Pyke’s charity was a triumph of small-scale voluntarism, and its founder was in no doubt that its ‘real capital’ was the energy and frenetic enthusiasm of its volunteers. In some cases this led to greater politicisation. One of his workers recalled the effect of this work on his colleagues. ‘They were starting to understand how vital it was for the working class to help one another, no matter what country they lived in.’ This was the Popular Front as it should have been. Those on the British Left were uniting to produce material aid which was going to those who needed it in Spain.
One of the VIAS ‘social entrepreneurs’ next to a reconditioned truck before it was sent to Spain
Just as these factory cells were run by volunteers, so was the charity’s headquarters on Great Ormond Street. Pyke described those young men and women who came in after work as ‘social entrepreneurs’ (long before the term became popular). They wrote letters, coordinated shipments and did battle with the notoriously chaotic VIAS card-index system. At the centre of this vortex of good intent was Pyke: drawn, balding, bespectacled, often in sandals and eschewing formal dress as he padded around the flat. Yet for all his commitment to the cause, he was a terrible manager.
Pyke’s style was circuitous and often labour-intensive. He tended to spend too long looking for a joke, analysing a joke or exploring apparently blind alleys. ‘I have not yet trained myself to keep my papers neatly,’ he added, conceding elsewhere, ‘I am very conscious, from my experience, that I am not the man to run this, as, psychologically, I am an habitual procrastinator’. He could also be impatient. There was an asperity to his urgency to aid the Republicans and he made no secret of his desire that VIAS should function with all the efficiency of a cut-throat capitalist operation. In a paper prepared for the Spain Campaign Committee of the Labour Party he described his charity as ‘damnably inefficient’, asserting ‘with complete confidence in the accuracy of my description, that if we had to face in direct opposition a German Fascist concern of the same size, we should be simply wiped out of the way’.
Out of this underlying dissatisfaction came the desire to apply himself more widely. For one of the first times in his life he had teams of workers awaiting instructions and, after reading about some of the issues faced by the Republicans, he began to design small-scale practical solutions to particular problems which were then sent out to VIAS cells. In other words, Pyke began to invent and his inventions were realised.
On learning that many of the roads leading to the front line in Spain were too rough for ambulances he designed a motorcycle sidecar capable of carrying a wounded soldier.
When he heard about the difficulty of getting hot food to the front, he produced plans for a separate sidecar which could keep rations warm by using the heat of the engine.
Knowing that there were problems with the Republicans’ trains, he developed plans for a pedal-powered locomotive in which the motive force came from an engine room of cycling men.
When he was not inventing, he would look to the past for solutions to contemporary problems. With fuel in short supply and fields to be sown, Pyke sent out instructions to his volunteers that they should look for discarded horse ploughs hidden in hedgerows. These could be restored and sent out to Spanish farmers.
He also read about a variety of moss which had been used during the Great War in lieu of cotton bandages. Self-sterilising, highly absorbent and readily available both in the Scottish Highlands and parts of Spain, sphagnum moss was described by the War Office in 1919 as ‘one of the most valuable and cheapest surgical dressings for the relief of suffering in the case of sceptic wounds and surgical operations generally’. Since then, curiously, it had been overlooked. Anyone can forget, Pyke allowed, but a collective failure to find out what had been forgotten was, in his opinion, unforgivable. Using his VIAS network Pyke distributed a guide to collecting and preparing sphagnum moss. He gave talks about this neglected material in Paris and London, all of which may have contributed to its use several years later, during the Second World War, when even the young Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret were reported to be gathering sphagnum moss from the moors surrounding Balmoral.
For a year and a half VIAS provided material aid to the Spanish Republicans at a fraction of its retail cost. There were enthusiastic write-ups of its work in the Daily Worker, Left News, Tribune and Manchester Guardian, and even The Times mentioned VIAS motorcycle-ambulances on their way to Spain. The Spanish Minister for Foreign Affairs, Julio Álvarez del Vayo, who had helped to purchase arms from the Soviet Union, praised the work of VIAS. Yet by the winter of 1938, with Franco in the ascendant, its activities started to slow.
