BINGHAM, MADELEINE• 55Intelligence Services. One school is convinced that they are staffed
by murderous, powerful, double-crossing cynics, the other that the
taxpayer is supporting a collection of bumbling, broken-down lay-
abouts.’’ He strongly disapproved of the writing of his prote ́ge ́Corn-
wall, observing, ‘‘The belief encouraged by many spy writers that
Intelligence officers consist ofmoles, morons, shits and homosexuals
makes the Intelligence job no easier.’’ Bingham died in August 1988,
not long after his wife.BINGHAM, MADELEINE.When Madeleine Ebel marriedJohn
Binghamin 1934, she was 22 and he was a reporter with theSunday
Dispatch, but soon after the war broke out he was recruited into the
Security Service and she followed his example. While he was based
in London, running agents with the legendaryMax Knight, Made-
leine was posted toBlenheim Palacein an administrative role. Later
she switched toSpecial Operations Executivewhere, she later told
friends, she worked in theBaker Streetheadquarters and kept a
drawer of suicide capsules for agents. Her talent as a writer emerged
after the war when her three-act comedy,The Man from the Ministry,
written under the pseudonym Julia Mannering, was produced in
1947.
Born into a family of relatively humble origins, her father being a
decorator and antiques dealer, Madeleine met Jack Bingham at a typ-
ing school in London. He was learning his trade as a journalist, and
when he landed a job with a provincial paper she went to work atThe
Times. Madeleine Bingham was to become a much praised biogra-
pher, writing the standard works on Sheridan, Sir John Vanbrugh,
Henry Irving, and Herbert Beerbohm Tree. Her autobiography,Peers
and Plebs: Two Families in a Changing World(1975), documented
the unwelcome impact she had, as a Catholic with family roots in
central Europe, on her fiance ́’s family, which was fiercely Northern
Irish and anti-Catholic. However, at no point in the book, which
draws to a close with the birth of her son Simon in 1937, does she
disclose her husband’s career after journalism, her occupation during
the war, or that of her daughter,Charlotte Bingham. Her announce-
ment, years later, that she intended to write an account of her hus-
band’s life and that he had been the model for John le Carre ́’s
character George Smiley, prompted a swift rebuke from the Security