John Harte has led a varied and busy life in a number of different careers and countries, as a child prodigy who consumed over two thousand books in his father’s library from the age of eight, including English, French, and Russian classics. He was an artist attending weekly life classes at Kingston-on-Thames Art school at the age of thirteen, during his final year at St. Paul’s School in England. The aim of his art master was to compile a portfolio of his line drawings for a scholarship to the Slade School of Fine Art in Oxford. Those plans were unexpectedly challenged by the imminence of World War 2 and an expected invasion by German troops who had already overrun Europe. He accepted his first job offer to design and paint scenery for the theatre. It introduced him also to acting, at which he had been successful in school. After an audition at the Henley Playhouse, he was appointed as their leading man at the age of fourteen. He was hired by H. M. Tennant, soon after, to understudy John Gielgud in Love for Love at London’s Haymarket Theatre when he was only fifteen.
Harte subsequently played some two hundred leading roles all over Britain, several at the Moss and Stoll theatre circuit with seating capacities of 3,000, and in provincial weekly repertory companies, with special weeks in and around London’s smaller try-out theatres.
Four of his own plays were produced, including a dramatization of a P. G. Wodehouse comic short story which he called Don’t Lose Your Head, and his dramatization of D, H. Lawrence’s most controversial novel. He chose to call it Lady Chatterley, because it was about a woman who wanted to take charge of her mind and body in a society dominated by men. His was the only “official version” championed by the feminist Frieda Lawrence, and performed to packed houses for a run at the Arts Theatre in 1961. It was only prevented from being transferred to Wyndham’s Theatre, as planned and licensed by the Lord Chamberlain’s office, by the famous trial against Penguin Books for publishing an unexpurgated version of the novel. The failure of the prosecution at the Central Criminal Court, known as the Old Bailey, changed Britain’s more formal and polite society into the so-called “permissive society.”
When theatres closed all over the British Isles with the establishment of television, Harte switched careers to business management, commencing as a management trainee in the paper industry in London. He soon became a company director. He made another successful career in the advertising industry overseas with J. Walter Thompson (WPI). And, by 1970, his varied skills and wealth of experience resulted in his appointment, first, as a director of the leading modern art gallery in Johannesburg, then as adviser to twenty-eight Presidents of companies acquired by the biggest textile conglomerate in South Africa. He became Managing Director of one of their upmarket companies in Durban. He was also Marketing Vice-President of GE when they were the leading global brand. About a decade or more later, after settling in Canada, he was elected Director General of the Canadian Institute of Marketing. Having now retired from a business career, he writes books on subjects he found challenging to master in his rich and varied career.
Hunt for A Double Spy is a glance back to a moment in postwar Britain when, as an undercover investigative journalist, he discovered a clandestine plot by Sir Oswald Mosley’s Fascist Party to take over Britain, and brought it to the attention of Parliament and the newspapers, which ended Mosley’s political career. He found spies almost everywhere since then – or they found him. Now he prefers to write about them in seclusion in the quiet government city of Ottawa in Canada, close to the border with New York.
