Ping-Pong Diplomacy Read online

  The path from the underground station to school took him directly past the offices of the Fabian Society in Tothill Street. That spring, he paused before the window to peer at a pamphlet that he thought “appropriate to me”; George Bernard Shaw’s Socialism for Millionaires. Socialism, he decided, was “the only plausible explanation of man’s history and the processes of the universe.” It was a big leap for a young aristocrat to make, but for Montagu it was a sure foundation that he would construct the rest of his life around. Instead of helping his mother organize his messy notes for his upcoming lecture on war games, he told her that he had become a pacifist and would cancel his engagement.

  By October 1917, as the bloody details of the Russian Revolution filtered through the British press, Montagu noticed that a kind of fear had entered the public consciousness. Was revolution contagious? Would his mother’s friend, Queen Mary, soon suffer the same fate as the tsarina and end up executed by radicals? Montagu watched the incessant marches that filed past his school, just steps from the Houses of Parliament and his father’s seat in the House of Lords.

  One night, finished with his classes, Montagu emerged from school into a scuffle between charging policemen and unemployed war veterans. He was knocked to the ground and watched a policeman crack a banner from a man’s hand. Montagu swung his cane and brought the policeman down. Had the policeman tried to identify his attacker in the melee, the least likely suspect would have been the retreating schoolboy, the Honorable Ivor Montagu. From the beginning, Montagu understood that his class offered a thick smoke screen of protection, one that would linger around him for decades. He walked home to the mansion in Kensington Court and said nothing of the afternoon’s events to his father.

  At fifteen, the precocious schoolboy passed the entrance exam to Cambridge University, but his chosen college, King’s, asked him to wait two years before beginning university. Tall and slightly hunched, with a tendency to wear his glasses halfway down his nose, Montagu busied himself with a mixture of zoology and politics. He studied botany and biology at the Royal College of Science, eating at the same small restaurant every day his chosen fare of “minestrone and wobbly pink blancmange.” Through his father’s connections, he met the heads of the British Museum and the Royal Geographic Society. Another family friend, the head of the London Zoo, allowed Montagu to spend a night on the zoo grounds listening to the wolves howl at the lions and the lions roar at the wolves.

  His rebellious streak remained hidden. On weekends down at Townhill, he’d sneak out to canvass his father’s tenants in support of the Labour Party; back in London during the week, he befriended socialist sympathizers H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. To prove his commitment, he helped the British Socialist Party by volunteering to hide a consignment of Lenin’s booklet State and Revolution. They were being sought by Scotland Yard. He put them on the landing at home, right by the Ping-Pong table. The sense of openness would be Montagu’s way of hiding in plain sight throughout his life.

  He was still honing his skills. A speech he was writing to present at the British Socialist Party was discovered by the butler and handed to his parents. Lord Swaythling asked him to leave the party at once and forbade him to spend any more family money on political memberships. Montagu decided that being a child was like being a “worker without a union.” From then on, he wrote, he began to repay his family’s love “with wariness.”

  Finally arriving at Cambridge, he reveled in being away from his family. A compulsive joiner of clubs, he also founded two: the Cheese Eaters’ Society, where he led the charge to try to find whale’s milk cheese; and the Spillikins, a left-wing society where they talked about the rise of Communism and wore black ties with little red dots.

  The one thing he didn’t do at Cambridge was study. “Quite frankly,” he wrote, success there depended entirely on extracurricular activities, and the ones that he “went a-whoring after” were “politics, art, sport (and) new friends.” Montagu understood that team sports dominated university campuses and he longed for the associated popularity. After failed attempts at soccer and tennis, Montagu had a eureka moment: Ping-Pong. Using a portion of his allowance, he had two tables made to order. It was a recourse only a very wealthy undergraduate could take, but over the next fifty years it would be hard to find a fellow Communist who would have begrudged the extravagance for the effect his decision would have on the greater world.

