Micky Burn - Early Life

Early Life

By his own admission, in earlier life he "had been drawn to three autocracies: German National Socialism, Communism, and the Roman Catholic Church." Burn's father was secretary and solicitor to the Duchy of Cornwall becoming a trusted confidant of the King; while his mother's family was instrumental in developing the golf-and-gambling resort of Le Touquet. Initially educated at Winchester College, Burn spent only one year at New College, Oxford before the social seductions of Le Touquet won out. As he himself put it, he was not sent down. Having done none of the work expected of him, he simply did no go back, choosing instead to initiate a writing career by ghosting the autobiography of 'Bentley Boy' Sir Henry Birkin.

Burn spent time in Florence, befriending Alice Keppel, the former mistress of Edward VII. A bisexual man, his lovers included later Soviet Union spy Guy Burgess. On two occasions during the 1930s Burn took himself to the police, as homosexuality was then a crime.

A developing interest in bettering the lot of the socially and economically deprived led Burn to a brief dalliance with National Socialism at a time when Hitler was regarded by many as having cured unemployment and given Germany back her soul. He met the German leader in 1936, who signed his copy of Mein Kampf (lost, shortly thereafter). He also attended a Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg, standing on the dais just a few feet behind the Führer himself. An unquestioning tour of Dachau crowned a period of which he would later write that he was for a time duped by a combination of his own blindness and the "intensely organized falsehood" that would later be exposed as the engine of the 'New' Germany.

In 1936, Burn joined The Times newspaper, initially on probation on the Home Editorial desk. Here he remained until the outbreak of war, with but a brief stint in London as Diplomatic Correspondent. In 1937, with Hitler's intentions becoming ever more clear, Burn enlisted in the Queen's Westminsters, a Territorial battalion of the King's Royal Rifle Corps. Commissioned Second Lieutenant in 1938, he had, by the outbreak of war, wholly abandoned National Socialism as an engine of social change.