by Anita Anand
When he arrived in London in 1936, I was only three. He left me and my mother in India, and it was hard for us, but he sent back money.
People say my papaji was a man with a fiery temper, generally quiet but very loyal . . . I don’t know if Papaji followed trouble or trouble followed him, and I’m not sure when he first met Udham Singh, but I do know he liked him a lot. He was quite different to my papaji. Udham Singh was a cheery chap, who laughed a lot. My father was serious and very quiet. Whatever tied them together was strong. Whatever happened next, my father never abandoned him.34
In the two years after his return from Russia, British surveillance was getting in Udham’s way. Though he could slip his shadows for stretches of time, it was impossible to get anywhere near Sir Michael. The authorities’ interest in him also succeeded in cutting him off from his Communist benefactors. The last thing their operatives needed was to end up with a police detail thanks to their contact with Udham. ‘Irene’ Palmer appears to have remained in his life, though they would rarely be seen in public together. ‘Sadhini’, the wise woman, now only existed in Udham’s private sphere.
Cut off from his handlers, running out of cash, life in London would have started to feel as impotent and frustrating as it had when he had come with Pritam Singh almost two decades before. By the end of 1937, Udham appears to have dispensed with his reliance on Russian help, and instead looked to America once again.
He needed money, but peddling jobs or the odd bit-part in a motion picture would not have met his needs. His former Ghadar brothers, Udham felt sure, would give him funds to live off while waiting for the heat to cool. Though the British did not know what his primary objective was, they soon found out that he was trying to get to the United States and successfully stopped him no fewer than three times.35 It would have driven Udham to distraction.
SECRET 22.11.37
Mr Silver.
I return herewith for your retention, the note on UDHAM SINGH’s record, which I sent you with my No. 2868 dated 11.10.37, and which was returned to me.
You will see from this note that UDHAM SINGH spent some seven years in the USA which makes it plain that his present statements are an attempt to deceive us.
Inquiries show that UDHAM SINGH peddles hosiery and lingerie and uses a small car for the purpose: he does not seem to be short of money.
UDHAM SINGH served five years’ imprisonment in India in 1927–1931 for having smuggled in two revolvers and ammunition. It was clear at the same time that in so doing, he was infected by Ghadar propaganda as the result of contact with the Ghadar Party when he was in California. There are adequate grounds therefore for maintaining a refusal to give him an endorsement for the USA. I think that in any case he would have considerable difficulty in securing a visa from the United States authorities.
DVW IPI36
The distinctive, slanting ‘IPI’ at the bottom of the memo told Cecil Silver that his boss had already seen the report on this Udham Singh character. Colonel Philip Vickery rarely signed documents with his own initials anymore. He used those of ‘Indian Political Intelligence’, the department he had helped to build from nothing.
Vickery now occupied one of the most important posts in British, intelligence, and Silver, his latest recruit, was still familiarising himself with the job when Udham’s file landed on his desk. He had spent most of his adult life working for the India Office, but the world of counterespionage and anti-terrorism was new to him.
Silver had joined the IPI at a time when the fabric of imperial security seemed stretched to ripping point. Increasingly audacious attacks by the IRA, the rise of Hitler in Germany and continuing intrigues from the Soviet Union were forcing his colleagues to work round the clock. Silver was doing his best to darn the holes, but every time he did, new ones opened up.
Back in 1915, when Vickery first travelled to London to nurse his infant IPI, he and his colleague John Wallinger had struggled to win over colleagues in the police and secret service. Funding was always an issue. The India Office, which paid the IPI budget, seemed to do so through a clogged sieve.
When Vickery was told in 1925 that he could move his operation from the fusty India Office in Whitehall to MI5’s headquarters in Cromwell Road, he might have thought the tide was turning. However, the space MI5 had seen fit to allocate him soon brought him down to earth. The IPI was given three pokey, windowless cabins in the attic, so suffocating that Vickery was almost driven mad in the hot, perpetual twilight.
The main room, which held the typing pool, secretaries and filing cabinets, was so gloomy it was a challenge to read original documents, let alone the anaemic carbon copies that often arrived in their stead. The offices felt like a tomb, offering ‘minimum amount of light and airspace’.37
Vickery, despite his seniority, was forced to wage a major paperwork offensive just to requisition ‘one extra hanging lamp’.38 The bickering over who should pay for it went on for months.
More than a decade later, as Silver sat reading Udham’s file, the department was in a state of flux once more, moving on the coattails of MI5 to the slightly more spacious accommodation offered by Thames House on London’s Millbank. This time Silver did at least have a desk and lamp to call his own, and the gloom came instead from the contents of the files.
Each day, trolleys came by and dropped off more reports than any one man could reasonably handle. Behind thick spectacles and an air of a disappointed librarian, Silver did his best, spending hours at his desk making connections between different and sometimes unintelligible intelligence held by departments in far-flung corners of the world. Paperwork was Silver’s life. Paperwork had saved his life.
