This memoir-biography hybrid is a personal account of how two very different lives intersected.
This memoir-biography hybrid is a personal account of how two very different lives intersected.
By Mark McGinness
March 11, 2025 — 11.00pm
BIOGRAPHY
Undercover: Two Secret LivesTony ScotlandShelf Lives, $49.69
In this innovative, unflinching double biography, Tony Scotland has shared a very personal account of two lives – his own and that of Milo Talbot, an Anglo-Irish lord in his 50s – through the prism of their friendship that lasted till Milo’s death at 60 in 1973.
It all began in April 1967, when a knowing chief of staff at the ABC in Hobart sent 22-year-old Tony off to interview the crusty, diffident, remote 4th Baron Talbot de Malahide, Hereditary Lord Admiral of Malahide and Adjacent Seas, who had commissioned the first volume of The Endemic Flora Of Tasmania.
The Talbots had, since 1848, owned Malahide, a country house and sheep station at Fingal where the rivers Break O’Day and South Esk meet. It was the second-largest estate in Tasmania. And so it was here that the diffident, reticent, former public schoolboy come Ten Pound Pom come reporter met the peppery peer, buttoned-up Wykehamist and former diplomat, Milo Talbot.
Sitting on the floor of his Lordship’s library, young Tony noticed a line of books: André Gide’s defence of “Greek love”, Robert Musil’s The Confessions of Young Torless, and John Rechy’s City of Night.As soon as Milo asked “Are you single?”, the chase began.
It was really more a stately, unspoken pursuit by Milo – never consummated, and one that settled into an abiding, avuncular friendship – but not without an edge. It was not an equal relationship; starkly underlined by Milo’s insistence that Tony undergo treatment to “normalise” him. As Tony consulted a psychiatrist who prescribed him oestrogen, Milo, who had arranged the appointment, waited in his car outside reading The Irish Times. Tony’s first dose was served at luncheon in the castle on a silver salver by Nugent, the butler. This lamentable experiment was soon abandoned. Yet the friendship endured.
Apart from charting Tony’s sexual journey, the core of Undercover is whether Milo was a spy for Russia. An early intimate at Trinity College in Cambridge was Guy Burgess, who tutored Milo for his Foreign Office exam, perhaps slept with him, and introduced him to Anthony Blunt, who became a lifelong friend.
Having joined the Foreign Office in 1937, Milo worked for the Ministry of Economic Warfare and was then attached to the Foreign Office in the propaganda department. In 1951, he became deputy head of the Foreign Office security department, and two years later its temporary head. By then, with the defection of Burgess and Donald Maclean, investigations intensified and rumours swirled about other double agents.
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According to his former MI6 colleague, Malcolm Muggeridge, Milo was interrogated; but as some 200 files relating to debriefings still remain closed, it is difficult to know what he knew. George Carey-Foster, the head of the Foreign Office’s security branch, claimed no suspicion had ever fallen on Milo. Perhaps he would say that?
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Tony concludes: “The truth was complicated, the players were all friends, they owed one another loyalty, and the facts, if unearthed, could only reflect badly on all of them and on the Foreign Office itself.”
In January 1954, Milo suddenly resigned, retiring to the other Malahide – Malahide Castle, north of Dublin, the family fortress and seat since 1185. He had inherited it and his title on the death of a cousin in 1948 and lived there with his unmarried sister, Rose. Scotland paints a vivid picture of the Anglo-Irish twilight. Milo would dine at one end of an enormous table while Rosie, “as reserved and rigid as her brother”, ate in silence at the other. Milo slept in a single bed in a spartan cell in one tower; Rose slept in another turret beside a copy of Debrett’s and Longman’s Pronunciation Guide.
In September 1954, Milo was recalled to serve as consul-general for the Kingdom of Laos, and then its ambassador. En route, to save the bother of laundry, he threw 100 underpants and singlets into the Indian Ocean and, finding no suitable accommodation, he wrote to the foreign secretary, “I have arrived and assumed charge, and until further notice I am staying with the prime minister”. En poste Milo fell hopelessly in love with his No. 2, 25-year-old Philip Ziegler, later a distinguished biographer, who never knew.
He resigned – permanently – in 1957, was honoured with a CMG, and returned to his two Malahides, to travel, and to his collections of coins, stamps and plants. He died suddenly, peacefully, painlessly, at 60, on an Aegean cruise in April 1973.
Tony’s reaction? “My life was my own again now – but polished by six years of closeness with an older man of great culture. I had much to thank him for, and I knew I would never forget him.”
While one can’t say “amazing what a difference Milo made”, it was an extraordinary life – and friendship.
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