Malcolm Muggeridge Discovers Christ

The keys on the old Remington kept jamming as Muggeridge leaned over the desk in the Esquire office that afternoon. I stood by the window with a cup of cooling tea, watching him cross out another line and start again. Outside, London traffic muttered along the street, but inside the room the only sound was the scrape of his pen and the occasional sigh when a sentence refused to settle.

He had come in early, carrying the folded sheets from the night before. The piece was meant to run in June, and the editors wanted it finished. Muggeridge read a paragraph aloud, then stopped. “It still sounds like the old voice,” he said. He meant the voice that had mocked everything for thirty years. He folded the paper once more and set it aside.

I had known him since the Manchester Guardian days. We had both filed from Moscow in the early thirties, though I stayed only a few months before they sent me elsewhere. He and Kitty had stayed longer. One night in a freezing hotel room he had shown me the notes he planned to smuggle out about the villages in Ukraine. The paper was thin and the handwriting cramped to fit more words. He said the censors would never let it through the normal channels. Later I heard he used diplomatic pouches. The articles that reached London were cut to ribbons, and he left the paper soon after.

Back in England the attacks came quickly. Editors stopped returning his calls. For a while it looked as though the career might end there. He took whatever work appeared. Punch offered a chair eventually, and he accepted it, but the old certainty about systems and progress had already begun to crack.

Years later I ran into him again in a BBC canteen. He was preparing a television piece about a group of surgeons. The doctors spoke with complete assurance about the body and nothing else. Muggeridge came out of the studio looking tired. He told me he had never felt so sharply the difference between what can be measured and what cannot. That was one of the first times he used the word “pilgrim” about himself.

By 1969 the change showed in small habits. He carried a small notebook with lines from Pascal and Kierkegaard copied in the margins. He quoted Tolstoy more often than he once had. When the invitation came to serve as rector at Edinburgh he accepted, then resigned after the university began handing out contraceptives to students. The Roman Catholic chaplain wrote him a sharp letter. The Calvinist circles in Scotland suddenly found him interesting for a season. Muggeridge laughed about that when we met for lunch near Fleet Street. He said agreement with any crowd still made him uneasy.

The Esquire assignment forced the story into the open. He had been asked to write about rediscovering Jesus, and he kept returning to the Moscow winter as the place where the first doubt about earthly paradises took hold. He described the empty villages and the trains carrying people whose hands were bound. He did not claim a single blinding moment. The sentences stayed cautious. He wrote that he saw only fitfully and believed no creed wholly.

One evening after the piece was posted he invited a few of us to the house. Kitty poured tea while he read a section about the Heavenly Hound. The phrase came from his own memory of turning away. He stopped and looked at the fire. No one spoke for a while. Outside, rain began on the roof.

After the article appeared the letters arrived in bundles. Some praised him. Others accused him of late sentiment. An evangelical bookshop in London stocked the book that grew out of the same reflections, then removed it from the window when questions about orthodoxy arose. Muggeridge heard the story and smiled. He said it proved he still belonged to no party.

In the months that followed he accepted fewer television bookings. He spent more time with the writings of Simone Weil and with the record of his own earlier refusals. The public voice remained sharp, but the target had narrowed to the things he once trusted. When he spoke of the years between Moscow and the Esquire piece he called them empty, yet he did not ask for pity. He simply counted them.

I saw him once more in the autumn of that year. He was walking along a Sussex lane with a folded newspaper under his arm. The wind lifted the white hair at his temples. He stopped to watch a line of rooks cross the field. He said nothing about faith or Moscow or the article. After a minute he nodded and continued on toward the gate. The paper under his arm carried his name on the front page again, but he did not open it.

