These pressures led to the formation of the National Union of Police and Prison Officers (NUPPO), which declared a strike in August 1918. Almost all of the 12,000 Metropolitan Police withdrew from duty. So, too, did the 1,200 men of the City of London force guarding the capital’s financial institutions. These police ‘revolters’ were, thought Hensley Henson, the politically minded bishop, ‘a very ominous sign of social disintegration’. The wartime coalition government, which feared that police disaffection would spread to the army, sent a detachment of Guards to protect Scotland Yard from the mutineers. Lloyd George, as Prime Minister, conceded most of the strikers’ demands on pay, pensions and war bonuses, and was understood by negotiators to have given an oral promise of union recognition. Sir Edward Henry, who had underestimated NUPPO’s support, was replaced as Chief Commissioner by General Sir Nevil Macready. Hayes and other policemen were soon riled by Macready’s declared intention to raise the force’s discipline to the standard of a Guards regiment.2
Hayes left the Metropolitan Police on his election as general secretary of NUPPO in March 1919. Born in 1889, he was one of the seven children of a police inspector at Wolverhampton, and had been educated in the town. At the age of thirteen he became a clerk with the Wolverhampton Corrugated Iron Company. By attending evening classes he learnt shorthand, book-keeping, accountancy and French. In 1909 he joined the Metropolitan Police, in which he reached the rank of sergeant within four years. He was an imposing man whose elaborate waxed moustache suggested vanity. The success of the 1918 strike imbued him with over-confidence. On the Sunday nearest to May Day in 1919 NUPPO assembled the largest crowd seen in Trafalgar Square for years. In addition to thousands of Metropolitan policemen, who marched along Whitehall bearing banners with defiant slogans, they were supported by crowds of colonial soldiers and by some sailors. The most insistent protesters were policemen who had recently been demobilized from regiments on the Western Front and found reversion to military drilling to be an intolerable prospect. Hayes denounced Macready to the demonstrators: ‘being an army officer, the Chief Commissioner was introducing a system not of discipline, but of tyranny, brutality and Prussianism’.3
The Police Act of 1919, which came into force in August, granted higher wages, but made it illegal (with a penalty of up to two years’ imprisonment) for policemen to join a trade union concerned with pay, pensions and conditions of service. The government-subsidized Police Federation was formed. NUPPO responded by calling a national strike which flopped everywhere except Merseyside. There the strike endured for three weeks, during which troops made bayonet charges to quell looting in rough districts. When the Merseyside strike collapsed, every striking policeman there was dismissed with total loss of pension rights. Lloyd George said that ‘all England’ should feel indebted to Liverpool’s resilient municipal leadership. He saw Merseyside’s police strike ‘as perhaps the turning point in the Labour movement, deflecting it from Bolshevist and Direct Actionist courses to legitimate Trade Unionism. Had Liverpool been wrongly handled, and had the strikers scored a success, the whole country might very soon have been on fire.’4
All NUPPO activists in London were dismissed. Several of them, including its former general secretary James Marston, took jobs with the All Russian Co-operative Society (ARCOS), the Soviet government’s commercial agency which opened in London in 1920 and acted as a front for espionage and subversion. Historians of British communism imply that these men were Special Branch plants, and mock ‘the wave of Bolshevism coursing through Scotland Yard and the Metropolitan Police at this time’, as if the recent victimization, strikes, demonstrations and dismissals were not sufficient causes of radicalization. Special Branch did have two informants planted inside ARCOS, Karl Korbs and Peter Miller, while MI5 had its own double agent embedded there, Anatoli Timokhin. None of them had been Metropolitan policemen.5
After the collapse of NUPPO, Hayes started the Vigilance Detective Agency, which was based at Clapton Common, where he lived. A festering shared grievance is a powerful unifier of men. Vigilance was manned by a rump of NUPPO loyalists, notably Walter Dale and Arthur Lakey. Dale became Vigilance’s chief investigator. Lakey’s wife joined Marston in the ARCOS offices, where she worked under her maiden name of Kitty Reynolds. In Paris before 1914 the Okhrana’s surveillance of dissident émigrés had been delegated to a private detective agency, Bint et Sambain, in order to distance the Russian embassy in Paris from the watch. After 1920 the Cheka determined to use Vigilance in post-war London rather as the Okhrana had used Bint et Sambain in pre-war Paris. The agency’s detectives were soon recommended by Hayes to a young journalist named William Norman Ewer.
