The Anthony Powell Society Newsletter Issue 50, Spring 2013, ISSN 1743-0976, £2.50 Anthony Powell at MI(L) – page 3 Bumper 50th Issue! Contents From the Secretary’s Desk … 2 Anthony Powell at MI(L) … 3-8 Dance Dedicatees … 9-10 Kaggsy’s Ramblings – Waring … 11-12 Kaggsy’s Ramblings – QU … 13-14 REVIEW: Annual Lecture … 15-17 A Powell Letter … 18 Letter to the Editor … 19 Dates for Your Diary … 20 Society Notices … 21-22 NY Birthday Lunch … 23 Competition Winners … 24 REVIEW: DJ Taylor “Parodies” … 25-28 From the APLIST … 29-31 Cuttings … 32-36 Christmas Quiz Answers … 37 Merchandise & Membership… 38-40 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #50 The Anthony Powell Society From the Secretary’s Desk Registered Charity No. 1096873 Welcome to this 50th edition of The Anthony Powell Society is a Newsletter. That’s an achievement which charitable literary society devoted to the I never dreamt – in the most literal sense life and works of the English author – of our achieving. I genuinely never Anthony Dymoke Powell, 1905-2000. thought about it, but suddenly here we are. Officers & Trustees And how far we have come! Newsletter Patron: John MA Powell started off in December 2000 as an eight President: The Earl of Gowrie PC, FRSL page A4 news-sheet, photocopied, stapled Hon. Vice-Presidents: and mailed by the fair hand of the Editor. Julian Allason This 50th issue is 40 pages of articles and Patric Dickinson LVO news which is professionally printed and Michael Meredith mailed – although still with the same Dr Jeremy Warren FSA Editor (Stephen Holden) and in-house Society Trustees: production team (me). OK, 40 pages is Dr Christine Berberich unusual but we normally run to 32 pages Stephen Holden and thus far have never really suffered Jeffrey Manley (USA) from a shortage of material. If anything Dr Keith C Marshall (Hon. Secretary) we usually have a the odd article with Dr Derek WJ Miles (Hon. Treasurer) which to seed the next issue. Paul Nutley (Chairman) With all things in clubs and societies the Tony Robinson success is dependent on members. In the Prof. John Roe case of the Newsletter we’re dependent Elwin Taylor (Switzerland) on you writing articles for us – or alerting Membership & Merchandise Officer: us to possible writers and Powell-related Dr Keith C Marshall news stories and sightings. Keep them Newsletter & Journal Editor: coming! The more the merrier – and the Stephen Holden more interesting this Newsletter is. Hon. Archivist: Noreen Marshall In other news, arrangements for the September conference are progressing All correspondence should be sent to: well and it is shaping up to be another Hon. Secretary, Anthony Powell Society exciting event. Invited speakers have 76 Ennismore Avenue, Greenford been lined up and the delegate papers UB6 0JW, UK have been selected (authors should have Phone: +44 (0) 20 8864 4095 confirmation by the time you read this). Fax: +44 (0) 20 8020 1483 The final events programme will be Email: [email protected] confirmed over the next few weeks. This Cover photograph © John S Monagan 1984 and reproduced means that we should be able to release by kind permission. delegate pricing and booking information © The Anthony Powell Society, 2013. All rights reserved. Published by The Anthony Powell Society. around the end of April. ■ Printed and distributed by Lonsdale Direct Solutions, Wellingborough, UK. 2 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #50 Anthony Powell at MI(L) By John Powell Anthony Powell’s work in WWII at the ENIGMA decoded communications. West War Office as an army liaison officer to says the Poles, the Czechs, the Belgians, This tantalising clue turns the Luxembourg and later the French was in attention to Sedlacek’s British sharp contrast to the shadowy fellow connections, and focuses on the link travellers and traitors revealed by the between Czech military intelligence, VENONA decrypts as senders of represented by Col Josef Kalla, long intercepted messages to Moscow, now serving military attaché in London mostly decoded. and his counterpart at MI(L) at the In his lecture entitled ‘BARON, Bletchley War Office. Park and Anthony Powell’ at the inaugural In fact my father only joined the War biannual conference at Eton College in Office in late 1941 months after this 2001 Nigel West described some of the particular intercept. At first he did odd most important spy rings detected after the jobs connected with liaison with neutrals decoding of communications between before joining the Polish section as GO3 London, New York and Moscow of Soviet with Capt. Alick Dru under the command agents between 1940-48. The collection of of Lt-Col Jack Carlisle. Therefore my texts on which Bletchley Park, GCHQ and father’s contact with Czech military HQ the US National Security Agency