M

by Henry Hemming

  M was livid. This botched Special Branch recruitment had caused ‘an acute attack of spy mania, and I have already heard from two sources that instructions are being given to [Communist Party] Locals to tighten up considerably, so as to make it very difficult for any unauthorised persons to obtain details of Party procedure etc.9 Recruits are to be examined more carefully, and the closest investigation is to be made into the reliability of persons offering themselves as members of the CP. It will be readily understood that this sort of thing increases the difficulties of our work most enormously, for it always has the inevitable results of making leading comrades extremely reticent, even to those whom they believe to be quite trustworthy.’

  Olga could only bide her time. She continued to pass on to M any titbits she picked up at the FSU, yet by the summer of 1932, after half a year as an MI5 agent, she had not been offered a job as a secretary by a senior Party member. Instead, Olga had reached the point when, as M put it, ‘an agent becomes a piece of the furniture, so to speak: that is, when persons visiting an office do not consciously notice whether the agent is there or not’.10 The only danger was that she had blended in too well and had been all but forgotten.

  M/2, M’s other female secretary, was not doing any better. On 9 February, 1932, she made what appears to have been her first report, telling M that Reg Bishop, a prominent Communist, would soon be ‘coming into local activity in S. E. London’.11 This was quickly followed by M/2’s second report, several days later: ‘Bishop is not now going into the S. E. Local.’12

  M’s experiment with female agents was not working. Both women were being outperformed by his more experienced male agents, such as Graham Pollard. In June 1932, Pollard reported to M that the same Reg Bishop had set sail for the USSR. Pollard also supplied the date of Bishop’s departure and noted the presence on board this ship of workers from the Government Experimental Aircraft Works at Aldershot. This was precisely the kind of valuable, timely intelligence that neither Olga nor M/2 had been able to provide. As M pointed out, these government employees travelling to the Soviet Union ‘might be pumped for very valuable information while in Russia’.13 He was right. As a result of that trip, two of these men, Frederick Meredith and Wilfred Vernon, who would later become a member of Parliament, were recruited to a Soviet spy ring.

  Meanwhile, M’s agent in Liverpool, M/4, continued to send in useful, if unspectacular, details from the Merseyside Local. The Glaswegian gun examiner, M/5, was also getting closer to the action. Although some of his reports revealed little more than the peccadilloes of senior Party figures, in the summer of 1932, to M’s delight, this agent was asked to take part in illegal Party work. Back in London, the Daily Express columnist, M/8, was still feeding his spymaster crumbs from the edges of the Communist movement. The only drawback to using him was his refusal to meet in the lobbies of grungy hotels or in any other out-of-the-way place. M/8 was a more flamboyant character and insisted on expensive lunches at the Overseas Club, the Grosvenor Hotel or Hatchett’s, the scene of M’s ill-advised lunches with Colonel Carter of Special Branch. Although most of M/8’s intelligence was gossipy and low-grade, this agent was important to M. He may not have been a penetration agent like Graham Pollard or Olga Gray, for he had been recruited long ago as a Communist student, but he was an ‘access agent’ whose material from lower down the Communist food chain often made sense of the higher-grade information coming in to M.

  These four agents were valuable to the new MI5 spymaster, yet by the summer of 1932 there was another source who was becoming one of the most prized assets in his stable of agents. This was a barrister who belonged to the Middle Temple, one of the four Inns of Court. He was referred to in all MI5 reports as ‘M/7’. He gave free legal advice to Labour Monthly and the Daily Worker, two well-known left-wing publications, which involved checking copy for libellous material and giving advice about future legal actions against the Communist Party. This gave him access to sensitive details about how the Party was being run. M/7’s intelligence was remarkable in terms of how much of it there was, its value and, ultimately, the fact that it was being delivered at all. Arguably M/7’s greatest achievement as an MI5 agent was that he was able to persuade the people he worked for that he was a genuine Communist, given his personal background.

  Although the identity of M/7 has remained a secret for many years, it can now be revealed. Later on in his career, as we shall see, M instructed M/7 to have lunch with a political extremist who had come to the attention of MI5. The meal was not a success. M/7 found his target to be ‘very deaf’ and ‘almost childish in what he says’.14 Yet the feeling was mutual, for the man he was spying on later described M/7 as ‘rather an odd fish’.15 We know this because his target kept a diary, which was deposited with the National Maritime Museum long after his death. Elsewhere in this same diary entry M/7 is referred to as ‘Nunn – a barrister’.

