The idea that Noel Coward had a role in wartime intelligence has been taken seriously by recent biographers - something else to read up on. And whatever the truth of that, he had upset the Nazis enough to appear on the list of people to be executed after the invasion.
When this list was revealed after the German surrender, Rebecca West, who also appeared on it, sent Coward a telegram: "My dear, the people we should have been seen dead with."
Spychology
The only spy I have known is the one I wrote jokes for.
Back in the 1990s, I had friends at Liberal Democrat court and could send in lines and ideas for Paddy Ashdown’s speeches. The 1997 general election campaign was, I think, the last at which BBC Radio 4 broadcast a daily late-evening round up of speeches from the hustings, and I sometimes heard my work used. At the following election, a programme satirising the election was broadcast in that slot. It was Peter Cook who said, back in the 1960s, that “Britain is in danger of sinking giggling into the sea.”
When Paddy Ashdown first surfaced in the old Liberal Party, it did not take the press long to notice his intriguing background. A former special forces officer who joined the diplomatic service and was appointed first secretary to the United Kingdom mission to the United Nations in Geneva? How obvious can it be? It was from Geneva that our agents behind the Iron Curtain were run.
There were those in the party who worried that Ashdown had been planted on us by the deep state, but as he was so much more appealing than anyone we had come up with ourselves, most were happy to welcome him. Besides, given our sometimes fractious relations with our partners in the SDP/Liberal Alliance, it was comforting to know we had someone who could strangle Dr David Owen with his bare hands if it came to that.
Ashdown’s memoirs told us inevitably little about his MI6 years, though his friend the former Labour minister Denis MacShane suggested after his death that he had been involved with Operation Gladio, which set up arms and supplies caches all over Western Europe for the Resistance to use if Soviet tanks ever rolled in.
Admirers of John le Carré were not surprised by what Ashdown did say about the organisation:
When I first joined, our headquarters was in an anonymous multi-storey tower block south of the Thames whose existence was never supposed to be made public. Indeed, we were all instructed to approach it with discretion, taking appropriate precautions.
But even George Smiley must have winced at this:
The game was, however, rather given away by the conductors of the London buses that passed our door at regular intervals: they delighted in announcing the local bus stop with a cheery (and usually very loud) shout of, "Lambeth Tube Station. All spies alight 'ere."
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Ian Fleming’s first choice to play James Bond was Noel Coward, but The Master sent a telegram in reply to the offer: ‘DR NO? NO. NO. NO.’ Coward, it is true, had played a spy in Our Man in Havana, but that was a deskbound one with no licence to kill.
What doesn’t work on the screen, however, can work in real life. The Carry On actor Peter Butterworth, for instance, was one of the vaulters who helped in the Wooden Horse escape from a World War II German prisoner of war camp in, but when he auditioned for a part in the film he was told he ‘didn't look convincingly heroic or athletic enough’.
And so it was with Coward, though quite what he did in the war is not clear. Some sources say he was a member of a network of rich travellers who gathered information from across Europe just before hostilities broke out: others that he worked in black propaganda in the same unit as Guy Burgess and Kim Philby.
What seems more certain is that he ran the British propaganda office in Paris, telling his superiors: "If the policy of His Majesty's Government is to bore the Germans to death, I don't think we have time." He later used his showbiz fame to help persuade the American public and government that they should enter the war.
Coward and Fleming were near neighbours in Jamaica, where much of Dr No was filmed, and both members of the slightly disreputable international elite that had flocked to the newly independent island – there was nothing slightly about another of its members, Errol Flynn. A young Chris Blackwell, who came from a family in that set, helped find locations for the film and was offered a job by Harry Salzman, who produced it alongside Cubby Broccoli.
Blackwell was tempted, but decided to remain in the music business. He moved to London and imported Jamaican records to sell to the expatriate community there, then founded his own production company. He discovered first Millie Small (‘My Boy Lollipop’) and then Steve Winwood and the Spencer Davis Group, and with them on board, Island Records took off.
In 1976 Ian Fleming’s Goldeneye estate on Jamaica came on the market, twelve years after his death. Blackwell bought it, but only after he had failed to persuade another Island artist to do so. Bob Marley could be stubborn.
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When the BBC showed Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective at Christmas I found it had curdled since I saw it in 1986, but their adaption of John Le Carré’s spy novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy from 1979 never disappoints. I know its seven episodes so well that I had to steel myself before seeing the 2011 film of the book and then steel myself not to walk out of the cinema. It was all wrong. Really, it was just different, though two hours was not enough time to do justice to the book’s intricate plot.
If the TV series, like Fawlty Towers, gets a bit more Seventies every time you see it, that’s only to its advantage. Much of the publicity about the film concerned its efforts to recreate the look of that decade, but the television series didn’t have to try at all.
Someone working on it for the BBC asked a contact if he could be smuggled into the MI6 building - the spooks had moved since Paddy Ashdown’s day - to see what it was like. "There’s no need," he was told. "It’s exactly like Broadcasting House."
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