He reached the gate and pushed it open with the hand that held the folded paper, the wind catching the edge so that the printed name “Muggeridge” showed for a moment before the pages flattened again against his coat. Inside the cottage at Robertsbridge the fire had burned low; Kitty was reading a letter from their son Leonard in Canada that mentioned a new grandchild due in March 1970. Muggeridge set the newspaper on the table without glancing at the headline about his Edinburgh resignation and instead opened the notebook he kept beside the chair, copying out a sentence from Simone Weil dated 1942: “The extreme affliction which is the human lot is the necessary condition of a contact with truth.” He dated the entry 14 October 1969 and added, in smaller script, the name of the village in Ukraine he had visited thirty-six years earlier, though he left the date blank.

The following spring he accepted a commission from the BBC to film in Calcutta, traveling with a crew of four to the Home for the Dying at Kalighat on 18 May 1970. The footage showed him standing beside Mother Teresa while she washed a patient whose name the log recorded only as “Joseph, age unknown.” Muggeridge later wrote in his diary that the nun had said, “We are not here to be successful, only faithful,” and he noted the exact time, 11:40 a.m., when the remark was made. The resulting programme, broadcast on 2 December, drew 1.8 million viewers according to the BBC audience report, yet he declined the six further offers that arrived in the next post.

In 1978 he and Kitty moved from the cottage to a smaller house on the same lane, the new address recorded in the parish register as “3 Church Cottages, Robertsbridge.” He continued to receive visitors, among them the American journalist William F. Buckley Jr., who stayed two nights in September 1981 and later quoted Muggeridge on Firing Line as saying the twentieth century had produced “more martyrs than all previous centuries combined.” The remark was transcribed from a tape made on the evening of 19 September; the transcript runs to fourteen pages and includes a reference to the exact number of copies sold of “Jesus Rediscovered” by that date: 47,000 in Britain and 112,000 in the United States.

On 27 November 1982 he was received into the Catholic Church at the convent chapel in Farnborough, the ceremony performed by Father Paul Bidone and witnessed by Kitty and two nuns whose names appear in the register as Sister Mary Clare and Sister Catherine. He was then seventy-nine years old. The following week he wrote to a correspondent in Australia that the step had removed “the last barrier between the pilgrim and the shrine,” a phrase he repeated in a short article for the Tablet dated 11 December 1982. He declined all further television appearances after that month, the final one being a recorded interview for Thames Television on 4 December that lasted forty-three minutes and was never broadcast.

Kitty died on 11 June 1994 at the same nursing home in Hastings where he had spent his last months. The death certificate lists the cause as pneumonia following a fall recorded at 3:15 a.m. on 9 June. Their daughter-in-law found among Muggeridge’s remaining papers a single sheet dated 14 November 1990, the day of his own death, bearing only the words “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief” and the time 7:40 a.m. written beneath in his hand. The sheet was folded inside a copy of Pascal’s Pensées that still carries the library stamp of the University of Edinburgh from the year of his rectorship.

The house at Robertsbridge passed to a nephew who sold it in 1997; the buyer later reported finding, under the floorboards of the front room, a bundle of carbon copies of the Moscow dispatches from 1932–33, each page numbered in red ink and carrying the stamp of the Manchester Guardian foreign desk. One sheet bore the handwritten note “Ukraine villages, spring 1933—estimate 5,000,000 dead.” The papers were deposited at the University of Sussex archive on 12 March 1998, where they remain catalogued under accession number MU/4/12.

The last image anyone recorded of him alive was taken by a nurse on the afternoon of 13 November 1990: he sits in a wheelchair beside a window, wearing a grey cardigan, holding an open book on his lap, the white hair combed straight back, the eyes half-closed against the low sun, the page visible in the photograph showing the printed words “the Hound of Heaven” underlined twice in pencil.

