It Takes Two

The couple’s suspicion of strangers might perhaps be bound up with their sexuality. They were almost certainly lesbians, even when you make allowances for shifting cultural norms. But is it appropriate to label them? They referred to each other as ‘my Beloved’ (though this had less weight than it does today) and they shared a bed. Some contemporary observers seem to have prized their chastity as a supreme virtue: one called them the two most celebrated virgins in Europe. Elizabeth Mavor prefers ‘romantic friendship’ and insists it is anachronistic to read the relationship as erotic, as if we have lost the ability to construe such a friendship in any other way: ‘Much that we would now associate solely with a sexual attachment was contained in romantic friendship: tenderness, loyalty, sensibility, shared beds, coquetry, even passion.’[21] This is a fair point. However, it seems likely they used the cover of an intense platonic friendship to live as lesbians when the world averted its gaze.

Sometimes, of course, the world peered right in, to their acute displeasure. When, in June 1791, the General Evening Post published an article full of innuendo about them not having married and accusing the ladies of having eloped in order to indulge their unnatural passions, Eleanor was so outraged that she cancelled their subscription. ‘Miss Butler is tall and masculine,’ the article read, ‘she wears always a riding habit, hangs her hat with the air of a sportsman in the hall, and appears in all respects as a young man, if we except the petticoats which she still retains. Miss Ponsonby, on the contrary, is polite and effeminate, fair and beautiful.’ The implication is that Sarah may have been ‘corrupted’. The ladies contacted Edmund Burke to ask if he thought there was any profit in bringing a libel action against the paper. He sympathised but thought it unwise.

And yet they seem, as Mavor says, ‘to have been aware of the eccentric impression they were creating’.[22] It was this that made them a draw to visitors such as Thomas De Quincey, Robert Southey and Wordsworth. At the same time their priority was the creation and tending of a private world of private enthusiasms, from fossils to ghosts, Egyptology, Pompeii and a lady rumoured to be able to lay eggs.

As the ladies aged their money worries receded. In 1819 the house became theirs. ‘The system’ changed to allow for physical infirmity and digestive comfort. Their evening meal was brought forward to four or five o’clock. They were still improving the interior, finding uses for the oak furniture that admirers kept sending them. Eleanor had operations to remove cataracts, but she never recovered her full sight. Sarah had dropsy but hoped Eleanor would die before her as she worried how her friend would cope on her own. As Eleanor faded, Sarah read her the novels of Sir Walter Scott. Eleanor did indeed die first, on 2 June 1829, aged ninety; Sarah followed two years later on 9 December 1831, aged seventy-six.

For contemporary chroniclers, one of the most intriguing things about the ladies’ enmeshed lives was what it proved about the possibility of long-term friendship for women. In this period many followed the sixteenth-century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, who believed the best and closest friendships were only possible between men. After his best friend Etienne de la Boétie died in 1563, Montaigne famously wrote: ‘If someone were to ask me why I loved him, I feel that it could not be expressed, except by answering “Because it was him; because it was me.”’

Friendship, Montaigne suggests, is an instinctive, ineffable force and one of the highest human goods. Loyalty to your best friend should come before loyalty to lovers, God, family – everything. But, predictably, Montaigne claims it is all very different for women, who, he writes, ‘are in truth not normally capable of responding to such familiarity and mutual confidence as sustain that holy bond of friendship, nor do their souls seem firm enough to withstand the clasp of a knot so lasting and so tightly drawn’.[23]

Absolute rubbish, responded Mary Pilkington in her 1804 Memoirs of Celebrated Female Characters, one of the first books to bestow upon Eleanor and Sarah the ‘national treasure’ status they still possess almost two centuries after their deaths. The pair had, at the point when Pilkington was writing, been close friends for over twenty years. Therefore, as she writes, ‘those who have asserted that females are incapable of a permanent attachment, must now certainly acknowledge that their opinion was ill-founded … Why should that sex, allowed to possess a superior degree of sensibility, be disqualified from feeling a passion, which is calculated to dignify the human mind?’[24]

