M

by Henry Hemming

  Although Max was doing well, there was always a chance that the demand for his intelligence work might suddenly evaporate, casting him adrift. Most of the young men like him who had thrown themselves into the world of private investigation hankered after a secure and permanent job at MI5, MI6 or Special Branch. The prospect of being an intelligence officer for the government, with greater powers, more funding, better pay and a pension, was obviously attractive. MI6 was Max’s most likely destination, given his close relationship with Morton. So he may have been surprised when he received an invitation, at around this time, from the head of MI5, Sir Vernon Kell, to a gathering of his exclusive ‘Intelligent People’ dining club.

  Several years earlier another of Makgill’s agents, Con Boddington, had made the move from private to public sector when he left the Makgill Organisation and joined MI5. Now Max looked set to do the same. This would mark an almost unbelievable turnaround. Four years earlier he had been a jazz-obsessed family outcast with dreams of not much more than writing cheap novels. Now he looked set to embark on a career in a glamorously secretive government department. Even his curmudgeonly Uncle Robert would have approved.

  Little is known about the dinner itself, only that it took place at the Hyde Park Hotel, there were no women present and the food was ‘the best to be had in London’.5 Kell made a short speech, as was his custom, and at one point he spoke to Max, whereupon he made him an offer.

  It was not the one that Max wanted.

  Kell merely asked his guest whether he was interested in joining a reserve of intelligence officers who could be called upon during a national emergency. Kell did not offer Max a job in MI5, nor did he plan to. Maxwell Knight remained on the periphery of British intelligence.

  7

  THE DAY

  In the months that followed this meal, Max made an offer of his own. He proposed marriage, but not to Hazel Barr, his first love, the girl he had met on a bus. She was by then in a relationship with another man: William Joyce.

  By the unlikeliest coincidence, it was Hazel who had seen Joyce collapse in front of the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday 1924, and had brought him back to her parents’ house to recover. When Hazel told her mother that she was engaged to be married, Mrs Barr nearly fainted, only because her heart was still set on Hazel marrying Max.

  We may never know whether Hazel was still together with Max when William Joyce crashed into her life, but at the very least they had recently been in love. Similarly, it is hard to trace the effect of all this on Max other than through the faintest inferences in the record of his life. One of these can be found in the transcript of an interrogation led by Max some fifteen years later. He was questioning a man who was an acquaintance of Joyce. At one point in their conversation, Max asked whether he knew the whereabouts of Joyce’s first wife, Hazel.

  The prisoner did not.

  ‘I knew her before she was Mrs Joyce,’ Max volunteered.1 ‘When she was a Miss Barr. Hazel Barr.’

  It is not much, but the use of a full stop between ‘Miss Barr’ and ‘Hazel Barr’ rather than a comma or a semicolon suggests a pause, a moment of reflection, a stumble perhaps, as Max was caught out by the unexpected memory of his feelings for Hazel. It is hard to imagine Max forgetting his first love, especially after she went on to marry and have children with a close comrade of his, a man for whom he felt both affection and a lingering dislike. But what had happened with Hazel did not prevent him from moving on to find someone else.

  On a sharp, clear morning in December 1925, several days after Christmas, Max arrived at Sherborne Abbey, in Dorset, to get married. His bride was Gwladys Poole, a lively and gregarious redhead from nearby Somerset who was later described ‘as one of the county’s finest riders to hounds’.2 Gwladys was also a keen cricketer, she drove a bull-nosed Morris with a souped-up engine and she was one of the most senior women in the British Fascists, as it was now called. The i had been changed to an s to guard against the charge that this organisation was merely peddling a foreign ideology, a particularly awkward accusation given that the BF opposed Communism on the grounds that it was a foreign ideology.

  Gwladys found Max good-looking and charming. He was a ‘character’, in the best sense of the word. Perhaps he resembled her father, an ex-officer and a sporty, county type. It was too early to tell, for they had only known each other for a few months. Their romance had been such a whirlwind that Max had almost certainly not found time to tell his bride-to-be that he had joined her beloved Fascist movement as a spy. There are secrets at the start of most relationships, but this was a particularly potent one.