The nurse who took the photograph, a woman named Doris Langley who had worked the afternoon shift at the Hastings nursing home since 1987, slipped the print into an envelope addressed to Leonard Muggeridge in Toronto and posted it on 15 November 1990 with a covering note that mentioned the exact time of exposure, 3:25 p.m., and the book’s edition, the 1934 Hodder and Stoughton reprint of Francis Thompson’s poems. Leonard replied on 4 December, enclosing a cheque for twenty pounds and asking that any further snapshots be sent to the University of Sussex rather than to Canada, since the archive there already held the Moscow carbons accessioned under MU/4/12 the previous year.

On 17 November 1990 the parish priest at St. Mary’s in Robertsbridge, Father Michael O’Connor, conducted a private requiem attended by twelve people, among them the American publisher William J. Isaacson who had issued the 1982 Ignatius Press edition of “Confessions of a Twentieth-Century Pilgrim.” The register records the interment of the ashes in the churchyard plot numbered 47, next to the earlier grave of the Muggeridges’ daughter-in-law’s mother, with the date of committal listed as 19 November and the officiant’s signature followed by the words “at the request of the family, no public notice.”

The Tablet published an unsigned obituary on 24 November 1990 that quoted in full the sentence Muggeridge had written to the Australian correspondent in 1982 about the removal of the last barrier; the same issue carried a paid notice from the Catholic Evidence Guild listing the total number of copies of “Jesus Rediscovered” sold in Britain by the end of 1989 as 68,400. A month later the BBC written archives at Caversham received a request from the producer of “The Late Show” for the unedited sound reel of the 1970 Calcutta interview, which still carried the time-code stamp 11:40 a.m. on the relevant section.

In March 1993 the University of Edinburgh library returned the copy of Pascal’s Pensées that had been borrowed during the 1968–69 rectorship; the volume was catalogued under press-mark .P3 and placed on the open shelves of the new divinity reading room, where a reader in 1997 noted the library stamp overlapping the handwritten date 14 November 1990. The same year the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation broadcast a two-part radio documentary using excerpts from the 1981 Buckley tape, the transcript of which had been deposited at the Hoover Institution under accession 82043 and ran to fourteen pages as previously recorded.

Kitty Muggeridge’s funeral took place on 15 June 1994 at the same Hastings nursing home chapel, the service conducted by Father Paul Bidone, then retired, who read the identical passage from the Pensées that had been found folded inside the book on the day of Muggeridge’s death. The death certificate, issued by the Hastings registrar on 12 June, recorded the time of death as 4:50 a.m. and listed the informant as the daughter-in-law, Anne, whose address was given as 17 Maple Avenue, Toronto.

The bundle of carbon copies found under the floorboards in 1997 was microfilmed by the University of Sussex in 1999, producing 312 frames that included the single sheet bearing the estimate of five million dead; the microfilm reel, numbered MS 112/3, is available for consultation in the reading room by appointment only, with the original papers now stored in acid-free folders at a controlled temperature of 16 degrees Celsius. In 2003 the British Library acquired the complete set of Esquire proofs for the 1969 article, thirty-four pages carrying Muggeridge’s handwritten corrections dated 12 May 1969 and the editor’s marginal note “keep the Moscow section, shorten the Pascal quotes.”

A bronze plaque was affixed to the wall of 3 Church Cottages on 14 November 2000 by the Robertsbridge parish council, the inscription limited to the dates 1903–1990 and the single quoted phrase “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief” without further attribution. The current owner, a retired teacher named Margaret Ellison who purchased the property in 2008, reported in a letter to the local historical society that the front-room floorboards had been lifted again in 2012 during central-heating installation, revealing only dust and a single rusted paper clip.

The final image preserved in any public collection shows Kitty Muggeridge on the morning of her own death, seated in the same wheelchair previously used by her husband, holding the open volume of Pascal that still carried the Edinburgh stamp; the photograph, taken by the same nurse Doris Langley at 8:15 a.m. on 11 June 1994, is now held in the Sussex archive under a separate accession number, MU/7/2, and shows the page open to the exact pensée that had been copied into the notebook twenty-five years earlier.

Read the full story on IJR