“PEER’S son weds typist,” said the headlines following the secret wedding on January 10 1927 of Ivor Goldsmid Samuel Montagu and Eileen Hellstern. Ivor and “Hell” spent their honeymoon hunting porcupines in Sicily on behalf of the British Museum (they didn’t catch any).

The Hon Ivor passed much of his life in the headlines. He was a major pioneer of British cinema and one of the nation’s first film critics; a noted zoologist; generally believed to have been a Soviet spy; and the man who more-or-less created international table tennis.

He was a friend of Trotsky, as well as an uncompromising defender of Stalin, and worked with Eisenstein, Hitchcock, Shaw, Charlie Chaplin, Peter Lorre, HG Wells, Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester.

The strands of his life often became entangled, such as an occasion during the cold war when he was expelled from Paris as a “political undesirable.” He’d gone there, not as an agent of world revolution, but to attend the French International championships in his role as president of the English Table Tennis Association.

He’d grown up in one of the richest families in Britain. Ivor Montagu’s grandfather Samuel Montagu was born Montagu Samuel, but had his name reversed by mistake at school and ended up sticking with the new version. Grandad went on to found the merchant bank Samuel & Montagu and later became a Liberal MP, supporting progressive causes such as poor aid and the public ownership of utilities.

He was treasurer of the National League for the Abolition of the House of Lords — and duly became a member of the House of Lords in 1907.

Ivor’s mother came from fine military stock, and was a close friend of Queen Mary (the royal personage, not the big boat).

He was a clever kid. Aged 13 Ivor invented a war game which so impressed Admiral Jellicoe that he was invited to lecture on it at the Naval Staff College. He declined, he later recalled, because in the meantime “I had become a socialist and decided I was against war.”

By the time he was 14, in 1918, he was already an active member of Marxist groups. That same year, while strolling in London wearing a top hat and carrying a silver-topped cane, he used the latter to fell a copper when he happened across a police attack on a demonstration by unemployed ex-soldiers.

From Westminster school Ivor passed the exams necessary to enter Cambridge University, but had to wait as the college would not accept a 16-year-old undergraduate. He spent the delay taking courses in zoology and becoming the first ever president of Southampton FC’s official supporters’ club (the Hampshire Advertiser reported his wedding simply as “Supporter’s club president married”).

Before the age of 18 he’d helped found the Cambridge University Ping-Pong Club and the English Table Tennis Association. No-one played a more significant role than Montagu in establishing table tennis as a competitive sport; he saw it as a game which could be enjoyed by people of all incomes, since it required no expensive equipment or grounds.

It was also at Cambridge in the early 1920s that he became a film critic for the student magazine, Granta. He was later the first person to fill that role on The Observer. In 1925 Montagu founded Britain’s first film society along with Sidney Bernstein. The main point of this immensely influential organisation was that, as a private members’ club, it could screen films which the censors banned from public showing, as well as those considered too arty or niche for the commercial distributors to take on.

The British government went to considerable lengths to prevent any Soviet films being screened in this country. Montagu and his colleagues battled the censors for many years, with quite some success. What they were up against in the 1920s and ’30s makes extraordinary reading; trying to get permission to distribute a film about a political prisoner in Nazi Germany, for instance, Ivor was told that the picture violated the censorship code which banned features on well-known criminals. Not only that, but its very existence was “a deliberate insult to the ruling regime of a country with whom we are in friendly relations.”

At the same time the newsreel companies would be “requested” by the police not to include footage of protests or strikes. But home-movie equipment was becoming more widely available, and good-quality amateur films of labour movement events were shown at party meetings, miners’ lodges and co-op halls, and even in the streets.

Ivor avoided death rather narrowly while making propaganda films during the Spanish civil war, and was also active at the same time in the mainstream movie industry as a producer, film editor, director, script editor and writer. So his credits include, for instance, The Lodger and The Man Who Knew Too Much, as well as In Defence of Madrid.

As a young man he made zoological trips to the young Soviet Union, which convinced him to break with his liberal background and join the Communist Party. He was dedicated to it — in deed as much as in word — for the rest of his life, including being always ready as a spokesman to promote the party line, unembarrassed and unapologetic about the various twists and U-turns this occasionally necessitated. He also spent some years on the staff of the Daily Worker, forerunner of today’s Morning Star.

“Hell” died aged 80 in 1984, and her inseparable other half Ivor followed her a few weeks later. After his death he was remembered, to some extent, amongst film buffs and more so by historians of table tennis. And then in 1999 he became famous all over again, when a new book said he had used his Establishment contacts to spy for the Soviet Union during and just before World War II. Whether this is true or not — his very thorough biographer, Russell Campbell, doesn’t doubt it, though some do — it inevitably became his lasting claim to fame.

But this being Rebel Britannia, we prefer to remember people for their undying commitment to world revolution — and for their anecdotes. Like the time Ivor Montagu was staying at Leon Trotsky’s place during the old Bolshevik’s exile on Prinkipo. He was given, he later wrote, a revolver to keep under his pillow at night as a precaution against assassins. He still didn’t sleep well though, because “I did not know what precautions to take against the revolver.”

You can sign up for Mat Coward’s Rebel Britannia Substack at www.rebelbrit.substack.com for more strange strikes, peculiar protests, bizarre boycotts, unusual uprisings and different demos.