Pilkington cleaves to Elizabeth Mavor’s ‘romantic friendship’ theory. But as the nineteenth century ground on, the boundaries between passionate female friendships and lesbian relationships became increasingly blurred. After the 1886 publication of Henry James’s novel The Bostonians, which features one such couple, the term ‘Boston marriages’ began to be used to describe long-term cohabiting women. In some cases, passionate friendships between women were just that – heady and romanticised, according to the fashion of the day. In others, friendships that looked to the outside world like passionate friendships were really passionate lesbian relationships. This ambiguity made it easy for women in such relationships to mask the true nature of their activities. It also made it easy for those who preferred not to confront reality to be genteelly obtuse about what was actually going on, leaving us with what the feminist critic Lisa Moore calls a ‘flattened notion’ of competing constructions of female sexuality in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century England.[25]

You could argue that, having been cast out of their birth families, the ladies’ ultimate goal was to create an idealised family unit consisting of themselves and their servants. Managing the house and its gardens therefore became a sort of family business. As its founders, they showed a high level of what workplace theorists call ‘organisational commitment’ to the task of building their brand. This was, of course, because it came with a side order of emotional commitment.

I’m always surprised when I read the statistic that only 30 per cent of family businesses survive the transition from first- to second-generation ownership.[26] Such a high failure rate is partly to do with poor succession planning. Too few leaders of family businesses succeed in passing on to their offspring the level of commitment to a company that they presumably had when they founded it. Communication fails, relationships founder and the ensuing tensions end up overwhelming everyone. As the psychotherapist and family business consultant Tom Davidow told the Financial Times, a family member might: ‘decide, “It’s not worth telling my brother that what he does bothers me” because if they have to talk about that issue it’s going to open up all these other issues”.’[27]

The annals of corporate history are littered with families – frequently married couples, sometimes their children, sometimes siblings – who messed up their businesses in this way. The Canadian food processing giant McCain was founded and run by Wallace and Harrison McCain, brothers from New Brunswick. They had once been exceptionally close. They shared the same bedroom as children and, in the first flush of success in the late 1950s, lived next door to each other in identical white houses across the river from their first frozen-chip plant. By the 2000s, however, they were no longer on speaking terms because of a dispute over whose child was going to take over the company.

Likewise, the succession of Sumner Redstone for the controlling interest in the media conglomerate Viacom has been compared to the Game of Thrones saga, culminating as it did in Redstone writing an open letter to Forbes magazine denouncing his daughter, Shari, for ignoring ‘the cardinal rules of good governance that the boards of the two public companies, Viacom and CBS, should select my successor’.[28]

What seems to work better is when succession involves the passing on of tangible skills. Giles Martin, son of the late Beatles producer George, is an acclaimed producer in his own right and has, since his father’s death in 2016, been the chief custodian of the band’s music, presiding over a wealth of remixes and high-profile reissues. He learned his craft from his father, who brought him along to mixing sessions for the Beatles’ Anthology albums in the early 1990s as a second pair of ears: Martin Snr was, by then, losing his hearing. Giles Martin is trusted by the surviving Beatles and their families because, as he puts it, he innovates while ensuring that standards are kept; remains committed to what we might call the Beatles’ core sonic values, while understanding that the modern marketplace requires them to apply to a wider variety of media than vinyl records and CDs.

In the early 2000s, Giles was instrumental in constructing, from the Beatles’ master tapes, the soundtrack to the award-winning Cirque du Soleil show Love. Sometimes his father would join him, as Giles told the Guardian: ‘I would sit and chop things up and create stuff and think about the show, he would come in on Thursday, and I’d play him bits and we’d talk about it, and just have a nice time together … Very few people have the chance of going through their dad’s dirty laundry for two years.’[29]

I want to consider another father–son couple who, like the Martins, were bonded rather than broken by their commitment to a particular way of doing things. The duo in question are glass-blowers Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka. From their workshop in Dresden, they created exceptionally detailed and lifelike models of sea-dwelling invertebrates, based on the latest scientific illustrations and, later, live creatures they kept in aquaria. They also produced equally detailed models of plants and flowers. ‘The savant finds the rendering of the minutest details of vegetable organism almost inconceivably accurate,’ marvelled Popular Science in May 1897. ‘Not even the daintiest productions of the Venetian and Bohemian glass workers have prepared us for the delicacy and pliability which we find here.’

