Peter Montagnon
Intelligence officer who helped found the Open University and directed Sir Kenneth Clark in Civilisation
PETER MONTAGNON, who has died aged 92, was a Cold War intelligence officer, a pioneer in Harold Wilson’s Open University, and an innovative documentary-maker who co-produced and directed Kenneth Clark’s landmark series Civilisation.
In 1966, when the new controller of BBC Two, David Attenborough, wanted his youthful television channel to produce something defining, which would also show off its new UHF colour service, he turned to the brightest and the best of his producer/ directors. Montagnon and his colleague Michael Gill believed an ambitious series on a thousand years of Western culture could best be delivered by a charismatic, skilled broadcaster, so they set out to bring on board Sir Kenneth, a former director of the National Gallery and Britain’s leading arts impresario.
“Come down to Saltwood,” Clark ordered Montagnon and Gill, “and I will hand you the slides to drop into my talk.” It was not what the two men had in mind, and it took them several weeks of patient persuasion before Clark agreed to leave the comfort of the studio and travel the world. Three years later, the Civilisation crew had covered 80,000 miles, visited 117 locations in 11 countries, and filmed objects in 118 museums and 18 libraries.
Montagnon specifically produced two of the 13 50-minute programmes – the opening episode, “The Skin of Our Teeth”, telling the story of the Dark Ages, and “Romance and Reality”, assessing the aspirations and achievements of the later Middle Ages in Italy and France. Clark relished the intellectual companionship Montagnon provided, and later recalled that he inspired “immediate affection”. Clark, Montagnon and Gill won a Special Award for Civilisation in the 1970 Baftas.
One of four children, Peter Ernest Arthur Montagnon was born on April 24 1925 in Croydon, Surrey, and educated at Whitgift School. He failed to shine academically, but discovered a talent for storytelling, keeping his classmates enthralled when the teachers were out of the room.
At the age of 13, on the eve of war, Peter’s father removed him from Whitgift and sent him to work as an apprentice at the Monotype factory at Redhill, Surrey, where he was manager. Monotype had been converted from a metal typesetting works to a munitions factory for the war effort, specialising in producing Bren guns. It was an unusual environment for a middle-class boy, surrounded by young, earthy, workingclass women. But he thrived, and fondly remembered visits to the cinema, holding hands with his – maternally inclined – workmates.
When the war ended Montagnon joined the Army, eventually settling in the Royal Corps of Signals. He went out to Malaya, where one of his key tasks was to help bug the prison cells of guerrilla leaders as the British desperately tried to contain the insurgency. He reached the rank of captain in November 1952, and his skills attracted the attention of MI6.
Within months he was pitched into the biggest and most audacious joint intelligence project of the Cold War – Operation Stopwatch/gold – which aimed to dig a tunnel from West Berlin under the border and into the Soviet-controlled East. This spectacular – and hugely expensive ($6.7 million) – eavesdropping operation would enable Allied spies to tap into telephone and telegraph cables through which the Soviet military command in Germany communicated with Moscow.
The plan was initially thrashed out between eight MI6 and six CIA officers over four days of meetings in London in middecember 1953. Captain Montagnon, at 28, was the youngest and most junior member of the group. Other members included Frank Rowlett (CIA), who had cracked the Japanese diplomatic codes in the Second World War, George Kennedy Young, later to be Vice-chief of MI6, and Ian “Tim” Milne, former head of Section V (counterespionage). Taking down the minutes was a colleague of Montagnon’s from Section Y – the double agent George Blake, who in January 1954, slipped a copy to his Soviet handler, Sergei Kondrashev, while they were on the top deck of a London bus.
The Berlin tunnel was betrayed well before the first sod was turned, though the Russians let it run for a year so that Blake would not come under suspicion when they eventually allowed its discovery in April 1956. Montagnon, in common with everyone else, knew nothing of his colleague’s treachery until many years later. Indeed he got on well with Blake, recalling him as “very affable and easy-going, a bon viveur who liked to eat well, and we used to go down to those wonderful Soho restaurants, and then wend our way back and carry on with our MI6 stuff.”
Civilisation was the highlight of Montagnon’s documentary making career at the BBC, which he joined in the late 1950s. Other outstanding work included
Modern India (1960) and Sunday Night,a series of serious arts programmes which attracted contributors of the stature of Pablo Picasso, Christopher Isherwood, Maria Callas and Daniel Barenboim.
In 1963 Montagnon had written to Peter Shore of the Labour Party’s research department, enthusiastically outlining his ideas for a “University of the Air”: he had dipped his toe in the waters of education broadcasting with the Italian language programme Parliamo Italiano. So when the Open University was launched in 1970, Montagnon was an obvious choice to become the first head of the BBC’S OU Production Centre, based at Alexandra Palace.
For Montagnon the OU was no semipolitical gimmick. He worked hard to fulfil its mission as a radical new learning process for education-hungry adults, and noted the enthusiasm of the scholars in the residential summer schools who “not only want to hear what their lecturers have to say, they pursue them – almost hunt them down – until they have said it.”
After leaving the corporation in 1979, Montagnon set up his own independent production company, Antelope, and some of his very best work was still to come. He managed to gain rare access to film in communist China, and the result was a magnificent four-part series entitled Heart
of the Dragon, which was nominated for both a Bafta and an Emmy in 1985.
In later years Montagnon moved from London to a rambling stone house in the village of Menerbes in Provence (made famous by Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence).
There, with his wife Rosemary Gordon – an eminent Jungian psychoanalyst – he was at the centre of a vibrant community of artists, local and ex-pat. Montagnon himself painted and sculpted to a high standard. He also found time to write an allegorical novel, Llama, set in the Ancient East, which was published in 2001.
In later years he liked to read and re-read
War and Peace in Russian – a language he had learnt (as did George Blake) on an MI6 training course in the 1950s.
Peter Montagnon’s wife died in 2012.
Peter Montagnon, born April 24 1925, died October 27 2017