Since his decision to take on Nazi anti-Semitism four years earlier a new version of Geoffrey Pyke had emerged. Similar to his 1920s iteration, he was intellectually adventurous, unafraid of extremes and always on the lookout for sloppy assumptions. He took great care to formulate his questions correctly, and when searching for solutions would conduct small-scale experiments or seek inspiration in newspapers, conversations, films, songs and anything else that he could find. He would also mine the past for historical analogies. What had changed was that he was now capable of mechanical invention, and in a political sense he had come alive. Yet for the British Security Service there would soon be a question mark over how far he had taken this newfound political awareness.
But he was not the complete inventor, at least not yet. Pyke might have perfected the ability to identify problems and come up with bold solutions, but he had failed to master the next stage – how to have his radical ideas taken up at the highest level. At times he would complain that it was everyone else’s fault, and that he lived in ‘a country whose deepest social belief is, perhaps, that nothing should ever be done for the first time’. While there was some element of truth in this – the 1930s in Britain will not be remembered as a decade of epic scientific advance – the real problem was that he had not yet understood that resistance to innovation was and is innate. ‘Wisdom is like gold,’ he had written, ‘it is useless if no one will accept it from you.’ Pyke was perfectly good at finding this gold. Now he needed to improve his ability to sell it – which was why his next challenge was so apt.
HOW TO PREVENT A WAR
BY THE SUMMER of 1939 Peter Raleigh was a man in need of an adventure. He had gone up to King’s College, Cambridge, several years earlier, where he had fallen under the spell of the historian and fellow Kingsman Eric Hobsbawm, then a senior figure in the Cambridge Student Branch of the Communist Party. ‘His quality of mind was such,’ wrote Raleigh, ‘the speed of his appreciation of a situation so extraordinary, his analysis of it so impeccably unemotional, that he was a natural guru for young Communists. He was also rather a nice man.’ Under Hobsbawm’s guidance Raleigh had become a probationary member of the Party, and in an ill-fated attempt to gain full membership had staged a fundraiser in aid of the Spanish Republicans. It included a sideshow called ‘Shoot the Dictator’, in which visitors took it in turns to take potshots at caricatures of Mussolini, Hitler et al. In a momentary lapse, Raleigh had added to this rogues’ gallery a portrait of Stalin. He was taken aside by a ‘rather foursquare earnest man’, Dr Arnold Kettle, and told ‘with gentle solemnity’ that perhaps he was not cut out for Party membership.
Several months later, in June 1939, Peter Raleigh returned to the Bloomsbury flat in which he had been staying, the home of a doctor who had volunteered in Spain, where he was told that he had a visitor. Raleigh was then introduced to a gaunt, wiry man in glasses and a threadbare suit.
It was difficult, he found, ‘not to be mesmerised by Geoffrey Pyke’s head’, and in particular ‘the shiny bald scalp with its in-built crease, a sort of adult fontanelle’ and the ‘tufty black beard waving uncertainly at the end of the chin’.
The combination of Pyke’s appearance and the way he spoke – an opening salvo of questions and jokes followed by streams of ideas and observations that would wash over you, the meaning apparent and beguiling, leading
up to a moment of high seriousness in which it felt as if you were being let in on a tremendous secret – all this made him come across as both ‘Mad Scientist and conspirator from The Secret Agent’. Raleigh was entranced. ‘Without knowing anything of what was to be asked of me, I volunteered myself for whatever Geoffrey had in mind.’ It would be some time before he realised what this was, and that unwittingly he had agreed to smuggle himself into Nazi Germany as part of a private attempt to avert another world war.
How to Give Germany ‘the Facts’
Fifteen months earlier, in March 1938, German troops had marched into Vienna in the wake of the Anschluss between Austria and Nazi Germany. In the weeks that followed Hitler had turned his attention to the Sudetenland, a little-known section of western and north-western Czechoslovakia. With the indignation of a man who had succumbed long ago to an enveloping victimhood, the German Chancellor declared in speech after speech that the Sudetenland belonged to Germany – until the Sudeten ‘issue’ had become the Sudeten ‘crisis’. The danger was ample. If Hitler ordered his troops into Czechoslovakia, as well he might, British, French and even Soviet forces might come to the aid of the Czechs. A single order from Hitler could trigger another war.