Leopold was born in 1822 into a glassmaking family in the Czech village of Böhmisch Aicha. His family speciality was prosthetic glass eyes. As a child, he showed artistic promise and was deemed to be the only one among three brothers gifted enough to apprentice with his father. He was still a relatively young man when his father died, just two years after Leopold lost his wife to cholera. Grief-stricken, he set out on a year-long journey to the United States, intending to devote himself to his passion for natural history. When his ship, the brig Pauline, was becalmed for two weeks in the Azores, Leopold became obsessed with watching bioluminescent jellyfish darting around under the water. ‘Hopefully we look over the darkness of the sea which is as smooth as a mirror,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘In various places there emerges all around a flashlike bundle of light-beams, like thousands of sparks, that form true bundles of fire and of other bright lighting spots, as if they are surrounded by mirrored stars … It is as if they wanted to lure the enchanted observer into the realm of fairies.’[30] Wouldn’t it be amazing, he wondered, if you could recreate these creatures using glass?

On returning from his trip in 1854, Leopold married a second time, to a woman called Carolina Riegel. Rudolf, the couple’s only child, was born a few years later. At the age of twenty-three, Rudolf began assisting his father professionally. ‘He was the only apprentice whom the elder man initiated into the mysteries of his art,’ noted Popular Science.

The Blaschkas’ models proved exceptionally popular. Dresden’s Botanical Gardens and Natural History Museum commissioned the pair to make glass flowers as well as sea creatures. The Blaschkas also began to offer a mail-order service. Before long, other museums and universities came calling, intrigued by the possibility of using the models as teaching tools; for as well as being three-dimensional, glass models of invertebrates retained their colour and form, unlike samples preserved in alcohol, which disintegrated into a squishy mess because of the lack of bone structure.

So it was that the Blaschkas turned out thousands of jellyfish, octopus and squid, every eye and polyp and tentacle rendered perfectly. It is estimated that over the course of thirty years they averaged one model per day.

The secret of the duo’s excellence was their unique working dynamic, a natural symbiotic rhythm that owed as much to an instinctive, familial intimacy and deep-rooted mutual respect as anything else. Their process involved creating detailed illustrations before actually making the models using traditional flameworking techniques – over a wooden table using a foot-pumped bellows. The models were created from blown glass, shaped with tongs and tweezers. Written like that, it sounds straightforward. But the fact is that even today expert glassworkers struggle to explain exactly how the Blaschkas made the models, wrongfooted by the fact that, for one thing, they were not exclusively made of glass but also paper and enamel, wire and different kinds of resin.

During quiet periods Rudolf would make field trips to America – increasingly the main market for their work – to study the natural world and collect samples. These were scientific models, after all, so accuracy was all-important. In her book A Sea of Glass, the marine biologist Drew Harvell notes cannily that ‘some part of the deeper motivation to create these masterpieces must have resided in the relationship between father and son’.[31] It was a mutual obsession which turned into a duopoly. In the absence of any apprentices, the pair’s dedication to perfecting their technique was so intense it was as to be unfathomable. ‘Many people think that we have some secret apparatus by which we can squeeze glass suddenly into these forms, but it is not so,’ Leopold wrote in 1889 to the Blaschkas’ patron Mary Lee Ware, who paid for what became known as the Ware Collection of glass flowers at Harvard. ‘We have tact. My son Rudolf has more than I have, because he is my son, and tact increases in every generation.’[32]

