Stella Rimington on the Cambridge Spies
Nov. 8th, 2008 09:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sawylAn excellent edition of the Archive Hour, in which Stella Rimington went through the BBC archives in search of information about the members of the Cambridge spy ring.
The most recent edition of The Archive Hour, which featured Stella Rimington trawling through the BBC's back catalogue in search of interviews with the members of the Cambridge spy ring. As expected, Rimington had a lot of insightful things to say about the affair, the echoes of which were still with MI5 in her time, and about the motivations of the people involved — she was majestically scathing of Rupert Everett's take on Guy Burgess's motives for becoming spy, noting that she didn't think the Cambridge group really though of Russia as a utopia and that they didn't really seem to enjoy it when they finally got there.
But the best part of the programme was section focused on John Cairncross, whom Rimington had met through her work for MI5. After finding an interview with Cairncross in which he sought to try to give as little away as possible, for example, claiming that he wasn't the Fifth Man because the term itself was so vague as to be meaningless, Rimington went to talk to Caircross' niece, Frances, about what he was really like. During the conversation, in which Frances Cairncross described her uncle as being a slightly raffish character, a rather wonderful anecdote came out.
Apparently, Cairncross had phoned Frances to tell her that he was going to be in the UK for a few days and that he was going to come to stay. To her horror, Frances realised that this meant that he would overlap with her mother-in-law, an extremely upright woman who'd horrified at having to stay under the same roof as a notorious spy. But worst still, the night of the proposed visit was the night of the census, so not only would Frances' mother-in-law be forced to share the same house as Cairncross, but the whole thing would be recorded for posterity in the census records.
Shocking.
The most recent edition of The Archive Hour, which featured Stella Rimington trawling through the BBC's back catalogue in search of interviews with the members of the Cambridge spy ring. As expected, Rimington had a lot of insightful things to say about the affair, the echoes of which were still with MI5 in her time, and about the motivations of the people involved — she was majestically scathing of Rupert Everett's take on Guy Burgess's motives for becoming spy, noting that she didn't think the Cambridge group really though of Russia as a utopia and that they didn't really seem to enjoy it when they finally got there.
But the best part of the programme was section focused on John Cairncross, whom Rimington had met through her work for MI5. After finding an interview with Cairncross in which he sought to try to give as little away as possible, for example, claiming that he wasn't the Fifth Man because the term itself was so vague as to be meaningless, Rimington went to talk to Caircross' niece, Frances, about what he was really like. During the conversation, in which Frances Cairncross described her uncle as being a slightly raffish character, a rather wonderful anecdote came out.
Apparently, Cairncross had phoned Frances to tell her that he was going to be in the UK for a few days and that he was going to come to stay. To her horror, Frances realised that this meant that he would overlap with her mother-in-law, an extremely upright woman who'd horrified at having to stay under the same roof as a notorious spy. But worst still, the night of the proposed visit was the night of the census, so not only would Frances' mother-in-law be forced to share the same house as Cairncross, but the whole thing would be recorded for posterity in the census records.
Shocking.
