Ivor Montagu

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International Table Tennis Foundation Hall of Fame

Ivor Goldsmid Samuel Montagu (23 April 1904, in Kensington, London – 5 November 1984, in

interwar years, and was also the founder of the International Table Tennis Federation
.

Life and career

Montagu was born into wealth, as the third son of

zoological
research.

With

H.G. Wells, and the stars of the film were Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester, while the remaining cast were his friends including Norman Haire (also Montagu's doctor), Sergei Nolbandov
and Joe Beckett.

Montagu joined the

Defence of Madrid (1936) and Peace and Plenty (1939)[2] about the Spanish Civil War. He directed the documentary Wings Over Everest (1934) with Geoffrey Barkas. As a political figure and for a time a communist, much of his work at the time was on low budget, independent political films. By World War II, however, he made a film for the Ministry of Information
.

In 1933, Montagu was a founder member of the

World Council of Peace. In 1934, he was founder of the Progressive Film Institute.[3]
After the war, Montagu worked as a film critic and reviewer.

Montagu had a keen interest in wildlife conservation, and was a council member of the Fauna Preservation Society for several years. He was friends with the eminent Soviet conservationist and zoologist Prof. Andrei Bannikov [de]. He had contacts in Mongolia, and was a champion for the conservation of the endangered Przewalski's horse.

On 10 January 1927, he married Eileen Hellstern (1904–1984), the daughter of Francis Anton Hellstern, a boot maker from Camberwell. Although the couple did not have any children together, Ivor adopted Eileen's young daughter, Rowna Barnett, née Hellstern (1922–1996).

Table tennis

Montagu was a champion table tennis player, representing Britain in matches all over the world. He also helped to establish and finance the first world championships in London in 1926.

Montagu founded the International Table Tennis Federation that same year, and was president of the group for more than forty years, not retiring until 1967. He helped expel apartheid South Africa from the Federation during the 1950s.[4]

He also founded the

English Table Tennis Association (ETTA), and served several terms as chairman and president.[5]

Montagu was inducted into the International Table Tennis Foundation Hall of Fame in 1995.[6]

Recruited by Soviet intelligence

His older brother

invasion of Sicily, Operation Mincemeat. He later wrote a best-selling account of that adventure, The Man Who Never Was
.

Ivor Montagu himself turned out to be working, albeit briefly, for the other side. A 25 July 1940 cable from Simon Davidovitch Kremer, Secretary to the Soviet Military Attaché in London, identified him as the somewhat reluctant new recruit who was supposed to create an "X Group" of like-minded friends.[7][8] By the following year, Hitler had invaded Russia and the Soviet Union became an ally of Britain, so that by June 1941, both brothers were technically working for the same side.

Ivor knew of his elder brother's intelligence work, but it seems doubtful his brother knew of his. Counter-espionage agents at MI5, however, even Ewen's boss John Masterman, seem to have suspected Ivor in general because of his outspoken Communist politics, his hanging around with "scruffy" Russians and housing a Jewish refugee in his house in the country. By far the greatest suspicions were aroused by Ivor's passionate support of international ping-pong, which seemed so eccentric to MI5 that they assumed it had to be a cover for something else. They even tapped his phone and opened his mail, creating three volumes on him by early 1942, but found nothing specific, much to Ewen's relief, since he was always worried that his own career in Naval Intelligence would be adversely affected by the activities of his younger brother.[9]

Only after the decryption in the 1960s of Venona telegraphs from March 1940 through April 1942 was he purportedly identified as "Ivor Montagu, the well known local communist, journalist and lecturer," code name "Intelligentsia", in communications from the Soviet GRU. The Verona decrypts, which were declassified in 1995, are a highly contested and confusing archive of information, with a welter of code-names, which were frequently changed and not explicitly identified with their real names; hence these decrypts were never used in any American or British trials for treason, despite their availability to prosecutors from the late 1940s.[10]

If "Intelligentsia" was, indeed, Ivor Montagu, his work for Soviet intelligence had little of the impact of the

FBI, who were looking for ways to keep him out of America at the height of McCarthyism.[11]
Apart from that, they left Montagu and his ping-pong tournaments alone.

Montagu was awarded the prestigious Lenin Peace Prize in 1959, given by the Soviet government to recipients whose work furthers the cause of socialism, primarily outside of the USSR.

Writing

Montagu wrote many pamphlets and books, such as Film World (1964), With Eisenstein in Hollywood (1968), and The Youngest Son (1970). He wrote two books about table tennis: Table Tennis Today (1924) and Table Tennis (1936).

See also

References

  1. ^ O'Pray, Michael; British Film Institute (2000), Britain in the twenties history of the avant-garde, BFI Video, retrieved 15 April 2013
  2. ^ British Film Institute: Peace and Plenty. Ivor Montagu, 1939.
  3. ISBN 978-1-135-20627-7
    .
  4. ^ Brown and Hogsbjerg, Apartheid is not a game, 13
  5. ^ "Ivor Goldsmid Montagu". International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame. Retrieved 3 April 2014.
  6. ^ "ITTF Hall of Fame" (PDF). International Table Tennis Federation. Archived from the original (PDF) on 17 June 2011. Retrieved 3 April 2014.
  7. British National Archives
    , Kew
  8. ^ Macintyre, Ben. Operation Mincemeat. pp. 89–93.
  9. ^ Macintyre, pp. 129-133
  10. ^ "Cables Coming in From The Cold," by Walter Schneir and Miriam Schneir, The Nation, July 1999 http://www.thenation.com/article/cables-coming-cold/
  11. ^ The Guardian, 17 February 2012. Retrieved 6 July 2013.

Further reading

External links
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