In July 1895, while Rudolf was away on a field trip, his father died unexpectedly. Rudolf described his reaction three months later in a heartbreaking letter to the botanist Walter Deane:

In America I could not suppress a strange apprehension, a presentiment of some mischief menacing me and which oppressed my mind, especially during the last days in North Carolina, with a strange power. But when I received the sad news the blow came though I was prepared and floored me terribly. I shall never forget my sad returning across the ocean with my grief and additional anxiety about my good mother’s health. Fortunately, my mother got well and I could collect myself and find comfort in my work and the study of nature again. At first my studio appeared to me very lonely, but my father’s spirit seems to be always with me. I see him in my thoughts sitting with me and hear his voice – how could I ever forget him? We have been working together for almost 25 years and the people in the city called us ‘the inseparable’ – now the unmerciful death has though separated us. I am however used, and have early been induced by my father, to be self-dependent in my work and as I am familiar by the long practice with everything in my art there is no trouble with me about the continuation of the flower-work for Harvard University. I trust you shall not find any difference of my work from the former models made by us both. The only circumstance is the quantity. So much as two active artists have produced can impossibly be done by one alone …[33]

By the end of the following year Rudolf was exhausted from doing all the work himself. He apologised to Deane for his lack of contact, but ‘I was working so continuously all year that I could not spare even an hour for corresponding …’ In 1897 Popular Science pondered the question of whether ‘there is no one besides Rudolf Blaschka who can make these models, or who can at least assist him in making them’. The answer was no. Tact may increase in every generation, but there was to be no next generation of glassmaking Blaschkas. In 1911 Rudolf married, but they had no children and, because he had never trained an apprentice, there was no one to carry on the business.

The Blaschkas’ success was the result of something singular in their natures, a complicity so intense that it became a kind of concealment. Between them, father and son created a space – the hot, smoke-fuggy interior of their workshop – which the outside world could not see. It was a space in which they could create artefacts so exquisite they might have been dropped from the heavens.

What is it that bonds couples, be they mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, business partners or ‘romantic friends’? Perhaps one is drawn in by the other, who may be the dominant partner. Perhaps there are areas – covert, shadowy areas – where the whole point is that you are two people keeping a secret or playing a role: I’m talking, of course, about espionage.

Most traditional spy narratives focus on individuals, mostly fictional men such as James Bond, but occasionally real-life women like the famous ‘honey trap’ specialist Mata Hari, a Dutch exotic dancer who was convicted of spying for the Germans during the First World War. Hari was accused of obtaining her intelligence by seducing prominent French politicians and officers. Bond does his fair share of seduction in the line of duty but is a classic loner oddball, and a sadist to boot. It is hard to imagine him settling down with anyone (even though he does, briefly, at the end of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and in 2015’s Spectre).

Yet spousal spies are a perennial obsession of Hollywood, whether it is Homeland’s Carrie Mathison and her double-agent lover, Brody, or Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie playing two assassins hired to kill each other in Mr and Mrs Smith. In The Americans, about Russian sleeper agents in suburbia, a glamorous couple kill together and use sex to lure their targets.

People who spy sustain clandestine double lives – hard enough to do on your own, you might think. But does being in a couple help? Spies are often depicted as narcissists or psychopaths. And psychopaths, says Dr Ursula Wilder in a CIA report on ‘The Psychology of Espionage’, rarely learn from mistakes and have difficulty seeing beyond the present. They cannot plan long-term and are, Wilder observes, ‘deeply antagonistic to sharing decision-making with others’.[34] This is tricky if you are one half of a spy couple.

Some spy pairings seem to have had amazingly healthy relationships and been capable of the most elastic adaptability. Others, not so much. If you’re part of a duo, you’re more dependent – and dependency, says Wilder, ‘makes a person particularly susceptible to manipulation and control’.[35]

So how do spy couples make it work? In Britain, the Krogers are the best known. They were key players in the so-called ‘Portland spy ring’ scandal – Soviet spies who operated in England during the late 1950s and early 1960s, until they were rumbled by the British security services.