Norman Ewer of the Daily Herald
Norman Ewer had been born in 1885 in the middling London suburb of Hornsey. His father dealt in silk, and later moved to Muswell Hill. The family kept one live-in housemaid. Ewer rose up the rungs of the middle class by passing examinations. He attended Merchant Taylor’s School in Charterhouse Square in the City of London, and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he won first-class degrees in mathematics and history. From an early age, he was nicknamed ‘Trilby’ because, like the heroine of George du Maurier’s novel, he liked to be barefoot. After Cambridge he became private secretary to an exotic plutocrat known as Baron de Forest.
Born in 1879, de Forest was ostensibly the son of American circus performers who died of typhoid when their troupe visited Turkey. After a spell in an orphanage, he was adopted in 1887 by the fabulously rich Baroness Hirsch, who believed that he was the illegitimate child of her dead son. He inherited a castle and many millions in 1899, was created Baron de Forest by the Austrian Emperor and converted from Judaism to Catholicism. Subsequently he settled in England, where he held the land-speed record and was the victorious radical candidate at a parliamentary by-election in 1911. He forthwith spoiled his political prospects by suing his mother-in-law for slander. In 1912 de Forest contributed to the fund launched by the Labour MP George Lansbury to save the fiercely partisan Daily Herald from insolvency. Ewer was installed as de Forest’s nominee in the Daily Herald management: he soon became, together with the young Oxford graduates G. D. H. Cole, Gerald Gould and Harold Laski, one of ‘Lansbury’s lambs’ working as a journalist there. His idealism became the overworked centre of his existence.
After the outbreak of war in 1914 Ewer opposed conscription, registered as a conscientious objector, became an indentured agricultural worker in Waldorf Astor’s pigsties at Cliveden and published anti-war verses. He was aghast at the mayhem of the Western Front, was revolted by the militarism of the Austrian, British, German and Russian monarchies, and loathed the inequities of free-market capitalism. He saw the undoubtable humbug of the British claim to be fighting for liberal democracy when its main ally was tsarist Russia, which had sponsored the pogroms of 1903–6 and sent dissidents into captivity and internal exile. As Ewer wrote in 1924, Lenin emerged as the greatest historical leader of the epoch because he saw world revolution, not national victory in the European war, as the primary aim. German socialists collaborated with German capitalism, British socialists exerted themselves for national interests, and pacifists strove for peace. ‘Only the great voice of Lenin cried from Switzerland that all were wrong; that the job of Socialists was Socialism; neither to prosecute the Imperialist war nor to stop the Imperialist war, but to snatch a Socialist victory from the conflicts of Imperialism; to turn war into revolution.’ For Ewer, like Lenin, imperialism was the apotheosis of capitalism.6
When Ewer applied for a post-war passport to visit the Netherlands and Switzerland, Gerald Gould assured the Foreign Office that the ‘extreme’ socialism preached in the Daily Herald was a bulwark against Bolshevism. Counter-espionage officers assessed him differently. ‘EWER is pro-German principally on the grounds that other Governments are not less wicked than the German,’ reported Special Branch’s Hugh Miller. ‘He preaches peace with Germany, followed by “revolution through bloodshed”.’ In Miller’s estimate, Ewer was a
risk to national security: not only ‘a clever writer and fluent speaker’ but ‘a dangerous and inflammatory agitator’.7
In 1919 Ewer was appointed foreign editor of the Daily Herald. He collaborated during that year with the pro-Bolshevik MP Cecil L’Estrange Malone and a director of the Daily Herald named Francis Meynell in formulating a programme for a Sailors’, Soldiers’ & Airmen’s Union which would certainly have been revolutionary in intent. Ewer became a founding member of the CPGB in 1920, and liaised between the newspaper, CPGB headquarters in King Street and Nikolai Klyshko, who was both secretary of the Soviet delegation that arrived in London in May 1920 to negotiate a trade agreement and the Cheka chief in London. Klyshko controlled Soviet espionage in Britain, and funded subversion, until his recall from London in 1923.
