Drinker, fraudster, philanderer, ‘spy’
PART 2 OF THE SENSATIONAL JOHN LE CARRÉ BIOGRAPHY
Father could rob you and love you at the same time
He could never admit his father was a spiv who’d come home drunk and fondle him in bed. So the young le Carré pretended he was a secret agent ... and his first work of spy fiction was born
LAST WEEK, our first extract from the sensational new biography of David Cornwell – the real name of bestselling spy novelist John le Carré – revealed how he conducted a series of affairs, including an explosive relationship with the wife of his best friend. Today, the second of three extracts tells how le Carré has spent his life in the shadow of his philandering father: an audacious conman, a friend to the rich and famous, an indefatigable womaniser – and, as we here reveal, a drunken child abuser…
DAVID Cornwell remembers little of his mother, only her scent and a gloved hand, and never forgave her for abandoning him. She left when he was just five. ‘Sixteen hugless years’ followed as a succession of substitute mothers came and went.
Olive left him in the care of his father Ronnie, a charismatic and philandering conman who swindled friends and family alike while maintaining he was doing them a favour. As David’s brother Tony – himself one of Ronnie’s victims – wrote: ‘He could put a hand on your shoulder and the other in your pocket and both gestures would be equally sincere. He could rob you and love you at the same time.’
Ronnie smoked large cigars, drank brandy and whisky by the quart, ate at the best restaurants and dispensed extravagant presents. He seldom settled an account unless pressed to do so, and often not even then. He was a charming and ruthless womaniser whose hugs were a demonstration of ownership as much as of affection.
When he came home sozzled, Ronnie would sometimes climb on to David’s bed, fondling him while the boy feigned sleep.
As a child, David fantasised about chopping his father’s head off, studying Ronnie’s neck for the best point to aim his axe. In later life he would liken Ronnie to P. G. Wodehouse’s Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge, a man who will do anything for money – except work.
But David’s loveless, itinerant childhood prepared him perfectly for his future life as an intelligence officer and novelist. David’s father even inspired his first spy creation: at school, he intimated to friends that Ronnie was a secret agent, rather than admitting he was a spiv. Ronnie peddled similar stories in London while trading in blackmarket goods.
‘How I got out from under Ronnie, if I ever did,’ David would write many years later, ‘is the story of my life.’
Ronnie’s father, Frank, was a garage owner, staunch Baptist and former mayor of Poole. Ronnie inherited an evangelical dynamism that made him the centre of any gathering. Olive’s family, meanwhile, were narrow, strict and teetotal; her father had been a Congregationalist minister, her brother a lay preacher and Liberal MP.
Initially the marriage, and Ronnie, seemed a great success. In the General Election of 1931 he stood as a Liberal candidate. But his debts were growing. He had lost a fortune on a string of houses he bought to rent. By 1932, his losses had reached £5,000 – a fortune then – while a further £6,000 disappeared in a failed bus business.
He responded by moving his young family to Exeter, where he set up as an insurance broker, but couldn’t escape his debts. In desperation he forged a cheque for £215 and four shillings, which would earn him six months’ imprisonment for fraud.
Worse was to come. While awaiting trial in 1934, Ronnie had moved his family to Farnham Common in Buckinghamshire and wrote a succession of worthless cheques.
In July he was sentenced to a further nine months, to run concurrently. Once free, Ronnie simply took up where he had left off, borrowing £50 to set up an insurance brokers and a property company. Both failed.
In March 1936 he was declared bankrupt, with liabilities of £20,064 0s 6d. Undeterred, he set up a new company which, when it went bust three years later, supposedly owed him £80,000 – £11million in today’s money – and an indication of the sort of accounting that financed his lifestyle.
The Cornwell family lived ‘in the style of millionaires or paupers’. At Christmas, Ronnie took the family off to a luxurious hotel in St Moritz.
When Olive became concerned about how they would pay the bill, Ronnie announced airily that he had bought the hotel.
He told the manager he represented a consortium of investors and was ready to make an offer for the loss-making business. The grateful hotel waived all charges.
Ronnie expected his wife to cash dud cheques, and began an affair with her best friend, Mabel George, which led to two abortions. On at least one occasion he persuaded Olive to share a bed with them.
A business associate of Ronnie’s, John Hill, begged Olive to make a stand. When a furious Ronnie hit her, Olive could take no more and eloped with Hill, leaving her sons asleep in bed. It would be years before they realised that she was never coming back. The enduring abandonment that David felt recurs in his books. The first paragraph of his first book, Call For The Dead, describes spy George Smiley’s wife leaving him, while Aldo Cassidy, the central figure in another novel, The Naive And Sentimental Lover, was abandoned by his mother as a small boy.
‘Well, it made me lonely I suppose. It sort of robbed me of my childhood,’ the character explains.
Olive and Hill settled in East Anglia and started another family. She was still besotted with Ronnie, however, and often went to London to meet him at one of his properties.
Ronnie resolved to make his sons the gentleman he never succeeded in becoming by sending them to expensive schools. Ironically, this distanced them from him. David was embarrassed by Ronnie both because he flashed his money about and because he often failed to pay the school fees on time.
To avoid being thought different, David pretended to share the attitudes he found around him, even when he felt alienated by them. In retrospect, he would feel he had been schooled into becoming a spy, learning the enemy’s language, wearing his clothes, apeing his opinions and pretending to share his prejudices.
He would later liken his boyhood to living in occupied territory. ‘The catastrophes in our family were so great and the disproportion between the domestic situation and the orthodoxy of my educated programme
was so great that I seemed to go about in disguise,’ he wrote.
