The Spy Who Painted the Queen

by Phil Tomaselli

  Fortunately for Pemberton Billing and Harold Spencer, it was a civil case. MI5 and Special Branch had bulging files on Spencer going back to at least 1915. To them he was American, a journalist, a con merchant and sexual deviant with a tendency (that he was well aware of) to get over-excited and obsessive – not to mention delusional. In 1912 he had been arrested by the Italian police for assaulting a servant, and photographs were found in his suitcase ‘of the sort whose mere possession is a criminal offence’. He had then attached himself to the US Embassy in Rome and claimed to be on the staff, but also claimed the ambassador was a Japanese spy. He had escaped from New York, leaving a litter of bounced cheques, in 1913 when his first wife was pressing charges ‘of a serious nature’, and returned to the Adriatic where he swindled the US Consul before proceeding to Albania. Though he claimed to have been confidentially employed by the Prince of Wied, MI5 thought it most likely that he had commanded an unofficial bodyguard in 1914.

  Spencer appears to have done a good job while attached to the British Adriatic Mission: MI5 quietly expressed the opinion that they hoped he had not seen some of the letters from his superiors praising his abilities in a manner that was ‘indiscreetly worded’. Whilst on leave in London he had done translation work for the Admiralty and was then, at some point, posted to his battalion in Salonika, which is when he seems to have flipped, telling all and sundry about German plots in London and claiming the Salonika intelligence officers were all under German influence. By mid-1917 he was raving; a medical board diagnosed delusional insanity. He started making allegations about scandalous sexual practices in the Asquith household and said of the British ambassador in Rome, Sir Rennell Rodd, that a ‘Greek Jew financier’ was blackmailing him because of his dedication of a volume of poems to Oscar Wilde thirty years before, with the result that the ambassador had been ‘forced by pro-German influence to send away every intelligent member of his staff and replace them with others of conspicuous stupidity and incompetence’. He was soon found unfit and invalided out of the army, but found himself a job as an aeronautical inspector. He began to associate with Pemberton Billing and started writing for his Vigilante magazine. His evidence was purest fantasy but it helped bolster the festering feelings that not enough was being done against ‘the enemy within’.

  The anti-alien frenzy and concern about this secret internal enemy led the home secretary, Sir George Cave, to accept an amendment to his Nationality and Status of Aliens Bill of July 1918, which specifically stated that naturalisations which had taken place after the beginning of the war should be reviewed and might be subject to revocation. It was a pressing political point. In the Clapham by-election the Independent candidate (supported by Pemberton Billing’s Vigilante magazine), Henry Hamilton Beamish, raised demands for the denaturalisation and internment of all former citizens of enemy countries in the United Kingdom, the closure of all foreign banks and the wearing of a badge by all foreign aliens. The Conservative candidate, Harry Greer, expressed the view that ‘stronger measures’ were necessary and published a letter from the prime minister who said he was ‘determined to take whatever action is shown to be necessary’. Greer won with a reasonable majority, but given neither the Liberal nor Labour parties had put up candidates because of the coalition government, his opponent’s 43 per cent share of the vote was worrying to the political establishment. The result of the amendment was that De László, along with every other alien who had been naturalised since August 1914, was required to have their status as British citizens examined and, if necessary, revoked.

  The De László case had continued to fester and receive attention. Though the French Secret Service reports had received no mention in the press or the public hearing, the letter produced by Basil Thomson’s agent mentioning Madame G and the forty reports allegedly submitted by De László was known about, if only vaguely. On 11 July 1918, Sir J.H. Dalziel, Liberal MP for Kirkcaldy Burghs, declared:

  You could almost have got a quorum of Members of the House of Commons who have been painted by László and who were able to say what an innocent person he was. It is very easy to be deceived, especially by enemy aliens. What was the case of Mr. László? He was found out, after a considerable time – it was kept a little bit of a mystery – committing an act of treason against this country, and, if I am not misinformed, just to show that you ought not always to trust enemy aliens, even though they have guarantees, he was thanked, I understand, for his report on the condition of affairs in this country. I only utter this to show that we really must not approach the consideration of this question full of trust in enemy aliens. I doubt not we have a duty to them. I am sure we have. But we have a duty to ourselves. Why should we take risks in time of war like we have been doing? No other country does it. Germany does not do it … None of our Allies have shown the tenderness which we have up to the present.

  In a debate on 15 April 1919, Sir Richard Cooper, Conservative member for Walsall, declared:

  De László was caught by the Government, in spite of the backing he had, from a letter which came from Hungary from his brother, in which his brother said he was instructed by the authorities to thank him for his fortieth report on the military situation in Great Britain … What I ask is, Why was he not shot? If he had been a Britisher, and if it had been discovered that he had made a fortieth report on the military situation, I venture to think that he would have been shot by the most weak-minded Government that we could conceive. Why, then, was de László, who got the protection of persons in high places at the outset, when he was found guilty, not shot?