George Lansbury visited Moscow and met Lenin in 1920. ‘I shall always esteem it the greatest event in my life that I was privileged to see this fine, simple, wise man’, he wrote in besotted terms in his memoirs. Lenin was ‘a great man in every sense of the word’, who held supreme national power and yet remained ‘unaffected and without personal pride’. Lansbury, who became chairman of the Labour party in 1927 and its leader in 1932, told the party conference at Birmingham in 1928 that the Bolshevik revolution had been ‘the greatest and best thing that has ever happened in the history of the world’. Socialists should rejoice that the ‘fearful autocracy’, which ruled from the Baltic to the Black Sea and from the Volga to the Pacific, had been replaced by that magnificent venture in state socialism, the Soviet Union. ‘The peasants and workers of that great nation, encircled by implacable foes who ceaselessly intrigue, conspire and work to restore Czardom, need our sympathy and help, and we need theirs.’ It was the role of the Daily Herald, thought Lansbury and his lambs, to provide and receive sympathetic help.8
In August 1920 GC&CS intercepted and deciphered a signal from Lev Kamenev, the Bolshevik revolutionary leader and acting head of the Soviet trade delegation, reporting that he had given to the Daily Herald a subsidy of £40,000 raised by selling precious stones. In return, it was understood that the newspaper would be the mouthpiece of Moscow on Anglo-Russian relations and would support Bolshevik agitation and propaganda against the Lloyd George government. Meynell, the courier used to smuggle many of these jewels, made several visits to Copenhagen to meet Moscow’s star diplomat Maxim Litvinov. The surveillance of these meetings was comically blatant: a window-cleaner appeared on a ladder, and a banister-polisher on the landing, whenever Meynell entered Litvinov’s hotel suite. Once Meynell returned from Copenhagen with two strings of pearls secreted in a jar of butter. On another occasion he posted a box of chocolate creams, each containing a pearl or diamond, to his friend the philosopher Cyril Joad. All these shenanigans were known to Ewer, although it may have been kept from him that £10,000 of the jewels money was invested in the Anglo-Russian Three Ply and Veneer Company run by George Lansbury’s sons Edgar and William. Edgar Lansbury was a member of the CPGB, who in 1924 was elected communist mayor of Poplar. His mother-in-law, Hannah (‘Annie’) Glassman, was used to convert the jewels into cash.9
MI5 resorted to family connections and social contacts in order to handle Kamenev and the Daily Herald. Jasper Harker had recently married Margaret Russell Cooke at a Mayfair church. She was the sister of Sidney (‘Cookie’) Russell Cooke, an intellectual stockbroker and Liberal parliamentary candidate, who had inherited a fine house on the Isle of Wight called Bellecroft. Russell Cooke had been a lover of Maynard Keynes, whose lifelong friend and business associate he remained, and was the son-in-law of the captain of the Titanic. Virginia Woolf called him ‘a shoving young man, who wants to be smart, cultivated, go-ahead & all the rest of it’. Harker used his brother-in-law to compromise Kamenev. Russell Cooke invited Kamenev and the latter’s London girlfriend Clare Sheridan, who was a sculptor, Winston Churchill’s cousin and a ‘parlour bolshevik’, first to lunch at Claridge’s and then to stay at Bellecroft for an August weekend. Lounging on rugs by the tennis court, Kamenev spoke vividly for over an hour, ‘stumbling along in his bad French’, about the inner history of the revolution in 1917, recounting the ‘secret organizations’ of Lenin, Trotsky, Krasin and himself, and depicting the Cheka’s chief Felix Dzerzhinsky: ‘a man turned to stone through years of travaux forcés, an ascetic and fanatic, whom the Soviet selected as head of La Terreur’. Kamenev inscribed a poem in which he likened Sheridan to Venus on a £5 banknote. He signed Bellecroft’s visitors’ book with the slogan, ‘Workers of the World Unit [sic].’10
Next month, on the eve of Kamenev’s scheduled return to Moscow with Sheridan, Lloyd George upbraided him for his part in the contraband-jewels subsidy. In order to gain political advantage, Lloyd George’s entourage spread the notion that he had given Kamenev peremptory orders to leave the country. The Prime Minister also yielded to pressure to publish the intercepts in order to justify his confrontation with Kamenev, although this compromised future SIGINT by betraying the fact that GC&CS could read Moscow’s ciphered wireless traffic. Journalists duly raised uproar about the Daily Herald diamonds under such headlines as ‘Lenin’s “Jewel Box” a War Chest’.11
When Kamenev and Sheridan left together for Moscow, Russell Cooke found an excuse to meet them at King’s Cross station, to accompany them on their train and to see them on to their ship. Sheridan’s handbag went missing on the journey, and was doubtless searched. At Newcastle it reappeared in the clutches of Russell Cooke, who claimed to have traced it to the lost luggage office. In Moscow Sheridan sculpted heads of Lenin, Dzerzhinsky, Trotsky, Zinoviev and other Bolshevik leaders. Soon afterwards, the Cheka informed Kamenev that Sheridan had lured him into staying with the brother-in-law and informant of an MI5 officer, and she found herself shunned when she returned to Moscow in 1923.12
