M

by Henry Hemming

  Battersea had become a key target for the Right, largely because of the incumbent Communist MP, Shapurji Saklatvala, whose ‘pernicious’ influence, according to The Times, had ‘crept like duck-weed among a large section of the electors’, fuelling the local ‘revolutionary element’.3 Battersea was now a battleground, and in recent weeks most political events had been interrupted by violence. There was no reason to think that the rally that night in Lambeth Baths would be any different.

  Sir George Makgill belonged to numerous right-wing groups, yet the most powerful of these was the Economic League, a newly minted coalition of trade organisations with vast financial backing. Its Chairman was Admiral Sir Reginald ‘Blinker’ Hall, recently the Royal Navy’s Director of Naval Intelligence and now a Conservative politician. The group Admiral Hall had taken on was supremely well connected and rich, but it lacked muscle. The Economic League needed foot soldiers to distribute its literature on the streets and to protect Conservative, Unionist and sometimes Liberal Parliamentary candidates when they were out on the campaign trail. Makgill had the idea of using the K organisation.

  With Max as go-between, the Economic League ‘chose from among the “K” members about 50 men to “propaganda” in the worst Labour centres throughout the country,’ explained Max.4 ‘The men were carefully trained and well paid’ and ‘did excellent work before and during the election’.

  Some of this involved simply handing out leaflets, and in the closing stages of the campaign K was responsible for distributing up to 20,000 pamphlets a week in Battersea alone. But this ragtag band of ex-servicemen and thugs was also paid to take on local Communist gangs and protect right-wing candidates at political events, such as the one that was going to be held at Lambeth Baths on the night of 22 October, 1924.

  The man in charge that night of an eleven-strong contingent from K was William Joyce. He and his heavies had been instructed to police this rally in support of the Conservative-backed candidate for Lambeth North, a young stockbroker called Jack Lazarus. At least one of Joyce’s men turned up with a concealed weapon. Shortly before the rally began, Max appears to have passed on to Joyce intelligence he had received from one of his informants: a Communist gang was on its way.

  By the time Lazarus got up to give his speech, the hall was packed. He looked out over a dim-lit sea of faces. Before him were activists as well as loyalists, fair-weather supporters, undecided voters and, it turned out, a swarm of opponents. There was heckling from the start. Joyce and his men removed the ‘interruptors’ as fast as they could, and at one point the chairman of the meeting read the Riot Act, but there were too many hecklers. Lazarus staggered through to the end of his speech, yet as the opening bars of the national anthem played, to mark the end of the rally, Joyce and his men lost control.

  ‘Pandemonium,’ reported the Daily Mirror.5 ‘Scenes of great disorder,’ recorded The Times.6 Men rushed the gangways. Punches flew. Fights broke out around the hall. A Red Flag was brandished. Joyce and the others from K were in the thick of it. Anyone who did not want to get hurt pushed to the exit, and in the confusion and the crush there was a brutal attack.

  A band of Communists had noticed that William Joyce was for a moment unguarded. This cocky young Fascist, who had been ‘untiring in his efforts’ against the local Communists in the past few months, and who had ‘made himself so obnoxious to the Communist Party’ as to become a marked man, was now alone.7

  The story that Joyce later told was this: several Communists rushed over and pinned him to the ground. One produced a razor blade. He leaned into the teenager’s face, placing the slip of metal in the corner of his mouth and pulled hard into the cheek. The blade sliced easily through his flesh. The man kept going until he reached Joyce’s ear, then he picked himself up and ran away. A senior figure from K called Webb, a brute of a man, apparently chased after this Communist and clubbed him over the head with a twelve-inch spanner.

  Joyce was left with the skin on one cheek hanging loose. There was blood everywhere. People clustered around in shock. One of them was Max. It seems that he had been close enough to witness part of this savage attack on his friend, later describing it as ‘little short of attempted murder’, but he had not intervened.8 Perhaps it had all been over too quickly, or there were too many of them.

