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OPE RA TI ON M I NCEM E A T
into a lifelong Americanophile: ‘I felt a great debt of gratitude to Americans for all their kindness to me and felt that I should try to repay it in some small measure.’ The war would provide that opportunity. At Cambridge, Ewen had a personal valet and a 1910 Lancia two-seater sports car he called ‘Steve’. He dabbled in Labour politics, but left the more extreme left-wing thinking to his brother Ivor, who followed him to Cambridge a year later and was already well on his way to becoming a committed Marxist. Despite their differing personalities and politics, Ewen and Ivor were close friends. ‘The ‘‘spread’’ among us three brothers was amusing,’ Ewen reflected. Stuart ‘already had a banker’s attitude to life’, whereas Ewen and Ivor had no intention of following the family career path. ‘He and I were much closer than either of us [was] with Stuart as we had many more interests in common.’ ‘We had nothing to do but enjoy ourselves,’ Ewen reflected. ‘And, from time to time, work.’ They did, however, find time to ‘invent’ table tennis. Ivor was extremely good at ‘ping pong’. The game had no real rules or regulations and so he founded the English Ping Pong Association. Jaques, the sports manufacturer, got wind of the fledgling club and stuffily pointed out that the company had copyrighted the name ‘ping pong’. Ewen recalled: ‘I advised him to choose another name for the game; as we bandied names at one another, one of us came up with table tennis.’ Ivor would go on to found the International Table Tennis Federation in 1926, and served as its first president for the next forty-one years. Another project initiated by the Montagu brothers at Cambridge was ‘The Cheese Eaters’ League’. Ivor and Ewen shared a passion for cheese, and set up a dining club to import and taste the most exotic specimens from around the world: camel’s milk cheese, Middle Eastern goat cheese, cheese made from the milk of long-horned Afghan sheep. ‘Our great ambition was to get whale’s milk cheese,’ Ewen wrote, and to this end he
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