My father's royal affair

Published on Sunday 27 September 2009 19:38

IT was a love affair between a spy and a cousin of the Queen Mother. Author Jimmy Burns, the agent's son, reveals the secrets of an old suitcase full of letters

ANY half-honest author will admit that one of the moments of maximum angst he confronts when writing a book is when a terrible sense that some critical material necessary to give the work soul, meaning and direction, is missing.

In my case it came while researching the world my late father, Tom Burns, the Scottish publisher, inhabited during the Spanish Civil War and Second World War, when he worked in secret intelligence and propaganda. It was the discovery that in the 1930s and 1940s, my father had set his heart on Ann Bowes-Lyon, a cousin of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, which fuelled my curiosity and stirred a sense of vertigo.

Part of me, as my parents' son, made me naturally fearful of investigating a love affair that my father had kept secret from his family during his lifetime. And yet my writer's instinct told me that this relationship would bring an extra human dimension to a story of faith, love, and betrayal played out during a critical period in history.

Thus I owe a special thanks to Ann Bowes-Lyon's son Anton D'Abreu, who generously made available to me hundreds of love letters written to Ann by my father. Anton had discovered them by chance after her death, in an old suitcase stashed away in an outhouse of Ann's country home outside London.

Tom Burns was the seventh child of a man who, in the late 19th century, had travelled half-way across the world to Chile from his home in Brechin to seek his livelihood as a bank manager. My grandfather, David Burns, could trace his paternal ancestry back to James Sandilands of Calder, husband of Jean Stewart, daughter of King Robert II of Scotland.

My father – who was a journalist as well as being a publisher – always took some pride in the fact that his great-grandfather, Reverend James Burns, had married into the family of James Chalmers, the founder of the Aberdeen Journal, and that his grandfather – my great-grandfather, who is one of several Davids in my family – was a bookseller who has gone on to found the Brechin Advertiser. My grandfather, though born into the Church of Scotland, had in later years abandoned the Kirk and converted to Catholicism after marrying Clara Swinburn, an Anglo-Chilean.

By contrast, Ann belonged to a family with enduring aristocratic pretensions in England and Scotland and who had taken a significant step towards the British throne with the abdication crisis. She was the daughter of Patrick Bowes-Lyon, a retired army officer and the fifth son of the 13th Earl of Strathmore, whose oldest son and heir, Lord Glamis, was the father of Elizabeth, who became queen consort in 1936.

Ann's older brother, Gavin, was killed in action with the Grenadier Guards in the First World War, at the Battle of Cambrai, while two cousins died fighting with the Black Watch, as did my uncle, David. Ann's second brother Angus later committed suicide. The extended Bowes-Lyon family of cousins and second cousins had a history of early death, neurosis, and alcoholism, which is barely revealed in William Shawcross's recent door-stopper biography of the Queen Mother.

It was a structured and inclusive aristocratic society that manifested itself in Glamis, the ancestral home that Ann shared with Elizabeth and her other cousins as a child. The social calendar was taken up with the London season of balls and then shooting and hunting on the Scottish estate, until Glamis was temporarily converted into a military hospital during the First World War.

Ann was 11 by the time the war ended. She spent her teenage years comfortably in Mayfair and a large country house in Kent, with occasional holidays in Glamis once the social calendar of the upper classes had been restored.

There is a letter to Ann dating back to this period, from a friend then working at the BBC, offering her a formal introduction to Olivia Plunkett Greene, one of the most notorious female members of the hedonistic and privileged set known as the Bright Young Things. But despite a penchant for French-style underwear bought in Knightsbridge, Ann preferred to correspond with academics and the occasional artist, keeping her private life under control.

Burns spent most of the 1920s, as a dashing, intelligent young bachelor, who danced well but was considered by society hostesses to be "safe" because of his Catholicism. He accompanied young debutantes out on the town – when not secretly joining friends including Evelyn Waugh at some of the more disreputable night spots of London, such as the Gargoyle and Hell.