This remained the situation on the morning of Monday, 29 August 1938, which began in London with a dribble of rain. On opening his curtains in Great Ormond Street Pyke looked out onto a flat, cloudy day.
‘Waking up, with me, has always been a slow process,’ he confessed. Rather than get up, he decided to go through the day’s newspapers in bed. On page nine of the Manchester Guardian he read an article that would change his life.
The paper’s former Berlin correspondent had written: ‘If the main facts of the conflict between the Sudeten Germans and the Czechs and of the international situation as a whole were known to the German public Hitler would no longer be the “Fuhrer and Chancellor”. The fear of war is greater amongst the German people than amongst any other, and if they knew that Hitler has been, and perhaps still is, as much as considering a war of pure aggression, then neither his eloquence nor his measures of terroristic coercion would avail him any longer.’ This was a revelation. If the author was to be believed, then Hitler would lose the support of the German people once they realised, as so many Europeans had, that he was leading them to war. One can imagine a smile spreading across Pyke’s face.
‘For me the world changed with that sentence. One response filled my mind: “Why not tell them? Tell them that Hitler is leading them to war.”’ ‘I forgot to ask myself whether anyone would take it on himself to tell the German people. I felt only the necessity of their being told: told at once and loudly and repeatedly and by the right people.’ ‘The civilian population of Germany should be bombed,’ he went on, ‘NOT WITH BOMBS – which is about the best way to unite them against us – but with leaflets, etc., containing the truth. A continual stream of messages (issued, too, as publicly as possible in this country) giving to the Germans facts which have been concealed, that there is no hope for them or us while Hitler and the Nazis are in power.’
Again he had identified the root of a problem in that lacuna which lies between the reality of a situation and how it is perceived. His task now was to reduce the gap, and in a Platonic sense show Germany the world beyond the cave. But he would need to move fast.
Pyke’s first attempt to give the German people ‘the facts’ took the form of a message to be sent to the workers of Germany from a body representative of the British labour movement to say that Hitler was leading them to war. Again he failed to persuade the TUC to help, but on this occasion won over an affiliated body, the National Council of Labour. In late September, the night before Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew to Munich for the last time, this organisation released a version of Pyke’s message. It was featured on the BBC News and appeared in the next day’s Manchester Guardian. But this was much too little, too late.
Though an agreement was reached the following day in Munich, and the immediate threat of war was diminished, Hitler remained in power and so did Chamberlain. Another international crisis was bound to flare up sooner rather than later. Over the weeks that followed, Pyke plunged himself once again into the question of how to prevent a war with Germany. He rejected the idea that conflict was inevitable, or that these events were beyond his control. Instead he chivvied himself into approaching this problem as if he was a newcomer to the situation, or, as he put it, being a Jew he had to think like an Ishmaelite, adopt the mentality of an outcast and reject ‘the common assumptions of the time as to what is feasible and what is not’.
Late in 1938 Pyke had his breakthrough. He had been intimidated, he realised, not by objective difficulties but by Nazi propaganda and, to a lesser extent, by the thought of sounding ridiculous. This, of course, ran counter to his dearly held belief ‘that among the first duties of a citizen (of the modern world) is a willingness to make a fool of himself. But for this belief it is, I think, doubtful whether the idea in my mind of a private attempt to prevent the war would ever have passed into action. For men do not think purposefully of what they believe they can never hope to do and they do not do what they have never thought of.’ Pyke now had in mind a scheme that was ‘not only practicable’ but ‘ridiculously practical providing we tackled it professionally’.
His plan was radical and dangerous – far more so than broadcasting a message to the German workers – and would be hard to implement. It depended on persuading at least ten German-speakers to enter Nazi Germany under false pretences and stay there for anything up to a month while carrying out undercover work on Pyke’s behalf. This was not an easy sell.