  Montagu’s first tournament amazed him: 140 players registered. Ping-Pong wasn’t dead after all. Montagu saw a player in a wheelchair beat Cambridge University’s finest runner. Montagu lost in an early round, then watched the field thin out. Cambridge’s best chess player beat its top tennis player in the final. Immediately, Montagu organized a team to challenge Oxford University and captained it to a thirty-one to five victory. All five losses were Montagu’s. Within a year, Montagu, not yet eighteen years old, was chairman of the national Ping Pong Association.

  A Manchester businessman, already interested in resurrecting the game, had heard of Montagu’s efforts and approached him, glad of “Oxbridge” support to help draw up rules and regulations. Montagu was in his element. As the whistle-blower, umpire, and organizer, he was allowed to write the rules of the sport. The fundamentals would remain intact for the next forty years and be translated into dozens of languages.

  Yet, almost immediately, there was a problem. Setting up a few small tournaments under the name of the new Ping-Pong Association, Montagu and his associates had failed to realize that the words themselves were trademarked. “Ping Pong” belonged to the famed toy manufacturer Jaques & Son, which insisted that its equipment should now be used at all events. Jaques representatives called a meeting at which Montagu surprised them by dissolving the Ping-Pong Association, then immediately re-forming the group as the Table Tennis Association in an adjacent room—an early foray into defending an ideology against the forces of capitalism.

  The reasons Montagu began to pay attention to the game, he later wrote, “were political. . . . I saw in Table Tennis a sport particularly suited to the lower paid . . . there could be little profit in it, no income to reward wide advertising, nothing therefore to attract the press. . . . I plunged into the game as a crusade.” Ping-Pong was also a game small enough for Montagu to control. He would use it to connect Communist countries to the West and to promote his political agenda. It would also be the perfect cover for an agent like Montagu to visit the centers of the Communist world.

  One advantage that was unknown to Montagu in the 1920s is that table tennis is also the best sport for the brain. Not only does it fire up the same neurons as any other ball sport, but it excites the areas of the brain that deal with strategy and emotion. It is “chess on steroids.” One of the keys is the distance you stand from your opponent. Across the nine feet of a table-tennis table, “it’s much more intense because you can interpret facial expressions.” The lack of distance is what makes the game so absorbing. The advantage has always been with players like Montagu who learn to disguise their emotions.

  CHAPTER 3 | Roast Beef and Russia

  Montagu bounced between London and Cambridge, itching to get to Russia, studying just enough to keep moving toward his university degree. He heard about a Soviet trade union delegation visiting England and immediately invited them down to Cambridge with one eye “on a possible future zoological visit to Russia.” It turned out that a visa could easily be arranged if Montagu wished to visit as a zoologist.

  Montagu, not yet a card-carrying Communist but already thinking like one, knew that all culture, whether sport, literature, or film, should serve the people. The question was how to make inroads into British culture. Ping-Pong was one way, and he quickly settled on film as a second. Using another family friend, the owner of the Times, he secured an assignment to go to Berlin, then considered by some to be the world’s capital of film. He had a fascinating time, never wrote a word, but decided on his return to London to found the Film Society. Instead of eternal subjection to
English and American box office fodder, the British public would now be exposed to “high art”—alongside a heavy dose of Communist propaganda. Producers would donate a copy of their films to the Film Society, and the Film Society would host free screenings. He brought in his friends as shareholders, almost all left-wing intellectuals, in a group where Cambridge met London: science fiction writer H. G. Wells, playwright George Bernard Shaw, film director Anthony Asquith, the son of Prime Minister Asquith, and J. B. S. Haldane, one of the most distinguished scientists in Britain.

  On the day he turned twenty-one, Montagu left for Russia. He spent the final eight weeks before his departure taking an intensive Berlitz language course. His father made one last, desperate attempt to convince his son to stay put, treating him to lunch of a “juicy roast beef and crackly roast potatoes.” Lord Swaythling confessed that he and other bankers “employed a network of informants in Russia” and that Montagu would be seized by Communists as soon as he crossed the border. When Montagu showed no signs of changing his mind, Lord Swaythling told him that he was also “certain to catch plague.”

