SIR,—Lady Violet Bonham Carter is:not only, as Mr. Henry Fairlie
clownishly concedes, 'a tenacious controversialist'; on this specific issue she is right as accurate about the facts as she is, in my view, justified in her protest against Mr. Fairlie's glib and unrepentant impertinence.
There is a. mass of evidence to prove that the families and, in some instances, the friends of Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess have been, since May, 1951, hounded, not by 'the press,' but by certain newspapers, which indeed, 'since Mr. Petrov's 'disclosure,' have gloried in the hounding and given themselves lavish doses of praise for their patriotism. vigilance and so forth.
Not long after the two men disappeared, representatives of one newspaper waylaid Mac- lean's small sons on their way to school and tried to question them and take their photo- graphs. They tried to bribe the Macleans
maid- servant. They haunted the garden of the Macleans' house, staring in at the windows. Was it any wonder—as Mr. Geoffrey Hoare has recorded—that Fergus Maclean,, aged seven, once announced : 'I'm going to shoot the reporters who are making Mummy unhappy'? Mrs. Bassett '(Guy Burgess's mother) has been subjected over years to a persecution just as insidious and just as insulting. The repre- sentative 'of one newspaper contrived to see art old and close friend of`Guy Burgess's, and suggested to this man—who in his own field of work had won high and merited distinction —that if he did not give the kind of interview which this newspaper desired, he would be exposed .as a sharer of what were alleged to be Burgess's sexual proclivities.
No crime of which' these two men could conceivably be guilty would ever justify this behaviour, the thought of which has nauseated decent journalists for years. Many of us have been deeply grateful to Lady Violet for the courage, the dignity and the magnanimity with which she has fought it. — Yours faithfully,
JOHN CONNELL
WilliamoStreet House, Willianz Street, SW1
Previous page