Meanwhile, on 28 February 1921 the Daily Herald published a photograph of an imitation of the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda which was circulating in England. The identifying marks of printers in Luton proved this issue to be a forgery which, as the Home Secretary admitted in the Commons, had been prepared with the help of the Home Office’s Director of Intelligence, Sir Basil Thomson. This trickery was adduced by Ewer, when MI5 interviewed him in 1950, as his reason for starting his counter-intelligence operation. In fact the groundwork had been laid before the forged Pravda incident; but it is true that his network coalesced in 1921.13
Hayes was the talent-spotter who put Ewer in touch with dismissed NUPPO activists and disaffected Special Branch officers willing to undertake political inquiries. Ewer in turn exerted his jaunty charm to inspire his operatives with team spirit. They wanted to prove that they could do a good job for him, both individually and as a group. Their skills were a source of pride to them. Shadowing and watching in the streets of London was akin to a sport that needed brains as well as agility. Smarting from their dismissals by the Metropolitan Police, they were glad to join an organization that appreciated team-work. The Vigilance brigade of detectives believed in manly self-respect and masculine prowess.
Ewer’s security officer Arthur Lakey had been born at Chatham in 1885. His father came from Tresco in the Scilly Isles: his mother was an office cleaner and munitions worker from Deptford. He worked as a railway booking clerk and in a brewery office before enlisting in the Royal Navy in 1900 and serving on the torpedo training vessel HMS Vernon. He left the navy to join the Metropolitan Police in 1911, but was recalled for war service, and spent eight hours in the sea when his ship was torpedoed in 1916. After this ordeal, he kept to land and was employed as a sergeant in Special Branch. During the NUPPO struggles of 1918–19, Lakey entered General Macready’s office at Scotland Yard, rifled his desk, read confidential papers and reported their contents to NUPPO.
In 1921, while Lakey was in the Doncaster mining district raising relief funds for dismissed NUPPO activists, he was summoned by Hayes to meet Ewer in the Daily Herald offices. Ewer asked him to investigate the circumstances of the Pravda forgery, implying that the inquir
y was on behalf of the Labour party. When Lakey tendered his report, Ewer told him that the work had been commissioned on behalf of the Russian government and established that he had no misgivings about undertaking further work for the same employer. He was put in contact with Nikolai Klyshko, who paid the rent of a flat at 55 Ridgmount Gardens, Bloomsbury, where Lakey lived and worked to Klyshko’s orders. Walter Dale and a policeman’s daughter named Rose Edwardes worked with Lakey in Ridgmount Gardens.
Hayes also introduced Ewer to Hubert van Ginhoven and Charles Jane, who held the ranks of inspector and sergeant in Special Branch, and were discreet NUPPO sympathizers. Ewer began paying them £20 a week to report on Special Branch registry cards on suspects, on names and addresses subject to Home Office mail intercept warrants, and on names on watch lists at major ports. They also furnished addresses of intelligence officers and personnel, and gave forewarnings of Special Branch operations. In addition Ginhoven and Jane supplied material enabling Ewer to deduce that communist organizations in foreign capitals were under SIS surveillance, which made it easier to identify SIS officers or agents abroad who were targeting these foreign organizations. Leaks were facilitated by the Special Branch practice of trusting officers with delicate political information. This guileless, unreflecting camaraderie had nothing to do with the old-school-tie outlook or class allegiances (Guy Liddell and Hugh Miller were rare within Special Branch in being privately educated). It was how men at work were expected to behave with one another.
Ginhoven, who worked under the alias of Fletcher within the Ewer–Hayes network, was a familiar visitor to the Special Branch registry, where he flirted with women clerks and snooped when they had gone home. Every week or ten days Ewer dictated an updated list supplied by Ginhoven of addresses for which Home Office warrants had been issued. These were typed in triplicate, with one copy going to Chesham House (the Soviet legation in Belgravia), another to Moscow via Chesham House and the third to the CPGB. It was found in 1929 that traces of Home Office warrants issued for Ewer’s associates, together with any intercepted letters, had vanished from the files at Scotland Yard. So, too, had compromising documents which had been seized during the police raid on CPGB headquarters in 1925.
Enemies Within Page 13