The Adventurers

A month ago Novelist Kingsley (Lucky Jim) Amis, the acidulous spokesman of Britain's new young welfare-state intellectuals, confessed that he was disturbed by the political apathy of his kind. What the intellectuals of the '50s lacked, argued Amis, was a good rousing cause--something capable of gripping them the way the Spanish civil war had gripped the intellectuals of the '30s. "Politics," he complained, "have become unromantic."

But why not Hungary? Three young Oxford romantics named Roger Cooper (a nephew of Poet Robert Graves) and Basil and Christopher Lord had spent last summer's vacation knocking about Tito's Yugoslavia. Cooper even managed to achieve expulsion from the country. Basil went on to Algeria and got himself jailed for mixing in the rebellion. As for Christopher and young Cooper, they slipped into Budapest in November with a shipment of penicillin for wounded Hungarian rebels, and found themselves a cause. "I am appalled by what happened in Budapest," said Christopher on his return to Oxford. "I must go back . . ."

Casting about for someone else to share the expenses for another trip to Hungary, the three adventurers picked Judith Cripps, 19-year-old granddaughter of the late Sir Stafford Cripps. She stuffed her pockets with letters from refugee students at Oxford to friends in Budapest.

Late for School. In a battered Volkswagen that lacked even a spare tire, the four headed off to Belgrade. British consular officials tried to talk them out of the trip. "Their only worry was that they didn't want to be late getting back to Oxford," sighed one of the diplomats.

From the time they crossed into Hungary, nothing was heard of them for twelve days. Then the Hungarian government announced that all four had been arrested. All Britain began to reverberate. In Parliament Labor's Aneurin Bevan urged the Hungarian government to "exercise a little humor." Said Bevan: "It is hardly likely that these four were engaged in espionage in a secondhand motorcar which broke down on several occasions and had to be started with the assistance of a tow by the Russians themselves."

Back to the Border. But for more than two weeks the unamused Hungarians even refused to let British diplomats in Budapest see the prisoners. Then, inexplicably, the Kadar government relented, and early one afternoon last week the four adventurers chugged over the Austrian border in their Volkswagen. (Released along with them were two other students who had been arrested for helping refugees escape into Austria--26-year-old American Richard Roraback and 25-year-old Norwegian Einar Roos.) Tired and dirty, but totally unfazed by 17 days of solitary confinement, of sleeping on slabs and living on bread and rice, the quartet calmly began to negotiate sale of their "exclusive" stories to the British press. In London the mother of Christopher and Basil Lord gratefully downed a glass of champagne and vowed: "Big as they are, I will give them a good spanking when they get home."

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