  Montagu’s overt mission was to look for specimens of the Prometheus mouse, a sightless vole endemic to the Caucasus Mountains. In reality, his first stop was Moscow, which is rather like leaving Los Angeles for Chicago and stopping by New York.

  Supposedly the surest way to cure someone of Communism was to send them to Soviet Russia; there were few whose ideals could withstand the dour reality. To Montagu, Soviet Russia was intoxicating. In Moscow, he collected hunting licenses, tried to secure films for the Film Society, joined the slow-moving queue to look at Lenin’s waxen corpse, was taken to the Bolshoi Ballet, and visited a film studio to watch a sci-fi production complete with “futuristic costumes and a comic Russian accordion player who stimulated the downtrodden Martians to revolt.”

  When Montagu finally arrived in the North Caucasus, his dreams of a Soviet Russian paradise were challenged. Children swarmed his train, begging for money. Montagu had little to give. He sat by his open window, cutting his pencils into pieces and passing them out to the clasping hands.

  Once the expedition started digging for Prometheus mice, they found that the voles moved quickly in the mountain heat. Montagu bought a straw hat like the ones the local donkeys wore and dug for a day or two, before resorting to a strictly capitalist scheme, offering to pay one ruble for every vole brought to him. They were inundated by “optimistic peasants” who continued to send sacks of voles long after they had left town.

  Montagu was a poor collector of zoological specimens. First he caged the voles together, but they fought viciously until only eight or nine remained. On the train back to Moscow, three of the voles escaped. Montagu had to ask a squad of Russian soldiers to surround the carriage to catch the runaways. By the time he reached London, all the voles had died.

  Montagu returned to England desperate to get more deeply involved in the world of Communism. He took the first step by joining the Society for Cultural Relations (SCR), hoping it would act as a signal flare for his rising interest. One thing was certain. Montagu was not going to become a first-rate zoologist. A dog he adopted first caused a car crash in front of his house, then expired “thoroughly infested with worms.” There was also a “Sicilian pole-cat who died of galloping consumption” and a marten he tried to take care of until it “bit off its own feet in a cage.”

  The first few Ping-Pong tournaments he had organized were well attended, but could that lead to a full-time job? He decided to work in the film business. One of his first jobs was to help a producer friend edit the work of a man named Alfred Hitchcock. Two weeks of recutting The Lodger secured Montagu a decade-long working friendship with the director and gave Hitchcock his breakthrough hit.

  One morning, a few months after his return from the Soviet Union, a messenger tracked Montagu down in his tiny film office. The matter was urgent: an order to visit Bob Stewart, Communist Party stalwart. It would be many years before Stewart’s full involvement with Moscow was known. Soon, Stewart would build a radio transmitter in Wimbledon that would give him direct access to orders from the Kremlin. Less than a decade later, he’d have other Cambridge graduates under his control: the five most famous spies of the coming Cold War. But for the moment, he had standing in front of him a puzzled Ivor Montagu.

  Stewart handed Ivor Montagu a letter. It was from the Communist International, better known as the Comintern, created to spread Communist propaganda, an organization that was riddled with spies and double and triple agents.

  “How soon can you leave?” asked Stewart.

  “I suppose I could leave tonight,” said Montagu. Stewart suddenly “became so stern as to be almost conspiratorial.” He pointed at Montagu’s letter. “Don’t show it to anyone.” Montagu might not have known it yet, but “a letter of this kind carries in Soviet Russia the weight of a decree.”

  Only months after his return to London, Montagu was speeding across European railways back to Moscow. The only thing he had forgotten to pack in his desperate rush was his rubber-coated Ping-Pong paddle. But what possible use could a paddle have on vital Comintern business?