The fateful first meeting between Ann and Burns is thought to have taken place in June 1935 during the first performance in Canterbury of TS Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral. Ann had befriended Eliot, as a budding, if amateur poet, while Burns had separately got to know him as a young publisher.

Within two years, Eliot had published a small collection of verse by Ann under the coveted Faber imprint. Entitled simply Poems by Ann Lyon, the book had a limited sale among friends. I discovered a copy recently dedicated by Ann to my father buried among his books and papers.

Of the 54 poems, mostly written in the haunting elegiac style of the Georgian poets, three stand out because of the intimacy of feeling linking the poetess to an unidentified person. They are love poems intensely expressed with feelings of longing underpinned by a prevailing sense of vulnerability and foreboding. The lover, I now know, was my father. The seeds of what turned into an intense love affair between Burns and Ann – at 28 she was a year his junior – are likely to have been sown during a discussion of Eliot's drama that evening in Canterbury, during which he would have displayed an intellectual grasp of Eliot's growing interest in Christian activism, and she a profound interest in the Church of Rome.

Burns found Ann intellectually mature and physically attractive, a combination that set her apart from other women he had known. The radical in him also felt challenged by her lineage which, like his, dated back to Scotland's King Robert II. Ann, for her part, found herself initially uneasy, and later enchanted, at being courted with such passion by a man who was outside her tight-knit social circle.

A "cradle Catholic", born in Chile and educated by the Jesuits in England, the darkly handsome Burns had a romantic self-confidence verging on the exotic, which contrasted with the stiff upright Englishmen and Scots she had met when growing up. From their first meeting, Burns had shown himself not only insightful about the arts, and matters of faith, but also responsive to her views as a woman.

If Burns managed to stir the repressed feelings the poet carried within her, such passion is barely hinted at in a collection of photographs taken by Howard Coster for London's National Portrait Gallery, in 1938, about the time the relationship was in full flow. It shows her very posed and controlled.

In fact, their affair proved complicated and, at times obsessive, reflecting not only the tensions of world conflict, but also Ann's periodic bouts of depression, which had affected generations of Bowes-Lyons, and which Burns blamed on the stultifying atmosphere at Glamis.

It was an environment from which Burns, as a Catholic with Chilean blood, was excluded by the Bowes-Lyon family, and which fuelled the sense of growing separation the lovers felt after war was declared. When Burns joined the secret world of Whitehall, Ann was enthused by the example of her older cousin Elizabeth and resolved to do her patriotic duty by volunteering as a VAD (Voluntary Aid Detachment) nurse at the Royal Herbert Hospital in Woolwich.

When Burns was posted to Madrid on a top-secret assignment in June 1940, he tried to keep the affair going via letters. He considered Ann the love of his life, but found her resistant to marriage and any enduring emotional attachment. Then, in the winter of 1940-1, during a visit to Gibraltar, Burns overheard a conversation in the officers' mess that revealed Ann had become engaged to Lieutenant-Colonel Francis D'Abreu, a military surgeon, whom she married in June 1945. Burns was emotionally shattered by the end of the affair and never entirely eradicated the memory of his loss. As he later wrote in a personal memoir (in which Ann is not mentioned by name), it would take a long time for the "vacuum in my life to be changed to a new vision, freed from the bondage and illusion of years", when he met, fell in love with and married my mother in 1944.

Burns and Francis D'Abreu both died in 1995, within three weeks of each other, neither knowing that Ann had kept my father's love letters for more than sixty years. Ann died in 1999, and my mother last year, also unaware of the existence of the letters although she knew of my father's earlier love.

I would like to believe that none of these characters would have objected to me drawing on these letters, if only as an enduring record of their closeness during what was an extraordinary period in history.

&#149 Jimmy Burns is the author of Papa Spy: Love, Faith & Betrayal in Wartime Spain (Bloomsbury). He will be in conversation with The Scotsman's Lee Randall at the Stena Line Wigtown Book Festival on Saturday 3 October at 1:30pm; tickets 6. www.wigtownbookfestival.com; www.jimmy-burns.com