  The bride arrived at the abbey that day wearing a crêpe de Chine dress and a coffee-coloured lace gown. The groom was in a morning suit. The congregation sang ‘O, Perfect Love’, and Gwladys gave Max a gold and tortoiseshell cigarette holder. The wedding was well attended and went without a hitch, but it was a far more sombre occasion than the newlyweds would have liked.

  Just three days before the wedding, Max’s mother, Ada, had died. His sister, Enid, was furious with her brother for going ahead with the wedding. Instead of deferring the ceremony, he had cancelled the reception after the service. Perhaps Max’s experience with Hazel had made him wary of any romantic postponement.

  After a short honeymoon in Sussex, the new Mr and Mrs Knight moved into a flat in Chelsea, and so did Max’s platoon of pets. At the time this included a parrot, a toad, several grass snakes, Rikkitikki the Indian mongoose and a wheezing bulldog called Fatty. Gwladys knew about her husband’s obsession with keeping animals, and had grown up around pets herself. The thought of sharing her home with so many different creatures was not in itself unsettling, but the reality of life in that flat must have brought her up short. Gwladys was now living in what was essentially a zoo. Gauze covered every window. The air was thick with the gamey smell of pet food, animal hair and soiled bedding. In each room a different combination of pets held sway, all of which had to be fed, watered and generally fussed over. Her young husband monitored the air temperature along with the state of each animal’s daily droppings. It was loveably eccentric, yes, but perhaps not all that romantic.

  Any doubts Gwladys may have had about her new life would have to wait. Beyond the zoo-like confines of the Knights’ home, the nation was edging towards a political crisis that would involve them both. A dispute over miners’ wages had escalated to the point that there was even talk of a nationwide general strike in which workers from other key industries might down tools in solidarity with the miners.

  This was unheard of. For those on the Right, ‘The Day’ was surely coming. Among the British Fascists, The Day was shorthand for a national emergency engineered by the Communists that might be used as a pretext for a socialist revolution. The man leading the Miners’ Federation, Arthur Cook, was a devout Leninist and had once belonged to the Communist Party. From a BF perspective, it was obvious that Moscow had orchestrated the threatened nationwide strike. The British Fascists saw themselves as the last line of defence against Socialism. For anyone remotely connected with the BF, let alone such prominent figures like Max and Gwladys, a nationwide strike was Judgement Day and the Apocalypse rolled into one.

  On 3 May, 1926, at a minute to midnight, the Trades Union Congress called a General Strike. The following day some 1.7 million workers, among them dockers, printers, builders, railwaymen and steel workers, came out in support of the miners. Volunteers and strikebreakers tried to fill the gaps by doing the jobs of the striking workers. A visiting American recalled the sight of ‘gentlemen with Eton ties acting as porters in Waterloo Station’.3 But there were too few of them for the task at hand, and much of the national infrastructure soon ceased to work. Parts of the country ground to a halt. The son of two cotton weavers remembered his family sitting ‘in silence in our kitchen’, early in the strike, ‘holding their breath, waiting for the revolution to begin’.4

  Max had never been so busy. Although he was probably in touch with MI5 during the General Strik
e, he does not appear to have joined the reserve of officers mentioned by Kell. This was presumably because he was flat out gathering intelligence from his agents in Glasgow, London and elsewhere in the country. The printing and distribution of newspapers had been badly affected by the strike and this gave his agents’ information even more value. Nobody in the British government could say precisely where the strike was heading, or how long it would be before order collapsed and the nation descended into bare-fisted barbarism. Detailed contingency plans were made. Civil war seemed to be just around the corner, when, suddenly, it was over.

  The General Strike was called off less than a fortnight after it had begun. The government had won.

