110 • CORFIELD, SIR FREDERICK
sible to distinguish between the wretchedly ambitious ‘‘Jack Reston’’
and his creator.CORFIELD, SIR FREDERICK.Elected the Conservative MP for
Gloucestershire South in 1956, Frederick Corfield joined the 8th
Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, in 1935 and served in India until
- He was a prisoner of war in Germany during World War II,
having been captured with the 51st (Highland) Division in France in - After his release, he was called to the bar and then took up
farming. After he retired from the Commons in February 1974, he
was appointed a judge.
The Corfield Report, entitledHistorical Survey of the Origins and
Growth of Mau Mau, released in May 1960, provided a detailed anal-
ysis of the background to the intelligence weaknesses that allowed
the Mau Mau movement in Kenya to develop in the absence of a
comprehensive security apparatus that reported to a single body able
to distribute the information and coordinate the appropriate counter-
measures.
CORNWELL, DAVID.David Cornwell’s first encounters with the in-
telligence world took place while he was still an undergraduate at
Lincoln College, Oxford, reporting to a friend of his father. After
graduating from Oxford, he worked as a teacher at Eton and then in
1958 joinedMI5’s F4 subsection as a subordinate toJohn Bingham,
a successful thriller writer and one of the great agent-runners of his
generation, whom Cornwell came to admire. By then he had com-
pleted his national service, which, thanks to his knowledge of Ger-
man acquired during his year in Bern, Switzerland, in 1948, had been
spent with theIntelligence Corpsin Germany screening refugees
from the East. After leaving Eton, Cornwell worked as a freelance
illustrator and was employed byMax Knightto provide the pictures
for hisTalking Birdsin 1961.
Cornwell served his apprenticeship with Bingham and then trans-
ferred in 1960 to theSecret Intelligence Service(SIS), which posted
him to Bonn. This city became the backdrop for several of his subse-
quent novels. His first, written under the pen name John le Carre ́
while still operating for SIS under consular cover in Hamburg, was
Call for the Dead(1961). This was followed byA Murder of Quality