In 1917, when he was a 33-year-old clerk working for the India Office, Britain was launching its latest spring offensive against the Germans on the Western Front. Silver received his call-up papers and a cubicle smelling of disinfectant was all that lay between him and the front line. As the doctor poked and prodded him, declaring him fit for duty, Silver knew the news from Europe was sickeningly bad. The Battle of Arras had begun and thousands of men were dying on both sides.
Hearing of Silver’s call-up, a senior bureaucrat from the India Office wrote to the recruiting officer in Croydon, asking him to exempt Silver from duty. He was too short-sighted to be of much use as a soldier, he argued, however Silver was indispensable to the Raj and its running.
The letter had no impact, and just as Silver was packing his kit bag on 14 April, resigned to imminent carnage, the secretary of state for India himself waded in to protect him. The tone of Austen Chamberlain’s letter was not to be questioned. Silver wasn’t going anywhere:
Sir, I am directed by the Secretary of State for India to address you regarding the case of Mr Cecil Herbert Silver . . . Mr Silver is a member of the staff of this office and has acquired a thorough knowledge of certain confidential branches of its work connected intimately with the conduct of the war . . . he is indispensable for his front duties.39
The Battle of Arras would turn out to be one of the bloodiest stalemates of the entire war, claiming the lives of about 160,000 British troops and 125,000 Germans within the space of a month.
Silver’s superiors may have recognised his ability, but colleagues mocked him for his perceived lack of personality. Peter Fleming, the dashing brother of Ian, creator of the fictional spy James Bond, would run a specially trained department for the secret service. His ‘Auxiliary Units’ employed the best of the best and were involved in missions so dangerous, average life expectancy in the field was just twelve days. Agents were licensed to kill, shoot each other, or use explosives to kill themselves if they fell into enemy hands.40 Fleming would give one of his most daring and valuable assets the codename ‘Silver’, an internal joke to amuse his department.
Unlike the flamboyant spy, Silver of the IPI was a grey machine, a bureaucrat to his bone marrow. Yet even the IPI’s most capable man allowed Udham Singh to slip through his fingers. It was ironic and uncharacteristic that Silv
er did not make Udham more of a priority, because at the time the Indian was giving him plenty of reasons to watch him even more closely than before.
Cut off from the Russians and now blocked from the United States, by 1938 Udham was getting desperate. He needed money. He also needed logistical support if he was ever going to get out of his London limbo and work out the best way to kill Michael O’Dwyer. As will become apparent, Udham harboured hopes of getting away with the murder and would need a means of getting out of the country after the deed. It was a most un-Bhagat-Singh-like thing to plan, but Udham had a family waiting for him in America.
Knowing he was on a watch list, on St Valentine’s Day 1938, Udham nevertheless presented himself at the passport office and asked for endorsements that would allow him to travel to Czechoslovakia, Greece and Norway. His flagged file caused the passport official to tell him to come back a bit later, presumably by which time the IPI could be informed of Udham’s latest request. The increased scrutiny scared Udham off. How he ended up in France just two days later is therefore a complete mystery.
Arriving at the British consulate in Dunkirk on 16 February, Udham once again asked for permission to travel to a list of other countries, this time Holland, Norway, Sweden and the USA. He also asked for a renewal of his passport, which was strange because his old passport had months left on it.
In a spectacular failure, which the British described as ‘an oversight’,41 Udham was given stamps to travel to Belgium and America. Most in his position would have considered this a victory, but Udham had to try to push his luck. He asked for a new passport again, presumably because he thought a clean passport would come without the troublesome flags attached to his old papers. He was denied.
Udham was now moving at speed. The very next day, he popped up in Antwerp, yet again asking the British Consulate there for a new passport. He apparently produced a British Legion badge and membership card for the Coventry branch of the Legion as proof of identity. Where he got those items remains a mystery, since the description of the serviceman that went with those cards, ‘A fully pensioned Jemadar of the Indian Army’, was not one that applied to him.
His request for a new passport was turned down yet again. Though he had an endorsement to travel to the United States, he had yet to get a visa. Just as the IPI had said, it was unlikely that he would get one with his troublesome documents.
It was too risky to try the United States, and his circuitous attempts to reach Russia seemed to have been thwarted too. When he surfaced in surveillance files in the summer of 1938, Udham appeared deranged with desperation. With no Ghadar or Bolshevik funds coming in, his need for money was making him reckless.
On 26 July 1938, Udham, together with a postal worker named Mool Chand, travelled to West Kensington, determined to get their hands on some cash. He demanded money ‘with menaces’ from Messrs Amir-Ud-Din and Fazal Shah Syed, cloth dealers who lived at one of the pedlar houses he knew well. The pair refused, the situation got messy, and Udham and Mool Chand beat up one of the men.42
The police were called, Udham and Mool Chand were arrested, charged and remanded in custody for almost a month. The whole thing was an unmitigated disaster and Udham was personally forced to cough up £229 he did not have to pay for his defence. Ultimately his car, which he had relied upon for his secretive forays around the country, was confiscated.
The case came before a judge on 20 September that same year,43 but collapsed and had to be retried, amid rumours that associates of Udham Singh had leant on witnesses to keep them from coming forward. During Udham’s second trial, in which he tried to change his appearance, turning up in the dock in a full turban and beard, the case against him also crumbled. Udham and Mool Chand were allowed to walk free.