  Arriving in Moscow, not a penny left in his pocket, he found no one to meet him; the entourage had been waiting for Lord Swaythling’s son at the first-class carriages. Montagu spilled out of the hard seats and wandered confused around Moscow. When, finally, he showed up at the Trade Union Building, there was a “great relief” balancing their irritation that it had taken him so long to get there. Moscow was preparing for the annual celebration of their October revolution and Montagu was asked to stay. What, he asked, should I do? Wait, said the functionary, then added on Montagu’s way out of the room, “There is something else you can do. . . . I hear you play table tennis.”

  Montagu spent the week battling a “series of the keenest players” in all of Russia, who, he suspected, had been brought in to impress him. He wired his new girlfriend back in England urging her to ship his paddle to Moscow at once.

  His treatment in Moscow was even better than last time. He attended the parade in Red Square, sitting close to Stalin in the VIP section. At the Bolshoi Theater he watched Vyacheslav Molotov give a lengthy report from the gallery. The great man, Stalin, sat three rows in front. Obviously, Ivor Montagu was being groomed, but for what exactly? Could it really be Ping-Pong?

  It turned out to be film. The Film Society was to be a funnel that ran straight from Moscow to London, through which Russia was going to pump its finest propaganda productions. Montagu would be their man in London. That, at least, is what Montagu confessed in his unpublished notebooks. His extensive travels and the vast grounds he covered for the Comintern in the coming years showed that, very simply, he was Moscow’s man.

  From now on, Montagu would be drawn deeper and deeper into the Comintern, befriending some of its most notorious spies and assassins. Not only would he never deny them, he’d be among the most enthusiastic volunteers the Soviets had ever stumbled across, willing to bend all of his talents in film, journalism, and table tennis to the Communist cause. In turn, perhaps as homage to their new disciple, a Ping-Pong craze swept across Russia in Montagu’s wake. All culture, Montagu knew, had a propaganda value, but how should it be unleashed on an unsuspecting Western world?

  CHAPTER 4 | The Dangers of Derision

  Every decision that Montagu made, in both his personal and business life, passed through the prism of his politics. In Ping-Pong it was direct. In order to help him regulate and spread the sport, he chose a man named W. J. Pope. Before his life in Ping-Pong, Pope had worked for the National Union of Railwaymen. He had learned the game inside a jail in Bradford, where he’d spent most of the Great War as a conscientious objector.

  If Montagu wanted to think of Ping-Pong in terms of the Comintern, where Communist culture crossed borders, then the sport had to grow large enough to hold international matches. By the mid-1920s, Montagu had created a lot of interest in the game, mostly by promoting a nat
ional championship through the Daily Mirror. The event, which promised a car for winning the men’s singles and a mink coat for the ladies, had drawn thirty thousand entrants. From 1926 onward, Pope had the task of giving direction to the enthusiasm, guiding the creation of hundreds of local clubs that mirrored the organization of the trade unions. In December 1926, Montagu and Pope decided to bring in national teams from across the Continent for a European championship. They would need to build tiered seating in Memorial Hall in Farringdon for the tournament, but luckily, Ivor Montagu had three hundred pounds left from his grandfather’s will to cover the cost. Montagu was never shy with his money. When he had made up his mind, he went all-in with his bets.

  Come December, Montagu and Pope had fully converted the Farringdon Street site into an arena with four tables standing in the middle. The place was packed with Hungarians, Slovaks, French, and Germans, and a group of eight Indian students. Montagu quickly recalibrated the event as a world championship. Ping-Pong turned out to be not a parlor game, but a full-fledged sport. How else to explain the numbers? Three thousand paying customers the first day, more than ten thousand in total? This was something to build upon.

  Montagu’s parents were proud “to see (their) wayward son take an interest in something non-political.” The championship cup was paid for by his mother but chosen by his father, who took him into the bullion room at Samuel Montagu and Co. to select “a fine fat-bellied design in old English style.” It cost thirty-five pounds and to this day carries the family name: “The Swaythling Cup.”