worked only began in May 1943. together until the 1980s were known as VENONA. Col Kalla, who had been military attaché in London for a few years before the war, As well as the two major spy rings headed is described in Faces as the doyen of the by INTELLIGENSlA (the scientist Prof. military attachés. However, while taking JBS Haldane) and NOBILITY (Hon. Ivor his leave from my father in 1945, before Montagu) revealed in the VENONA returning home as the war ended, he had intercepts, Nigel West was particularly forebodings about his country’s fate as the exercised by BARON, whose identity communists and the Red Army grabbed remained a mystery until after WWII, power. He was imprisoned on his return, when examination of the VENONA traffic dying of a heart attack, probably as a suggested that it was Karel Sedlacek, a result of his treatment, in 1947. My father senior member of the Czech Intelligence noted that some Czech officers were shot service (headed by General Moravec in out of hand on their return. London). Sedlacek operated via Switzerland passing information to Russia, This contrasts with the career of Karel and presumably Germany. Sedlacek, the spy thought to be BARON who, Nigel West suggests, might have had Among the texts mentioning BARON to some indefinable connection via Kalla which Nigel West refers is one dated 3 with my father. Neither Sedlacek nor his April 1941 which implies contact with boss Gen. Moravec is mentioned by my allied military intelligence using access to father in Faces. While Kalla, despite 3 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #50 being a loyal supporter of a free the Polish Corps there, and see something Czechoslovakia and of the Russian war of the troops only known on paper. partnership with the Allies, became a In an earlier paragraph he writes: victim of the Red Army and of the new regime, Sedlacek was promoted and The Poles, high spirited, gallant, ever appointed Czech military attaché in Berne unfortunate, were stimulating to work after the war. with. By the time I arrived in the War Office (in late 1941) there was The real functions and objectives of MI(L) already a great uneasiness about the were skated over by Nigel West (talking whereabouts of 15,000 Polish off the cuff) in the discussion after his Officers, deported after the Russian lecture. His view was that invasion of Poland to the Soviet MIL’s responsibility, particularly in Union, and not identified as among respect of the Czechs and the Poles those Polish units known to have been was firstly to liaise with the transferred to Central Asia.* At this government in exile in the UK and to period it was thought by the London gather information from those two Poles that the missing officers had intelligence services and to try and been exiled to distant camps within collate it, to match it to what was the Arctic circle. Their atrocious known by the other sources. The massacre at Katyn was to emerge reverse process was also taking only later. place, that MIL’s responsibility was to It is also worth mentioning details given in disseminate information, much of it of Nigel West’s book Venona of the course, in fact the overwhelming part bombastic Maj-Gen. Vasili M Zarubin who of it came from ENIGMA intercepts, operated as a spy out of New York in 1942 the source of which had to be -43 under the nom-de-guerre Zubilin with disguised but the secret intelligence rank of third secretary. As a former banker service had no assets in either in Moscow who also worked as a diplomat occupied Czechoslovakia or occupied in China he is named by Nigel West as Poland for much of WWII so they being implicated in the massacre of Polish therefore relied heavily upon officers at Kozielsk in the Katyn woods. ENIGMA and the conduit for the official flow of intelligence between I can firmly quote my father as having said the two official intelligence “The point about secrets is that they are communities was Anthony Powell. secret”. He writes in Faces The emphasis on ENIGMA is misleading While at the Cabinet Office I was because it was still largely ‘secret’. MI(L) impressed on the whole by the was working in the real world of the army relative unimportance of those in a capacity of administration on matters ‘secrets’, which play so large a part that cropped up day to day. in novels and journalism, dealing with official life. One knew several During his first stint at MI(L) in mid-1942 my father was sent on a week’s tour of duty in Scotland to make contact with the * These units were eventually administered by British Liaison Headquarters attached to MI(L). 4 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #50 Allied Military Attaches with Field Marshall Montgomery (left of centre) and Major AD Powell second from right) near Roermond, November 1944.