  John Bull, the magazine owned by another right-wing populist MP, Horatio Bottomley, complaining about De László’s treatment generally, reminded its readers that ‘he was afterwards found in traitorous communication with the enemy – this “British” citizen who ought to have been court martialled and shot … he used his position to worm out our military secrets and convey them by letter – nearly fifty of them – to the enemy’.

  7

  THE DENATURALISATION HEARING

  FOLLOWING THE PASSAGE of the Nationality and Status of Aliens Act, the home secretary appointed a three-man committee to investigate and, where necessary, revoke the nationalities of all former aliens naturalised after 4 August 1914. Notices in the press instructed them to contact the committee directly by letter and requested members of the public with information also to send in their evidence in writing. Questionnaires were sent out to the individuals at the beginning of October 1918 asking for details of their relatives and property in formerly hostile states as well as when they last visited, whether they belonged to any clubs or associations linked to them, and whether any relatives had served in enemy forces. They were clearly designed to tease out former enemy aliens. Seven days were given to reply. Cases where naturalisation had occurred before the start of the war and there was suspicion of abuse were referred directly to the home secretary.

  De László had, by now, been released from the nursing home following the intervention of some of his powerful friends and been allowed to live in the country house of his newly appointed solicitor, Sir Charles Russell, in Buckinghamshire. It can’t be said that he didn’t co-operate with the enquiry. As well as writing a personal defence, he wrote to Madame van Riemsdyk, to his family and to other persons he had been in contact with, authorising them to send, to the inquiry, his original letters. These were collected by the British Consul in Holland and by representatives of the Spanish government in Hungary and forwarded to the Foreign Office.

  The authorities began to prepare their case against him, but ran straight into problems. A whole swathe of correspondence that had been used in support of their case before the internment committee had gone missing. The Treasury Solicitor noted:

  In August 1917 the Police searched the Holder’s house and took possession of a number of letters and other documents. Certain of these were selected for use in support of the recommendation for internment, and are referred to in the report of MI5 dated 19t
h September 1917, being shortly described therein and lettered from M to Ze. Neither the documents themselves nor copies of them are attached to the report. On a perusal of the papers which came to me with my instructions, it became apparent that the documents mentioned would form an essential part of the case against the holder on the question of denaturalization, but, apart from this, as the case was likely to be strongly contested, it was clearly desirable that I should see and have in my possession all the documents which had passed into the hands of the Police.

  To make matters worse, Charles Russell & Co., De László’s solicitors, had applied to see them, which they were entitled to do. Despite a thorough search of the MI5 registry and of the Home Office, the documents never materialised. As the Treasury Solicitor pointed out, ‘Messrs Charles Russell & Co may be expected to take full advantage of [this] on behalf of their client.’

  Another problem concerned the French secret service reports, the most serious part of the case. The Treasury Solicitor pointed out:

  As matters stand, all we can do is to say that we had information that a letter in Hungarian, of which we have a French translation, was seen and the French translation taken. We can give no indication of the person who saw the letter or took the translation; nobody here is able to say that he knows who it was and is prepared to vouch for his trustworthiness.

  He urged more effort be made to persuade the French authorities to let them give the committee a little more precise information about their agent and how he got the information. Presumably the French were obdurate, not wishing to give any clue as to even the existence of an important informant. In the end no mention was made of the reports, or of the letter obtained by Thomson’s informant, in the charges levelled against De László.

  The third problem involved the statements Thomson had gathered from some of De László’s sitters. Though they had made written statements, they suddenly seem to have become coy about standing up in court to justify them. One was dead, which was about as coy as you can get, but Mrs Wanda Muller and Henry Vincent Higgins were still alive and presumably could not be persuaded to appear in court. It had been nearly two years since they made their statements but no real explanation appears on the file as to why they refused.

  By the time De László appeared before it, the Revocation Committee, after a slow start, had been busy. Between 1 January and 31 March 1919, it revoked the naturalisation certificates of twenty-one former Germans, four former Austro-Hungarians, one former Turk and one former Russian. One of these cases, that of Caroline Hanemann, is worth looking at before examining the De László hearing in more detail. Caroline was naturalised on 13 October 1914. She had been born on 23 September 1857 in Nordheim in what was then the Duchy of Sachsen Meiningen. She was lady’s maid and companion to Mrs Graham Smith to whom she also acted as a nurse because her mistress was an invalid. Mrs Graham Smith also happened to be the sister of Mr Asquith’s wife. Being of German origin, Caroline had naturally come under suspicion, and an article in the magazine The Pianomaker in December 1917 made the allegation that she had actually resided within 10 Downing Street for a period round about 27 September 1916. Allegations were made about the ‘Hidden Hand’ that protected Germans and their friends, and about ‘the sinister undercurrent of German influence’ and the ‘pampering of Huns’. The Downing Street story was probably true; Asquith frequently visited his sister-in-law in Easton Grey near Malmesbury and she sometimes visited him. MI5 had investigated the tale at the time and not discovered anything, though it did later receive a note claiming that Hanemann, at home in Wiltshire, had been found listening at keyholes, had opened and read her mistress’s mail, and had openly expressed delight when news came through of German victories. All it could say about these allegations was that they were made by ‘a responsible person in a position to know about what she was talking’.