Antiquarian book-dealer Peter Kroger and his wife Helen were sociable denizens of suburban Ruislip. Peter worked from home, buying and selling rare books, which he posted to dealers across the world. In reality, many of these books contained microdot reductions of information Peter and his wife were being given to pass on to the Russians. The pair had the necessary technology to do this, plus a keying device to encrypt the radio transmissions they made to the USSR and attenuate them so that they could not be detected.

One of Helen’s main roles was to charm (and watch for signs of suspicion in) other residents of the street, especially the Search family, whose house overlooked the Krogers’ bungalow. Now a writer and broadcaster, Gay Search, then aged fifteen, remembers that Helen popped over nearly every day to chat with her mother and, sometimes, take photos of Gay and her brother Phil with her expensive-looking camera. Every weekday, that is – the couple never seemed to be around at weekends.

On 5 November 1960, Special Branch approached the Searches and revealed why. Weekends were when the Krogers met their contact – Russian spy Gordon Lonsdale, real name Konon Molody, the head of a spy ring based at the Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment at Portland in Dorset. Two corrupt civil servants who worked there, Harry Houghton and Ethel Gee, supplied secret information to Lonsdale, who took it to the Krogers, whose real names were Morris and Lona Cohen. ‘Helen’ photographed this material using the same expensive camera she used to photograph Gay and Phil Search.

Excitingly for Gay and Phil, Special Branch used Gay’s bedroom as a lookout. This led to some near misses when Helen paid her visits and the British agents would have to hide in the downstairs bathroom. Gay’s mother bore the brunt of all this – she would have to pretend to be Helen’s friend, just as Helen was pretending to be hers. In early 1961, the Krogers were arrested and their bungalow was taken apart to reveal the radio transmitter and camera equipment, plus lighters with secret compartments and what disgraced civil servant Houghton in his account of the case called ‘the whole James Bond collection’.[36] It tells you a lot about the psychology of the Krogers that Helen told Gay – who visited her in prison shortly before the Krogers were swapped for some British spies and returned to Moscow – that she would never forgive her mother for ‘betraying’ her by allowing her house to be used as an observation post.

You can see the same shamelessness at play in the story of Donald Healthfield and Tracey Foley. In June 2010, shortly after returning from an evening out to celebrate their son Tim’s twentieth birthday, Heathfield and Foley’s worst nightmare was realised. Their house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was raided by armed FBI officers who promptly arrested them, bundled them off in separate black cars and began an intensive, forensic search of the property. Tim and his brother Alex, who had always believed their parents to be a political consultant (Donald) and a real estate agent (Tracey), were told the pair had been arrested on suspicion of being ‘unlawful agents of a foreign government’. Which, it transpired, they were.

The ring they were part of had been busted in an FBI operation called ‘Ghost Stories’. Heathfield and Foley were not Canadians, although their names were: they belonged to long-dead Canadian children whose identities the spies had stolen and adopted. Their real names were Andrei Bezrukov and Elena Vavilova and they were Russian nationals who had been recruited as a couple by the KGB. After intensive training in spycraft, such as communicating in code and evading detection, they were sent abroad in the late 1980s as what the CIA calls ‘illegals’ – deep-cover secret agents. Taking root in the new soil of Canada, they worked on acquiring the identities of ordinary Western citizens. As ‘Tracey Foley’, Elena gave birth to Tim in a Toronto hospital in June 1990. Alex followed in 1994, after which the family was sent, presumably on SVR (the new KGB) orders, to Paris so that ‘Donald’ could study for an MBA. Their next stop was not a return to Canada but a new life in Boston: ‘Donald’ had got a place at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. During their time in Europe, the old Soviet Union had continued its long process of disintegration under Boris Yeltsin. Their relocation to Boston coincided with the arrival of Vladimir Putin, their new boss, who was keen to reactivate agents who had been left discombobulated by developments in their home country.