Historical Dictionary of British Intelligence

MONTGOMERY, BRIAN• 375

traordinarily wealthy, having a huge inheritance from his great-

grandfather, the first Baron Swaythling, who was one of the founders

of Shell Oil. He was also a leading exponent of table tennis.

Montagu eventually settled on the island of Rousay in the Orkneys,

where he died in November 1984. He was the author ofThe Traitor

Class(1940), wrote many political pamphlets, and was on the edito-

rial board ofLabour Monthly, with Rojani Palme Dutt and another

leading figure in the CPGB, Robin Page Arnot. After the war, he

headed a Soviet front organization, the World Council of Peace.

Montagu made no reference to his clandestine role in his autobiogra-

phy,The Youngest Son(1970), which was intended to be the first of

several volumes, giving an account of his life only until 1927; it in-

cludes a description of his visits to Leningrad, Moscow, and Tbilisi

in 1925 that had a profound impact on his political consciousness.

MONTGOMERY, BRIAN.The youngest brother of Field Marshal
Bernard Montgomery, Brian Montgomery was one of nine children
born to the bishop of Tasmania. After Sandhurst he was commis-
sioned into the Royal Warwickshire regiment and later served in East
Africa with the King’s African Rifles before transferring to the In-
dian Army.
During World War II Montgomery worked on Field Marshal
Slim’s staff and participated in the retreat from Burma. After the war,
as a lieutenant colonel, he commanded the 4th Battalion Baluch regi-
ment and upon the partition of India was recruited into theSecret
Intelligence Service(SIS). He eventually retired in 1970 and was
elected a councilor in the royal borough of Kensington and Chelsea.
With the publication ofA Field Marshal in the FamilyMontgomery
established himself as a biographer.Shenton of Singaporefollowed
in 1984. Neither volume betrays any detail of Montgomery’s quarter-
century career in SIS. Nor indeed does he refer to SIS’s role in the
loss of Singapore, the military catastrophe for which Sir Shenton
Thomas was made a scapegoat. Although Montgomery was entirely
sympathetic to his subject, who died in 1978 aged 94, his account of
the last hectic weeks before the surrender omits details of the gover-
nor’s controversial refusal to allowSpecial Operations Executive
(SOE) to arm and train Chinese Communists as guerrillas to fight the
Japanese. Thomas had turned SOE’s proposal down partly because