Despite a string of suspicious acts, Silver and his peers allowed Udham to melt back into the shadows. It would be an expensive mistake.
* * *
* In the 1940s, Nazir tried to buy a sub-machine gun to kill some firangis and make his mentor proud. He was foiled when it transpired that he was trying to buy his weapon not from the IRA, as he thought, but from undercover police. Nazir escaped arrest and went on to become an upstanding member of his local community. He never stopped loving Udham Singh.
† Goras – a slang word for ‘whites’.
* Happy-go-lucky
* Traditional Punjabi clothes comprising a long white cotton shirt that falls beneath the knees, and white cotton pyjamas.
CHAPTER 20
RECKONINGS
Britain was balancing on a precipice when Silver took his eyes off Udham Singh. The atmosphere in which the security services were operating had become febrile in 1938. All eyes looked outwards at the mounting threat of war from the Continent. It explains how the IPI lost sight of the enemy within.
Having annexed Austria, Hitler was pressing his claim on the Sudetenland, an area of Czechoslovakia with a predominantly ethnic German population. Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, flew personally to Germany for talks, convincing French and Italian counterparts to let Hitler keep what he had snatched. His appeasement did nothing to dampen the Führer’s ambition, and Britain girded itself for war.
Udham knew he had been lucky to walk free from prison, and though he continued to stay in London for the most part, he never slept for more than a few days at any one of his multiple addresses, a clear attempt to shrug off any unwanted police attention. The list of his residences had extended to include two more: 17 Mornington Crescent and 8 Mornington Crescent.1 The gaze of the security services may have shifted, but he was taking no chances. Udham now faded into the background and made no further attempt to reach Russia, Germany or the United States, even though this cut him off from valuable friends, and even more valuable cash flows.
By January 1939, Hitler was secretly ordering a major build-up of his navy, challenging British supremacy at sea. Three months later, his forces were on the move again, invading the remainder of Czechoslovakia and threatening Poland. Preparing for an imminent outbreak of hostilities, Britain rearmed, installing a highly secret radar early-warning system along its coastline.
Conscription was introduced and assurances given to the Poles that Hitler would not be allowed to take their country as easily as he had taken their neighbour. In the background of this maelstrom, two countries, both historic enemies of Britain, formed an alliance. The German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, a non-aggression treaty. The stage was set. On 1 September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. Two days later, Britain declared war.
As his pedlar friends sat transfixed by their radios, listening to Chamberlain’s mournful announcements, Udham was nowhere to be seen. He had already left London and made his way to the south coast, securing a room for himself in Southampton,2 a coastal town where he had managed to get a job with a major contractor – Sir Robert McAlpine’s company was doing extensive works on the docks.3 In July, after only a month, Udham inexplicably quit his job and took up work with a company based in nearby Hampshire: Messrs Lindsay Parkinson and Co.4 It had a lucrative contract to work on militia camps mushrooming in the area and urgently needed skilled men. Udham signed up under a fake name, ‘Singh Azad’5 – a dramatic moniker to any who understood Hindi or Urdu. It literally translated as ‘The Lion Free’. To those with knowledge of India, it would have sounded immediately suspicious: ‘Singh’ was a Sikh name and ‘Azad’ Muslim. Nobody at Lindsay Parkinson and Co. seemed to notice.
For a man who had wanted nothing to do with the army since his ignominious return from Basra, it was a strange choice of employment. Udham hated the very notion of the British army, and supported the country’s enemies. To now be involved in helping with the war effort made no sense unless he had an ulterior motive.
His new job gave him access to low-level military sites, where, with his ear to the ground, he could pick up interesting chatter. Southampton, where he continued to live and where some of t
he Parkinson job sites were located, was of great strategic importance. Apart from hosting one of the busiest docks in Britain, it was also the home of the Supermarine factory, a major manufacturer of Spitfires in Britain.
He had no hope of getting work at Supermarine, but his experience of working with aeronautics in America put him in good stead to understand any technical talk that might slip from loose lips in the local pubs. He would recognise parts being ferried in and out of the plant, would know where and how quickly they were coming in. Testament to Southampton’s key role in the British war effort, Hitler would try to bomb it off the map a year later.
One has to imagine the heated atmosphere in Udham’s work crew. As well as being unusually warm for that time of year,6 the international conflict fuelled the urgency of the work of Lindsay Parkinson and Co. It would undoubtedly have raised the temperature of the banter between men. Udham and his fellow labourers worked long hours in the sun, building makeshift barracks at lightning speed in preparation for conscripted men who would soon be expected to fight. After work, the pub was the natural place to decamp, drink and dissect unfolding world events.
Perhaps it was the booze, or maybe it was simply a reaction to the intense patriotism of his fellow workers, but something pushed Udham to have a major outburst just weeks into his Lindsay Parkinson contract. He told a fellow English workman, somewhat threateningly, that he was working for people in India, ‘who intended to cause trouble’ as soon as India was dragged into the conflict: ‘He declared that everything was ready for a rebellion and that arms and ammunition had been supplied by Germany and Russia.’7