For the Director of SIS, Britain’s foreign intelligence agency, the recent failure of his organisation to penetrate Nazi Germany had nothing to do with funding or motivation. ‘The fact of the matter,’ he wrote in 1938, ‘is that during the last twelve months or so, things have become very difficult indeed in Germany.’ One of the only SIS agents in the country, Baron de Ropp, had recently been moved to Switzerland because of fears for his safety. For years, there had been no British agents in the country – indeed, the situation was so bad that SIS was by then forced to rely on aerial photographs for its military and industrial intelligence. If, by early 1939, it was too dangerous to send even one professional intelligence agent into Nazi Germany, then dispatching a team of amateurs was senseless.
Yet for Pyke the risk was easily outweighed by the consequences of success. If he could find enough people who were willing to enter Germany on his account, and his plan actually worked, then war might be forestalled and millions of lives would be saved. With that in mind, Pyke began to look for recruits.
He started by contacting senior figures at the Workers’ Educational Association, Toynbee Hall, LSE and University College London (UCL), asking them if they knew of any adventurous German-speakers who might be willing to go on a paid expedition to Germany. If so, they should write to him. In spite of the risks, almost immediately the letters and telegrams began to arrive at Great Ormond Street.
One of the first to get in touch was Cedric Hentschel, a lecturer at UCL whose German and Polish parents had named him after Little Lord Fauntleroy, and whose students liked to rhyme: ‘The Lectures of Hentschel / Are really essential; / No other teacher / Knows so much about Nietzsche’, although it was Byron, really, where his expertise lay. Amy Cunningham, at LSE, was a friend of Hentschel whose teaching methods were described by colleagues as ‘unorthodox’ – sadly we do not know why. She too wrote to Pyke, as did Edith Lamb, the daughter of a trades-union official whose only weakness, worryingly, was her ability to speak German. John Gilbertson, a miner’s son who taught German at a boy’s school, was a better linguist but would not be able to travel for another few weeks. Stanley Smith was another man who taught German and was on holiday when he heard about the scheme. ‘The thought of augmenting my modest salary as a teacher with activities of a kind reminiscent of Ashenden [Somerset Maugham’s fictional British s
py] appealed strongly,’ not least because he had recently become engaged and was saving up for a ring.
As well as Peter Raleigh, the Cambridge undergraduate who, for Pyke, ‘by a short head is perhaps the most brilliant of the team’, the amateur spymaster was contacted by a teacher from Bradford; a young architect; a manual worker who was unable to travel until his broken finger had healed, and six or seven others, mostly young teachers and lecturers in German Studies, each one patriotic, curious and quietly courageous. A Miss Crowther was typical. She reminded Pyke of the formidable Lysistrata in Bernard Shaw’s Apple Cart. ‘Apparently rather gentle, but as firm as a rock underneath. I think if she came up against a Gestapo agent that the Gestapo agent would get the worst of it. Yorkshire accent. No nonsense about her. Full of beans and enthusiasm. I suspect wanting a little adventure and a laudable desire to be of use and to do her bit. The obstacle: an aged widow mother.’
More mysterious among the team of Pyke’s potential recruits was Fred Fuller, then living in Paris, whose ability to speak German was never questioned, and Marjory Watson, a stout, sallow-looking woman in her late thirties, who was apparently eking out a living as a German translator. Watson had once been described to the police as ‘a drunkard and a bad character’. More recently, in April 1939, Special Branch had referred to her as a ‘woman suspected of being a Nazi agent’. MI5 had subsequently labelled her ‘unsuitable for employment in any capacity under the War Department’. It would later emerge that they were right about Watson’s unsuitability, but for the wrong reasons.
It was a fascinating group, a neat cross-section of the coming generation in Britain whose members hailed from across the gamut of social and geographical backgrounds. But it was hard to see how this band of well-meaning linguists could possibly thwart Hitler in his attempts to take Germany to war.
Churchill's Iceman_The True Story of Geoffrey Pyke_Genius, Fugitive, Spy Page 17