HOUSEHOLD, GEOFFREY• 251Houghton, Gee, and Lonsdale were arrested in January 1961 and
three months later appeared at the Old Bailey, where the two Britons
were sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment. Houghton claimed that
he had been coerced into helping the Soviets after his black-market
activities in Warsaw had been discovered. He also insisted that he had
believed Lonsdale to be an American intelligence officer (in fact, he
was the Soviet illegalrezident, Konon Molody). The prosecution
challenged his version by pointing out the large amount cash he had
accumulated that had been found in a search of his home. Upon his
release from Maidstone Prison, Houghton married Gee and wrote his
autobiography, Operation Portland. They moved to the Isle of
Wight, where they still live.HOUSEHOLD, GEOFFREY.Born in 1900, Geoffrey Household was
educated at Clifton College, which he detested, and Magdalen Col-
lege, Oxford, which he regarded as paradise. After graduation he was
offered a job in Bucharest by a fellow student’s father who happened
to be managing director of the Ottoman Bank. Household’s branch
was a subsidiary, the Bank of Romania, and he arrived to take up his
duties there as a junior clerk at the end of 1922. After four years in
banking, during which he had acquired a loathing of the business and
a love for the daughter of one of his customers, Household moved to
Paris to take up a job with Elders & Fyffes, fruit importers famous
for their bananas.
In 1927 Household was sent to Bilbao to open a Fyffes office. Al-
though it proved to be highly successful commercially, his ambition
was to travel to America to join his fiance ́e, who lived for much of
the year with her parents in New York. He was also keen to publish
his short stories but could not interest anyone in them. After two
years in Spain, Household joined a ship bound for Panama and trav-
eled to New York by train. There he married Marina but was unable
to make a living as a writer and instead worked as an editor on a
dictionary. Finally, in the autumn of 1932 he was commissioned by
CBS to write a series of radio plays and thus began his literary career.
By mid-1933 Household was back in London, ready to embark on
a third career, as the representative of an ink manufacturer. He was
hired, on the basis of an advertisement in theTimes, to travel across
Europe to exploit the boycott Jewish printers had imposed on their