  For Max and many others in the British Fascists, this should have been a moment of elation, and to begin with it was, before the implications began to sink in. The failure of the General Strike undermined the premise on which the British Fascists had been founded. Like any extreme political movement, the BF depended on the spectre of impending disaster, and its success had been fuelled by fear. The Day had come and there had been no revolution.

  In the months that followed, the threat of a socialist revolution in Britain seemed to fade away, and at an equivalent rate the size of the British Fascists’ membership shrank. The BF leadership responded by cobbling together a political programme. Until then the British Fascists had positioned itself as a group dedicated to nothing more than the defeat of Communism and had even refused to call itself a political party. That was set to change as it devised a manifesto to be published the following year. It called for strikes to be made illegal, the voting age to be raised from twenty-one to twenty-five and Parliamentary candidates to be British-born and of ‘British race’. The BF also warned that it would oppose, with violence if necessary, ‘any attempt by the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, or any other disloyal section of the community, to abolish the Monarchy or disrupt the Empire; even if such a policy is supported by a majority of the electorate.’5

  In other words, in the wake of the General Strike, the British Fascists became more recognisably fascist – to the dismay of many members. This only deepened its internal divisions and accelerated the loss of members. Some went to join less extreme organisations like the British Loyalists or weird splinter groups such as the Imperial Fascist League and the National Fascisti. Others, like William Joyce, attached themselves to the Conservative Party. Presumably after long discussions with his spymasters, Max stayed within the original BF.

  Just five months after the collapse of the General Strike, Max received yet more bad news. At the age of fifty-eight, Sir George Makgill had died. Makgill had been for Max a gatekeeper to the secret world and in some ways a mentor figure. His death must have felt like a break with the past for Max, just as it cast a shadow over his future. The Makgill Organisation had lost its driving force at the very moment that the demand for intelligence on socialist activities was drying up. Until then Max’s success had depended on the demand from Makgill’s customers for intelligence on left-wing activities, and his own seniority within a thriving Fascist movement. In the space of a few months, both had been eviscerated. Max’s days as a spymaster seemed to be drawing to a close.

  In just under three years, he had successfully built up a vast network of informants and agents and had begun to master the art of recruiting and running them. But he was a freelancer in what was now a depressed market. He had little choice but to scale back his operation.

  ‘I regret very much that circumstances are compelling me to leave London for some time,’ he wrote the following year, in a letter to the British Lion, the official BF journal.6 ‘I have not resigned from the movement, but – I am going where I can still keep an eye (or even two) on any undesirables, inside or outside the movement who may seek to make trouble for us.’ He finished this cryptic message by wishing the Fascist movement ‘continued success’ and signing off ‘yours loyally’.

  Loyally. For anyone connected to the British Fascist movement ‘loyal’ was a dog-whistle term used to describe themselves and their political kin. Max had never been much of a political animal. Throughout his life he would be mistrustful of intellectuals and elaborate political creeds; indeed, there were times when he seemed to believe in little more than his country, as he had known it in the years before the birth of the Soviet Union, in its history, its people and its landscape. His patriotism often appears to have been rooted in his love of the British countryside and the wildlife that inhabited it. Yet by 1927, although he did not believe in everything that the British Fascists stood for, he felt a powerful tug of loyalty towards this movement and, crucially, to the people who belonged to it. Pitting oneself against Communism in the postwar world seemed to him to be the decent and patriotic thing to do. It was what his brother and father would have done. Max felt a binding solidarity with these men and women, one of whom he had married, and had slowly come to agree with many parts of their political programme. Having been put into this movement as a spy, he appeared to have almost gone native.