  Joyce was picked up by a policeman and carried to the Lambeth Infirmary. He lost a lot of blood and it was unclear at first just how deep the blade had gone. Yet twenty-six stitches later, William Joyce was told that he would live. For the rest of his life he bore on his cheek a mad, lilting scar that served as a permanent reminder of that bloody night. He called it his ‘Lambeth honour’. Many years later he suggested that a Jewish Communist had been responsible. Yet his wife would tell a rather different story.

  Almost seventy years after this attack the historian Colin Holmes managed to track down and interview Joyce’s first wife, who had met her husband around the time of this attack. ‘It wasn’t a Jewish Communist who disfigured him,’ she said.9 ‘He was knifed by an Irish woman.’

  This is not the story that Max would later tell. Yet it is easy to see how he came to believe Joyce’s version of events. Every account of that night describes a sudden eruption of violence, and that for several minutes nobody really knew what was going on. There was certainly a large Irish contingent in the audience that night, and it is conceivable that Joyce’s past with the Black and Tans in Galway had suddenly caught up with him, and that a woman, possibly with connections to the IRA, had recognised him and taken a blade to his face. It is also possible, given the confusion, that Joyce was able to convince his friends that his assailant had in fact been a Communist man, and was part of a gang.

  We may never know. What matters is that everyone in K, including Max, believed that Joyce, their brother-in-arms, had been the victim of a vicious attack by the Reds. The next day, William Joyce woke up in the hospital as the poster boy of the British Right. People he had never met before came to visit him and commend his bravery, even if not everyone seemed to understand what had happened.

  ‘These Fascist blackguards are damn swine to carve you up like that,’ one press photographer sympathised.10 ‘They should be shot.’

  Joyce laughed so hard he nearly burst his stitches.

  Less than a week later, the British people went to the polls. Although the Communist MP Saklatvala won in Lambeth North, the nationwide result was a landslide victory for the Conservative Party.

  For years afterwards, even to this day, that result would reek of scandal on account of the so-called Zinoviev Letter, the name given to a fake Communist directive published in the Daily Mail five days before the General Election. The letter itself was hardly revelatory. It purported to show Grigori Zinoviev, a senior Soviet official, telling the British Communist Party to fire up the working class into launching an uprising against the bourgeoisie. Men from Moscow had been saying the same thing for years. Yet the political traction came from the Labour Prime Minister’s response to the Zinoviev Letter, which had been to do nothing.

  This was enough to remind some voters of the idea that a Labour government might be more sympathetic to Moscow than it cared to admit. Although the Labour vote actually grew in the 1924 General Election, there is a chance that it might have grown much more, given the collapse of the Liberal vote, had it not been for the Zinoviev Letter.

  The scandal that persists even today is centred on how this forgery ended up in the public domain. There is no doubt that the document was received originally by MI6’s Estonian Station and was passed on from there to MI6 Headquarters in London. Not long after, it was indirectly leaked to the press. We also know that MI6 used a report from one of Sir George Makgill’s undercover agents erroneously to authenticate the Zinoviev Letter. Makgill’s role in the Conservative victory of 1924 was greater than most people would ever realise.

  When William Joyce heard about the result of the General Election, he was too weak to register anything more than relief. On Remembrance Su
nday, almost a fortnight after polling day, he was still too frail to leave hospital. But he did so anyway. Ignoring his doctors’ advice, this determined, diminutive figure made the short journey across the River Thames to the Cenotaph, where he stood alone in his trench coat, his pale face heavily bandaged, his eyes ablaze with patriotic fervour. He must have looked like a ghost from the trenches. Joyce’s mind churned with thoughts of those noble Britons who had given their lives for King and Country, of their sacrifice, their courage, their commitment – when, suddenly, it became too much. He collapsed.

  The first person to Joyce’s aid was a girl who recognised him as a fellow undergraduate at Birkbeck College. Somehow she managed to get Joyce back to her parents’ house, and in the weeks that followed she nursed him back to health. They fell in love, and although her mother did not approve, they would later get married and have children together.

