249
Hodgkin, who was the grandson of the celebrated Oxford historian and
Master of Balliol A.L. Smith. Improbably perhaps, Hodgkin was related to
Seton Lloyd, Pat Domvile, and Perowne; all four were cousins.^6 Though
also an Oxford graduate, Brian Giffey was half-German and had grown up
in Hamburg, which may perhaps have accounted for his aloofness and/or
exclusion from the Set, though being MI6 head of station may have been
enough in itself to distance him from the rest—other than Clive of course.
Clive is the only person on record to have complained of professional
rivalries existing at the local level in Baghdad. However, his perception was
probably coloured by the fact that his immediate superior, Giffey, appears
to have avoided the Baghdad Set, unlike Clive, who was very much part of
it. Clive got along extremely well with the South Gate team and spent
much time with them, so it is conceivable that this fact merely intensified
Giffey’s antipathy towards them.^7 Bishop and Aidan Philip had worked
together during the 1920s for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC)
in Persia, where they had become close friends. It seems that Bishop
arranged with the Special Operations Executive (SOE) (despite vociferous
protests by SOE Tehran, who claimed that Philip was ‘theirs’) for Philip to
join him in Baghdad as his 2 i/c. Bishop and Philip were, of course, also
former members of Section D of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS),
together with Stark, Perowne, Domvile, and Terence Bruce Mitford: a
select subset with strong SIS connections.^8 Politics, particularly of the left,
united many of the younger men: Philip, Lloyd, Perowne, Hodgkin (who
wrote for the Manchester Guardian), and Campbell Hackforth-Jones
(1905–1988) of the Combined Intelligence Centre Iraq and Persia (CICI)
were all progressives. Hackforth-Jones, a barrister in civilian life, had even
run (unsuccessfully) for parliament as a Labour candidate before the war.^9
Of course there were romances and marriages too. Seton Lloyd met the
well-known wood-engraver and sculptor Ulrica Hyde (1911–1988) in
Baghdad. ‘Hydie,’ a former Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) company
commander (captain), was driving huge tank transporters across the desert
as a Royal Army Service Corps (RASC) sergeant. They married in 1943
and made South Gate their first family home, while Hydie Lloyd contin-
ued driving long-distance runs to Palestine and Tehran.^10 Campbell
Hackforth-Jones fell for Freya Stark’s assistant, the archaeologist Peggy
Drower, and they married in 1947, which seems to have been a year of
weddings. In the same year, Teddy Hodgkin married Lawrence Durrell’s
ex-wife Nancy (née Myers) in Jerusalem; and Freya Stark married Stewart
Perowne at St Margaret’s, Westminster, entering into what Perowne—and
EPILOGUE: THE BAGHDAD SET