In 1963, Charlotte Bingham (the Honorable Charlotte Mary Therese Bingham) wrote her first bestselling memoir at age 19, Coronet Among The Weeds. Several others followed and she turned her hand to writing for TV (Upstairs, Downstairs) and over 30 romance novels.
In MI5 and Me, she recalls being 18 - too flighty to keep even a coffee shop job and still under her parents control until she turns 21 - being assigned a job by her father John Bingham to work secretarial at his business. Little did she know that his was the secretive world of espionage that is MI5.
John Bingham was a head MI5 counterspy and once the boss of John leCarre, becoming one of the men who inspired the famed character George Smiley, and author of 17 spy thrillers himself.
That said, this is quite a frivolous book, delivering exactly the light entertainment you expected. Lottie is a sharp-eyed but scatterbrained girl, and Charlotte does a great job of bringing you back to that time, where her concerns were about the cakes in the breakroom, keeping up with dictation, and petty retaliations towards her boss nicknamed Dragon. Hers is not the dangerous world of covert operations, more the daily duties given to young girls of the day and gossip with Arabella, her girlfriend at work - observances of the people her father brings to the Knightsbridge home she calls Dingly Dell - ideally suited to ferret out the Commies lurking about the luxury flats next door. It soon seems to Lottie that London was seething with Lefties, that everyone she knows from household staff to family friends were potential spies, counterspies, or double agents. As Arabella explains, the service's purpose is to make socialists' lives umitigated hell. "But in a nice way of course, because that is what we British do."
Her parents decide to bring in two famous West End actors as 'lodgers' (actually bogeys he uses to find out what kind of Communist propaganda is going to be fed the public as entertainment). One big job is tricking the Trotskyists into producing a Leftist play that is doomed to fail, thereby draining their coffers. Arabella and Lottie end up temping at a film studio, which brings a little glamour.
There is no real danger here, and nothing substantial about MI5 business. But it is a fun look at both the place of woman in the 1960's and an entertaining, often comic look at nosing around in others business, overhearing clues in phone calls, and once or twice reporting back random bits of gossip which actually yield results - enough to cause one to stub out their cigarette or put down their drink.
You would think at that age, Lottie would be focused on meeting the right man, but there is a lack of romance one usually finds in these memoirs.
"There are quite a few bachelors in MI5, and quite a few friends of Dorothy, too."
"Does she work in my Section?', I asked in a low voice.
This is a light memoir set against the backdrop of 1960's spy work. Very much on the outside of the action, but a unique look that was worth a quick read. Entertaining.
2018 / Hardcover / 240 pages
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