  This did not make Max what we would call today a ‘Fascist’ – even after the publication of its manifesto, the outlook of the BF in the 1920s was merely ‘Conservatism with knobs on’, as one former member put it, and its members would struggle to recognise the more toxic, aggressive and outwardly anti-Semitic version of Fascism espoused by Mussolini and Hitler during the 1930s, as distinct from what they had called for during the 1920s – yet by 1927, the year in which Max left London, he felt a lasting connection to his fellow members of the BF and, in particular, his street-fighting comrades in K.7 It was among these men that he had experienced the rugged sense of belonging, fraternal camaraderie and purpose that comes from being under attack, going into battle together and feeling yourselves to be above the law. It was a baptismal experience, one that would stay with him for the rest of his life. The bond he felt towards these people by the time he left London, in 1927, was reminiscent of his earlier experiences with the Boy Scouts or as a junior naval officer, only far more intense. It was not one that he thought would ever break.

  8

  EXILE

  The story that Max and Gwladys told their friends, when asked why they were leaving London to run a pub in the heart of Exmoor, a wild and windswept moorland deep in the West Country, was that they wanted a fresh start away from the city. Gwladys also liked the idea of being closer to her family and her childhood friends, many of whom lived nearby. Max was excited as well by the thought of so much fishing and having more space for his beloved pets, such as Bimbo, his baboon and a Great Dane called Lorna. His fondest childhood memories were of scouring the fields around Mitcham and Tythegston Court looking for injured animals to rescue; his teenage years had largely been spent on the deck of a ship; and even in London he had worked as a games teacher, which usually involved being outside. Max was at his happiest outdoors. Moving to the country was a release.

  The pub that Gwladys had bought, the Royal Oak Inn, in the remote village of Withypool, also had personal significance for Max. It was here that his second cousin twice removed, R. D. Blackmore, had written parts of the famous Victorian romance Lorna Doone (this may also explain why Lorna the Great Dane was so named). Yet there was another reason for their move, one which the Knights kept to themselves, understandably. What few people guessed was that leaving London was part of an attempt to save their marriage.

  Take one Saturday afternoon soon after their arrival on Exmoor. Gwladys had bought not only a pub but an eight-mile stretch of the River Barle, which her husband enthusiastically began to fish. Max was, by his own account, ‘a madly keen fisherman’.1 On this particular Saturday, he had gone to the river while Gwladys rode out as usual with the local hunt, the Devon and Somerset Staghounds. The trout were rising well. As Max waded down the river, casting over the most likely spots, he could hear off in the distance the plaintive blast of the huntsman’s horn. Perhaps he was imagining his wife and her friends on horseback when he heard an enormous splash. He
turned around. The stag that they were hunting had leapt into the shallow water behind him.

  This magnificent beast sniffed the air. Its head moved this way and that. It seemed tired yet alert. Max was downwind from it and hidden from view. The stag concluded that there was no danger and began to relax, ambling about in the river before moving towards the opposite bank.

  Nearby Gwladys and the rest of the hunt tore along in the hope of finding this creature and killing it. Had she been in her husband’s position, she would have done everything in her power to drive the stag towards the dogs and alert the hunt to its presence. But Gwladys was not Max. She was a hunter. He was a watcher. Max kept very still and observed the creature as it crossed the river and moved off to safety, after which he quietly returned to his fishing.

  The problem here was not so much that Max and Gwladys had different attitudes towards animals and hunting, though this did not help. It was that Max did not fully recognise this in himself. His reaction to being parachuted into Gwladys’s world was to try to reinvent himself as a male version of his wife. In the past he had played the young naval officer, junior civil servant, prep-school games teacher, jazz musician and enthusiastic Fascist. Now he was hoping to pass himself off as a young country gent. It was a demanding role, and even more so given he was surrounded by so many examples of the real thing.

  Gwladys’s friends picked up on this. Her husband came across as a charming newcomer who seemed to be playing a part. In an attempt to win over his wife’s more hesitant friends, he confided in some that back in London he had been working informally for MI5 and Special Branch. This was a major breach of security. Of course Max had been working for the government at one remove, effectively as a freelancer, and perhaps it is unfair to expect a level of discretion otherwise associated with a full-time, professional agent. Yet at the very least, this suggests that anonymity did not come naturally to Max. Perhaps it was for the best that his espionage career appeared to be more or less behind him.