John was a 19-year old art student when his father was exposed as a traitor; his alcoholic mother had never hinted at her husband's treachery, and although John himself had never suspected his father of spying, when the news broke he did (as he admitted later) feel a sense of something approaching quiet approval.
Kim Philby was the senior officer of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) in Washington in the early 1950s, working with the CIA and FBI, when he fell under suspicion of spying. He had been ordered to investigate Donald Maclean, another double agent who had been passing British secrets to the Soviets. In fact Philby and Maclean's fellow spy, Guy Burgess, were intimate friends, and once tipped off by Philby, who organised their defection, Maclean and Burgess fled to Moscow.
The stammering, debonair Philby was suspected of being the so-called Third Man but although he was investigated, he swore that he did not know Maclean. Although forced to step down from his MI6 post, he maintained links to the Secret Intelligence Service while working as a Middle East correspondent for The Observer newspaper.
In 1955 he was formally cleared of spying for Russia, but shortly before being reinterviewed by British Intelligence in 1963, Kim Philby defected to Moscow. His son was shocked to learn the news from a newspaper placard as he stepped off a ferry from the Isle of Wight.
An effortless and effective spy, Kim Philby's information about British and American strategy during the Second World War and its aftermath was, as one historian put it, "beyond price". For years Philby had sabotaged Allied missions behind the Iron Curtain and had calculatedly sent dozens of agents to their deaths.
His friend Malcolm Muggeridge regarded Philby as "a real-life James Bond. His boozy amours, his tough postures, his intelligence expertise, are directly related to the same characteristics in [Ian] Fleming's hero."
Finding himself the son of the most reviled man in Britain, John Philby was none the less surprised to discover how like his father he was. Of Philby's five children, John was the closest to him, and visited him in the former Soviet Union on at least 12 occasions.
On one such visit, father and son were pushed into a cupboard at Moscow airport with a bottle of vodka to keep them quiet when officials realised that John Philby and his family had been booked on the same return flight to London as the British ambassador. The blunder was not repeated: at the end of the next visit, the family was whisked to the airport in an unmarked limousine with pleated grey curtains at the windows and a flashing blue light, using the exclusive "Kremlin lane" reserved for senior Soviet officials and visiting dignitaries.
Like his father, John Philby enjoyed the company of women, and drank and smoked heavily. In 1964 when he was 20, the young Philby was fined £15 and placed on probation for two years for stealing, with two friends, a radio and bottles of whisky, brandy, wines, liqueurs, cigarettes and cash valued in all at £75 from a sports pavilion at Greenwich, south-east London. But unlike his notorious father, who was hailed a hero in the Soviet Union and buried with full honours, John Philby led a low-profile life, and ran his own successful joinery business in north London.
John David Philby was born on November 7 1943 under a kitchen table during an air raid on London. His father Harold "Kim" Philby had been a product of the British ruling class but, like his own eccentric parent, the explorer and Arabist St John Philby, contemptuous of it. Nicknamed after the hero of Kipling's novel, Kim Philby had attended Westminster School and then Trinity College, Cambridge, where, in the early 1930s, with Burgess, Maclean and others he espoused communism. John's mother was his father's mistress, Aileen Furse, to whom he had been introduced in 1940, and whom he married in 1946 after his divorce from his first wife.
Young John's earliest memories were of the idyllic time the family spent in Istanbul where, in 1947, Kim Philby had been posted as station chief for the British Secret Intelligence Service. The Philbys lived in a sprawling villa on the Bosporus. John recalled carefree days playing with local Turkish children on the beach.
In 1948, when John was five, Guy Burgess came to stay for a holiday. John's mother resented Burgess and his close relationship with her husband, and began staging accidents to claim attention; she once reported being mugged in her car, and on another occasion set fire to the living room, suffering serious burns. She was later sent to a Swiss clinic for treatment. Philby was posted to the United States the following year.
Guy Burgess was second secretary at the British Embassy and lodged with the Philbys at their ramshackle house in Washington. John recalled "his dark, nicotine-stained fingers. He bit his nails, and always smelled of garlic." Years later, Kim Philby told his son that Burgess had kept his standard-issue KGB revolver and camera hidden under John's bed. In 1951 Burgess's defection to Moscow with Donald Maclean cast suspicion on Philby.
On the Philbys' return to London, John attended Beaumont House, a prep school in Hertfordshire. While he was there, in 1955, the Labour MP Marcus Lipton accused Philby in Parliament of "dubious Third Man activities".
John Philby's classmates were enthralled to think his father might be a spy, and John himself basked in the reflected glow of notoriety. But when the then Foreign Secretary, Harold Macmillan, announced that he had "no reason to conclude that Mr Philby has at any time betrayed the interests of this country", John was summoned to the headmaster's study. "Good news, Philby" the head told him, "your father's been exonerated."
When John Philby's mother died in 1957, none of her children was invited to the funeral, and he never knew where she was buried. They went to live with an aunt and uncle. John completed his education at Lord Wandsworth College in Hampshire, and thereafter saw little of his father. When he was 17 he enrolled at the Hornsey School of Art to study painting and sculpture. It was there that he embraced Left wing politics and joined the Young Socialists.
Realising that he lacked the talent to be a professional painter, John Philby worked briefly as a freelance newspaper photographer before taking up joinery. He spent the rest of his professional life as a self-employed joiner, operating from a small workshop near King's Cross where he made stands for exhibitions.
He valued his anonymity – although he never changed his name from Philby, which was frequently recognised when signing cheques or a hotel register. To the question: "No relation, I hope?", he would reply: "Oh yes, I'm his son." Indeed, to the journalist Monica Porter, who persuaded him to give his only interview in 1998, John Philby seemed like a son who regarded his father as an almost heroic figure.
In return, Kim Philby appeared to admire his eldest son for making his own, very different, way in life, working with his hands as well as his brain. However, the master spy never explained his treachery to his son. When, four years after his defection, he found John standing unannounced on his doorstep in Moscow, Philby's first words were "What are you doing here?"
"He offered no explanations for his career as a spy," John Philby recalled, "and I never asked for any."
Rather than discuss politics, father and son preferred to speak of England. Although Kim Philby said he loved living in Moscow, he was embarrassed by his VIP treatment and missed such concomitants of English life as Colman's mustard, Marmite and Worcester sauce (John brought replacement supplies on subsequent visits). The two became good friends, travelled extensively in the Soviet Union, accompanied by KGB minders, and drank heavily along the way.
After his death in Russia in 1988, aged 76, Kim Philby, in accordance with his wishes, was buried in the Soviet Union with full military honours. John Philby and his sister Josephine were flown to Moscow by the Russians. He refused to have his picture taken while kissing his father in his open coffin, and was relieved when (as he told Monica Porter) "a man in green wellies appeared, closed the coffin lid, banged in four nails, and lowered it into the ground. Then the guard of honour fired a volley of shots into the air and it was all over."
John Philby, who died on August 14, was thrice married. His first marriage, to a fellow art student in the 1960s, ended in divorce, as did his second, to an Israeli au pair. His third marriage broke up in the late 1990s. He is survived by a daughter, the journalist Charlotte Philby.