  Caroline appeared before the three-man committee at Westminster Hall on 21 October 1918. She went before it with no legal representation and called no witnesses. She answered its questions clearly and courteously, explaining her various positions before she took the job with Mrs Graham Smith in 1890. Mr Graham Smith had died in 1908. Both Caroline’s parents had died before the war and she had three sisters and three brothers in Germany, with two nephews at the front in the German army, one discharged wounded and one exempt from service because of his health. She had last heard from the family the previous July and her communications had all gone through Thomas Cook, a recognised intermediary. She had a sister who had also served as a maid, but she had returned to Germany in early 1915 when an attempt to obtain naturalisation had been rejected. Caroline had last visited Germany for ten days in 1912. When questioned about them, she explained what her male relatives did for work, all reasonable middle-class men with moderately responsible posts and all too old to have served in the war. The committee went through the various people who had supported her naturalisation application, all stalwarts of the local Wiltshire community, the teacher, the postmaster, the farm bailiff, Mr Lawson of the Telegraph who was a family friend, and Mrs Graham Smith herself. Mr Arbuthnot Lane, Mrs Graham Smith’s doctor, wrote to support her because she had helped with Mrs Graham Smith’s treatment.

  Caroline explained her sympathies in the war lay with England and that it was a subject rarely spoken about in the house in front of her to save her feelings. All her money was in England and she was too old now to get any new work. She had done her bit in a small way for the war by making things for distressed folk and soldiers. When asked why she hadn’t naturalised before the war she replied simply:

  Because I never thought about it. I never thought of a war; I never thought about such a thing. And then, I have travelled about a good deal in other countries, and I had no feeling – I felt rather cosmopolitan, I suppose you would say. I never thought. Then, of course, my lady is such an invalid, and she is so lonely and so dependent on me that I never felt that I wished to go away, of course.

  She was thanked for her attendance and told she would hear the result through the Home Office.

  They certainly took their time considering the matter. It wasn’t until 6 February 1919 that the home secretary revoked the naturalisation, and not until the 16th that Wiltshire Constabulary was instructed to serve a copy on Caroline Hanemann. She became an Alien Enemy at that point.

  Day One

  The hearing to decide De László’s naturalisation was held on 23 June 1919. Though the Armistice had been signed on 11 November 1918, the Versailles Treaty was still unsigned and, technically, the country was still at war. The Honourable Mr Justice Salter, a former Tory MP who had been a judge of the King’s Bench Division, High Court, since 1917, was chairman. With him were The Right Honourable The Viscount Hambleden, Eton-educated and former colonel of the Devon Yeomanry, and His Honour Judge Radcliffe. The attorney-general Sir Gordon Hewart, KC, MP, Sir Archibald Bodkin and G.A.H. Brandon appeared for the Home Office, instructed by the Treasury Solicitor. De László was represented by the Right Honourable Sir John Simon, KC, a former attorney general and Home Secretary, Mr Harold Murphy, and Mr J. Wylie, instructed by his solicitors Messrs Charles Russell & Co.

  The transcript of the five-day hearing runs to hundreds of pages, but, it has to be said, would run to an awful lot fewer without the verbiage spouted by both sides – in particular De László’s defence barrister Sir John Simon. He seemed incapable of making any point without referring to the honesty of the police and the good will showed by the authorities in releasing all the paperwork, and in stressing that his client might technically be guilty, but … He repeatedly raised points but stressed he wasn’t complaining on behalf of his client. A decade later, Oswald Mosley nicknamed him ‘Soapy Simon’, and it’s quite plain here why.

  De László himself appeared as a witness mainly to clarify some points on a written defence statement he had laid before the court. He was questioned surprisingly lightly despite his quoted desire that everything should be done in public ‘in order that his r
eal actions should be known, and that the gravity of the case should be put at its true weight’.

  The case was widely reported in the press and the entire transcript is available in the files at Kew so the extracts quoted are purely the author’s own.

  The attorney general began by reminding the hearing of the terms of the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act 1918, including the section which declared that if anyone to whom a naturalisation certificate had been granted ‘has during the War in which His Majesty is engaged unlawfully traded with or communicated with the enemy or with the subject of an enemy state’, the secretary of state should seek to revoke the certificate. The fundamental question was whether De László had done any or all of these things and then whether continuance of his certificate was conducive to the public good. He then gave basic details of the three charges – that De László had assisted the escapee Horn with money and had not informed the police for twenty-four hours, that he had, on numerous occasions, communicated through the Dutch diplomatic bag, and also that he had attempted to persuade Mr Winthrop Bowen to send letters to Hungary for him from New York.