The traitor’s last supper
FOR SALE: The £900,000 home where Soviet spy Donald Maclean calmly sat down to eat – hours before fleeing Britain for good
IN 1951, Derek Walmsley’s house e in Tatsfield, near Westerham, in n Kent, was the scene of one of the e most dramatic nights in the history y of British espionage. It was here, , in the dining room, that the spy y Donald Maclean ate a supper to celebrate e his 38th birthday, said goodbye to his wife and children, then left Britain, never r to be seen here again.
‘ Everybody still talks about it,’ says Derek, a retired electrical engineer, now aged 70. He says locals remember seeing a Morris Minor parked at the house, which they later found belonged to fellow spy Guy Burgess. ‘ Burgess went into the house, joined the supper party, then the pair of them came out and drove down to Southampton. They took a ferry to France and weren’t heard of for five years, until they reappeared in Moscow.’
Maclean’s career as an agent for the e Russians reads like the plot of a John le Carré thriller. Recruited into the Soviet intelligence service while still at Cambridge, he entered the British Foreign Office on graduating and began leaking top-secret information in 1934.
Three years later he made a crucial contact: a fellow Russian agent, Kitty Harris. Maclean – a striking man, blond and 6ft tall – would visit Harris in her Bayswater flat twice a week bringing papers for her to photograph, along with flowers and chocolates as presents. They soon became lovers and one evening he gave her with a locket on a thin gold chain.
Maclean was so besotted with Kitty that when he was posted to the embassy in Paris in 1938, he persuaded his masters in Moscow to allow her to move there too. However, the affair was not to last. Things fell apart when he met a pretty, seemingly reserved young American woman, Melinda Marling, in a cafe and fell for her immediately.
They married in 1940 and spent the rest of the war being bombed out of one flat after another in London. Then they moved to Washington, where Maclean did his most valuable work as a secret agent, supplying the Soviets with secrets about US energy policy. There is no evidence that Melinda worked alongside Maclean as a spy but she certainly supported him in his double life.
In 1948, Maclean was moved to the British Embassy in Cairo, but the stress of duplicity was taking its toll by this time – he began drinking, brawling and even telling people about his life as a spy.
Maclean was moved back to London, where he discovered that MI5 had broken his cover. So we arrive at that fateful evening when Maclean caught the train from the Foreign Office in London to have his birthday supper back in Kent.
The house – which is for sale for £895,000 – has changed a good deal over the intervening years. In Maclean’s day it was a single, six-bedroom, smallish manor house, but in 1952 it was divided in two.
TODAY, anyone fascinated by the house’s cloak-and-dagger past will not be disappointed. The dining room where the spy t ook his l ast supper is in Derek’s side of the property, although it is now a living room.
With four bedrooms, four bathrooms and three reception rooms, it was the garden that attracted Derek when he and his wife Maia bought the house in 2004.
The story of the spy ring did not end with Maclean’s defection. In 1953, Melinda and the children joined Maclean in Moscow. But the marriage failed and in 1976 she returned to New York, where she died in 2010.
Guy Burgess drank himself to death in Moscow in 1963, aged 52, while Maclean, who made a new life for himself as a specialist on the economic policy of the West, died of a heart attack in Moscow in 1983, aged 69.