerby and Klop’s contacts, Anatole Baykalov, who
alerted MI5 in 1936 to the possibility that Wallis Simpson was supplying intelligence obtained from her lover, King Edward VIII, to the Germans through their ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop. Baykolov, once a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, ran an anti-Soviet newsletter in London during the 1930s and became a valued source for Klop and Guy Liddell. He had been in London since the end of the First World War, working as a journalist, under frequent surveillance through to the 1950s, with the intelligence services never quite able to make up their minds whether he was a trustworthy source or an undercover
agent provocateur
for the Soviets.