It is April 1967 and Tony Scotland is working for ABC (in those days the Australian Broadcasting Commission) in Hobart, Tasmania.
Born in 1945, he left school at fifteen and worked for the East Essex Gazette. When he was nineteen he emigrated to Australia and after a stint as a journalist with The Sydney Morning Herald snagged a job as a television reporter with ABC in Hobart. His assignment that April morning was to go with a cameraman to interview Lord Talbot de Malahide, Baron in the Peerages of Ireland and the UK, Hereditary Lord Admiral of Malahide and Adjacent Seas. “He’s a retired ambassador, who lives in a castle in Ireland and a sheep station up at Fingal. And he’s written a book about Tasmanian flora” his formidable, female boss explained contemptuously, unable to imagine a man writing a book about flowers.
Milo Talbot, born in 1912, had been at Cambridge and then the Foreign Office with Philby, Burgess and Maclean and like them most of his career was in Intelligence. Burgess coached him in History leading to his getting a First. Milo also knew Anthony Blunt; for decades he was intimate with Britain’s four most famous spies.
Undercover is a biography of Milo, inevitably speculating on the extent to which he may have protected his friends who went undiscovered for so long. Tony also describes Milo’s attraction to handsome young men, although as he got older these tendresses were not often consummated. When Tony met Milo at Malahide in Tasmania, the sheep station has the same name as the castle in Ireland, they recognised each other as being gay and for the next six years, until Milo’s death in 1973, Milo mentored Tony. He lavished his attention on him, was generous and made half-hearted attempts to seduce him.
Undercover is also an autobiography of Tony Scotland. It is unflinchingly candid about his confusion and shame about growing up gay in a society and at a time when it was taboo. Like most conventional autobiographies it describes his life at home and school, then his work life in East Anglia, Australia and, in 1968, back to Britain again to work for the BBC ending up on BBC Radio 3. He doesn’t want to reject his sexuality but finds it difficult to live with. Perversely Milo tries to make him heterosexual and Tony is persuaded to try hormone treatment. Tony writes about his emotional struggle dispassionately without any self-pity. It reveals how two men, thirty-five years apart in age, and worlds apart in experience of life, education and background cope with their sexuality. Spoiler: Tony meets Julian Berkeley, son of composer Lennox Berkeley, and they live happily ever after in a cottage in Hampshire occupied with writing and Gregorian Chant among other things.
Undercover; Two Secret Lives will be in the better class of bookshop on 1st October 2024 but can be bought now from the Shelf Lives website. Readers here will be sent their copy pre-publication but should be aware that although postage to UK addresses is included there is a surcharge for addresses outside the UIK.