  This attack and the events that followed changed Joyce’s life both personally and politically, yet it also had a profound effect on Max. Although he did not write about his feelings after that night at the Lambeth Baths – this was not his way – many years later he would recall the attack with telling clarity. Perhaps he felt partly responsible for what he thought had happened to Joyce, because it had been his job to warn his friend about imminent attacks. Or he may have regretted his failure to intervene. What had happened at the Lambeth Baths also changed the way Max saw his enemy. Until then he had disliked Communism in a fairly loose, possibly abstract sense. After all, he had only joined the British Fascisti on the instructions of Makgill. He was not there for ideological reasons. But now his antipathy towards those on the Left was more personal.

  The razoring of William Joyce had left Max with a new desire for revenge, as well as a sense that the rules had changed. There had been many clashes in the past between Fascists and Communists, but none that had involved razor blades. From that night on, Max saw less need for gentlemanly restraint. The sight of his friend’s face became proof, for him, that the enemy was playing a different and more violent game. It was time for Max to do the same.

  5

  REVENGE

  Harry Pollitt was a boilermaker by training who would spend more than two decades at the helm of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Yet, by 1925, when he first came into Max’s life, he was merely a rising star of the Left. Although capable of fantastic hatred, Pollitt was a warm and persuasive speaker. As the Labour politician Michael Foot later said, ‘lots of people who were not Communists couldn’t help liking him’. This was one of the reasons why, in March 1925, Harry Pollitt had been lined up to speak at a protest in Liverpool organised by the Communist Party.

  After finishing work the day before his speech, Pollitt travelled to Euston Station and caught the 5.55 p.m. train to Liverpool. It was the opening move in the most unusual journey of his life. One of the train’s last scheduled stops was at Edgehill, where four men approached Pollitt’s carriage and, to his amazement, manhandled him out of the train. A fellow passenger, who had been sitting across from Pollitt since London, rather than intervene, actually helped these men to remove him. Evidently he was part of their gang.

  ‘I was dragged to the barrier, struggling violently,’ Pollitt recalled, in his booming Lancastrian baritone.1 ‘The barrier is a narrow one, but on this occasion the gates were wide open and no ticket was asked for – the collector had been told that a dangerous lunatic from London might give trouble. I was hustled into a car and driven away.’ One of his kidnappers remembered it differently, explaining in court, to the delight of the gallery, that he and his accomplices had removed Pollitt from the train ‘gently, rather like getting hold of a man who refuses to come and have a drink, but who wants to go’.2

  Harry Pollitt was then driven to a nearby hotel and held overnight. The next day he was released, once there was no prospect of him making it to Liverpool in time for his speech. The young Communist was also made to endure a series of impromptu lectures from his abductors on the perils of Marxism: the men who had bundled him off the train were Fascists. They belonged to the Liverpool section of K, the paramilitary group with Max and Joyce at its heart.

  Though Pollitt’s kidnappers were later arrested and appeared in court, key details of his abduction remained obscure, including the identity of the fifth man involved, or how the kidnappers knew which train Pollitt had taken and the carriage he was in.

  What did emerge, however, was that on the morning of the kidnap a call had come in to the organisation that had arranged for Pollitt to speak in Liverpool. The caller had asked which train Pollitt was planning to take. Given that it was Max’s job to supply K with intelligence, the unidentified man on the phone was probably him. It is also possible that Max was the passenger who shared a compartment with Pollitt up from London and who had alerted the waiting Fascists to his whereabouts on the train, probably by holding something out of his window as they pulled in to Edgehill station.

  Nobody in K had ever attempted a stunt like this before. It was more brazen than any earlier operation and far more aggressive. Given his new desire for revenge and his intelligence role in K, it is probable that Max was the man behind this. His involvement in the next set of K attacks on the Communists, on the other hand, is beyond any doubt.