For Ronnie, the war presented new opportunities trading in black market chocolate, petrol coupons, Benzedrine inhalers and nylon stockings. He paid his sons’ school fees with dried fruit and a case of gin. He escaped conscription by pleading he was a single parent.
BY 1943 he had moved yet again, to a substantial property i n Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire. The boys lived at boarding schools in term time and were farmed out to holiday schools for much of the rest of the time.
Ronnie’s new girlfriend, Jean Gronow, was a divorcee who worked for the BBC and shared a London flat where she entertained a string of male visitors, many of them foreigners. Jean and Ronnie were married on December 21, 1944, at Marylebone Town Hall. During the reception, two policemen arrived and took the groom outside. There was much whispering, before he returned, beaming.
In the 1945 Election, Ronnie was again chosen to stand for the Liberals in Great Yarmouth. He believed becoming an MP would further his business interests, which seemed to blind him to the danger of his past emerging. He presented himself as a teetotaller who had done his bit for the country during the war.
But one day during the campaign, Ronnie took David aside: the Conservative agent had learned of ‘certain difficulties’. This was the first time Ronnie had ever spoken to David about going to prison. That evening, Ronnie prefaced a hustings speech with a statement of masterly obfuscation about ‘completely inaccurate statements’.
After Ronnie had delivered his address, a woman at the back asked whether it was true that he had served a prison sentence for fraud.
Ronnie brazened it out. ‘I ask each of you, if one of your sons or grandsons had made a mistake, and paid the price for it, and then he asked to be taken back, which one of you would slam the door in his face?’
The response was tumultuous applause. Ronnie polled a respectable 13.6 per cent of the vote, but was not elected.
The late 1940s and 1950s were Ronnie’s golden years, when he rode in chauffeur-driven limousines with personalised plates, owned a string of racehorses and was a regular at the Albany Club, where showbiz met the underworld. He hosted lively parties for a startling array of guests, including the Australian and West Indies cricket teams, senior civil servants, politicians, showbusiness stars and Scotland Yard officers.
He became quite the society figure, playing snooker with music-hall stars, who would stop the show to greet him when he arrived late at the theatre (‘Why, it’s Ronnie Cornwell. Hello, Ronnie’). He was pictured sharing a table with a young Cliff Richard when they went to see Lionel Blair in cabaret at the Hungaria River Club in Maidenhead, a regular haunt of the West End set at the time.
Ronnie was everybody’s fixer, finding compliant young women for influential contacts and ensuring that those found drunk at the scene of a car accident were not prosecuted. He allowed himself to be known as ‘Colonel Cornwell’, though he affected to be embarrassed. ‘Don’t be so damn foolish,’ he would say. ‘We’re all civilians now.’
His business, based in Mayfair, continued on a larger scale. He began with a spectacular coup: buying a property company for £90,000 and selling it on the same day for £105,000.
Between 1945 and 1950, he acquired 4,000 houses in more than 180 transactions. By October 1951, he had accumulated a personal fortune estimated at £191,000 – £13million in today’s money.
He ordered gin by the crate, Trumper’s hair lotion in cartons and a Bentley. He returned in triumph to St Moritz with a riotous group of sportsmen and his business retinue, and convinced the hotel to grant them unlimited credit on the proviso that his guests could settle their bills with him in pounds, which he would then (illegally) exchange for Swiss francs via a contact at the Embassy in London.
One summer holiday Ronnie despatched his sons on a commercial mission to the George V Hotel in Paris to collect his golf clubs and some money from the Panamanian ambassador – to whom Ronnie had apparently been shipping bottles of unbranded Scotch whisky under diplomatic protection.
Tony and David called on the ambassador, who claimed to have paid Ronnie up-front and was still waiting for the first consignment of booze. At the George V, they discovered that Ronnie had left the golf clubs as surety for an unpaid bill.
Ronnie’s movements in the 1960s are hard to trace. David believed that he was on the run from the police. He may also have been on the run from violent business associates – possibly the Kray twins, who were associates of notorious slum landlord Peter Rachman, whose property dealings were similar to his own.
CERTAINLY, they knew each other. In the late 1980s, Charlotte Cornwell appeared in a film about the Krays. The twins’ brother, Charlie, had been retained as a consultant and, on the set, showed her a snap of her father with an arm around each twin.
For a while, Ronnie based himself in New York. In Canada he set up a scam involving a bogus satellite town to be built outside Toronto. He moved to Hong Kong, presenting himself as someone rich, discreet and well-connected. In Kuala Lumpur, he tried to start an airline. In Singapore and Malaysia he floated a football pools scheme.
Eventually, with financial help from his sons, Ronnie returned to Britain, but continued to pursue business schemes abroad. He once telephoned David from Zurich after he had been arrested for hotel fraud. ‘How much?’ David asked. There was a long pause, then the gulp of a man fighting back tears. ‘I can’t do any more prison, son.’
In 1969, David bailed Ronnie out with £1,000. ‘He promptly pushed off to Madrid and, so far as I can make out, blew it in a fortnight.’
Ronnie was not above blackmail, either. When he heard about David’s involvement with a woman, he demanded another £1,000 as the price of his silence.
He died, aged 69, in 1975. ‘I never mourned him, never missed him. I rejoiced at his death,’ David wrote.
Not long afterwards, he heard from a woman in Brussels who seemed to think that they had had an affair. After a while, the penny dropped: she had been seduced by his father, who had been passing himself off as John le Carré.
John Le Carré: The Biography, by Adam Sisman, will be published by Bloomsbury on October 19, priced £25. Order your copy for £18.75 from www. mailbookshop.co.uk, with free p&p until October 25.
I rejoiced at his death. I did not miss or mourn him