  In the early hours of 2 May, 1925, less than two months after the Pollitt kidnapping, Maxwell Knight and several other young Fascists climbed onto the roof of the local Communist Party headquarters in Glasgow. There, they smashed through the skylight and clambered into the loft. At this point one of them produced a saw and began to carve a hole in the floor. Once this had been done, the raiding party jumped down into the offices below, where they went berserk.

  Max and the other men upended furniture, threw papers around and went off with all the important documents that they could find. They left the place, as the police report put it, ‘in a great state of confusion’.3

  Less than two weeks after this first burglary, Max and his men broke in to the same Glasgow office again. This time they did not bother shattering the skylight. They forced the main door instead. As well as trashing the place, as they had done previously, the Fascists sprayed black ink over the Communists’ political banners and stole as much literature as they could carry.

  Nine days later, amazingly, Max and two accomplices returned to the same spot for a third time. It was late on a Friday night. Again, they wrecked the office, chucking around ink and gathering as much sensitive paperwork as they could, but just as one of the burglars left the building, at about three in the morning, he bumped into a policeman.

  The man who had just stumbled out of the local Communist Party headquarters was an unemployed ex-serviceman called Joseph McCall. When asked what he was up to, McCall explained that he had been working late in the Communist office and had decided to take home one or two books. This was where his story fell apart.

  McCall was carrying 20 books, 266 typewritten circulars and 76 books of lottery tickets. The offices he had just left resembled ‘a scene of desolation’, according to one reporter.4 This was after Max, McCall and one other man had spent roughly two hours in there. ‘I have never seen such wreckage,’ the reporter went on, ‘not since the air raids, at least!’ McCall was arrested. Max and his other accomplice had managed to get away.

  These raids may have represented Max’s first taste of burglary, yet by no means his last. Years later an MI5 colleague described him as one of the few officers who would not hesitate to burgle premises without authority. Indeed, it is striking just how many of the men and women who worked under Max acquired a similar penchant for breaking and entering. It was clearly something of a speciality for him.

  The Glasgow raids were widely reported, partly because of their ferocity. Communists had been known to raid Fascist offices in the past, but not like this. The devastation carried out inside these rooms did not resemble a straightforward burglary so much as an impassioned reprisal.

  Max would later describe the ‘latent spark of agg
ression’ in ‘the breasts of creatures of the private inquiry world’.5 It seemed that another side of his character had momentarily slipped out. In the Pollitt kidnap and the Glasgow raids there was a hint of his shadow self, of Max the black sheep of the family, Max the frustrated exhibitionist, Max the young man whose brother had died on the Western Front and who had volunteered for active service but had seen none, Max the political activist who now wanted revenge for what had apparently happened to his comrade William Joyce. At the same time, not that anybody in the Makgill Organisation was concerned about this, it was becoming harder to believe that Max was merely playing the part of an enthusiastic Fascist. Instead these seemed to be the actions of a willing warrior in the war against international Communism.

  These raids can also be seen as an expression of Max’s growing stature within the Makgill Organisation. He had become more confident, perhaps as a result of his new role.

  Having been taken on as an agent, Max was now operating as a spymaster as well. Aged just twenty-five, Maxwell Knight was running his own stable of agents. Most likely, he had begun to build up his agent network after being installed as Director of Intelligence at the British Fascisti. At first he recruited friends and acquaintances as agents, but as his self-belief grew, he had started to take on strangers. He found some recruits by placing small advertisements in newspapers. One of these appeared in the Sussex Agricultural Express, in late 1923, and called enigmatically for anyone ‘interested in patriotic work of a definite character’.6

  Each of these approaches to a potential agent took imagination, subtlety and some courage. Befriending or chatting up a stranger is hard enough. Asking one to become a spy, who reports to you, is considerably more daunting. With no formal instruction Max was learning the rudiments of espionage through trial and error, and he was doing so at incredible speed. In January 1925, Max was able to tell Don, his spymaster at the Makgill Organisation, that he had recently ‘secured information of some value from 52 sources’.7 About thirty of these, he went on, could be classed as agents of his, and ten ‘deliver reports fairly regularly or are employed to investigate special cases’.