  M/7 was Vivian Hancock-Nunn. He may not have been a well-known or particularly successful barrister, but he was a superb MI5 agent. This was largely because of his canny ability to play a part, which M had correctly identified. Hancock-Nunn’s father had been the president of the local Conservative Party Association, which may explain how he first came to M’s attention; his wife, Eileen Hewitt, was also a staunch Conservative and the daughter of Edgar Hewitt, KC, a prominent ‘Die-hard’ Conservative. Indeed, everything about Vivian Hancock-Nunn screamed dyed-in-the-wool Conservative. He had grown up in a large country house, Lealands, in Sussex, and was fond of hunting, shooting and fishing. His ancestor was Thomas Hancock, famous for the discovery of vulcanisation, and his family had made a fortune in the rubber industry. He was a cricket-playing, privately educated, straight-down-the-line younger son of a landed country squire. Yet M had felt that Hancock-Nunn might be able to pass himself off to suspicious Communists in the offices of the Daily Worker and Labour Monthly as an ardent Socialist, as he successfully did.

  Like his spymaster, Vivian Hancock-Nunn saw Moscow as the greatest threat to the future of his country, and the British Communist Party as the enemy within the gates. Although Hancock-Nunn found some of the people he spied on ‘quite agreeable to talk to, for a short time’, most left him cold.16 In a novel he later wrote under a pseudonym, some years after leaving MI5, Hancock-Nunn railed against the ‘haughty disdain’ of Marxists very similar to the ones he had been reporting on for M, men and women for whom economics was ‘a subject which they seemed to regard as peculiarly their own and on which nobody was so well informed as themselves’.17 Yet Hancock-Nunn kept at it, diligently passing on to his spymaster every pertinent detail, while doing valuable legal work for people he did not much like.

  Just a few miles from the offices of the Daily Worker, where both Hancock-Nunn and Pollard worked part-time, Olga Gray had started to flourish among the well-meaning progressives of the Friends of the Soviet Union. ‘The increased efficiency of the administration of the FSU began to be noised abroad in Communist circles,’ wrote M, until ‘officials in other Communist organisations began to be a little jealous of the “find” of the FSU’.18

  One of those Communists who heard about Olga’s secretarial prowess was Isobel Brown, a tiny political activist from Newcastle-upon-Tyne who had been jailed previously for making an inflammatory speech to a group of British soldiers. More recently, the Home Office had described her as an important Communist ‘engaged in some particular form of revolutionary activity’.19 MI5 thought she was involved in ‘anti-militarist work’ and suspected her of having recently gone to the Soviet Union for ‘a special course of instruction’.20 But they had no further details. In August 1932, that looked set to change after Isobel Brown offered Olga Gray a part-time position at the two organisations where she herself worked. Both were Communist fronts with a more direct connection to Moscow than the FSU.

  M was thrilled, about Olga’s new position as much as the manner in which she had acquired it. Rather than volunteer her services, Olga had waited for the approach to be made to her.
‘It is an immense safeguard if an agent can be actually invited by some member of an organisation to join up’, for if the agent’s bona fides were ever questioned, it would always be remembered ‘that the agent did not in any way thrust himself forward’.21 It had taken almost a year, but M’s experiment with female secretaries was at last starting to pay off.

  16

  AN AUTHOR WITH UNPREDICTABLE HOURS

  M liked his agents’ cover stories to contain an element of truth, and, as we know, Olga had been told to pretend that she was working for an author with ‘unpredictable hours’. But this does not really explain why her spymaster now began to write a book.

  Many years earlier M had written short detective stories, and although he had made it into print on several occasions around this time, it had not been for his fiction. In 1923, M had had several articles published in the magazine Animal Ailments. These were well-informed pieces about how to treat eczema and mange in pets or the dangers of inbreeding, all surprisingly lively, in spite of the subject matter. Now ten years later, he began work on what he hoped would be his first full-length book.

  It had nothing to do with animals. Rather than take on a subject he could write about with insight, passion and encyclopaedic knowledge, he chose instead to describe the cartoonish exploits of an imaginary gang of American drug smugglers as they tried to hijack a cruise ship.

  Everyone in M’s book plays to type. His English toffs say things like ‘my hat!’ The Italians are emotional.1 The naval officers are sturdy. At one point the French maid exclaims ‘oh là là!’ M gave the American gangsters names including ‘Lobo the Killer’, ‘Eddie the Swede’, ‘Fingers Reilly’ and ‘Duke Lyman’, the last of whom he describes rather confusingly, in a phrase that speaks for the whole novel, as a man who was ‘about as reliable as a tame rattlesnake’.2

  As M himself acknowledged, his story was full of characters and scenes reminiscent of ‘a hundred similar ones in stage comedy-dramas’.3 Although the plot becomes darker towards the end, with one character ending up in a vat of acid, M’s book was intended to be what Graham Greene would call ‘an entertainment’. ‘They amused me,’ said M of this book and another one.4 ‘I don’t know whether they amused anybody else.’ What they did, instead, was reveal a lot about their author.

  M emerges from these books as a diehard devotee of American gangster films, and a writer who owed a lot to Damon Runyon, whose stories inspired the musical Guys and Dolls. He also comes across as being suspicious of foreigners or anyone who was Jewish. A similar charge could be levelled at most British novelists writing in this genre during the 1930s. Given that one of M’s most trusted agents in later years was the German Jewish actor Ferdy Mayne, and that possibly his only Jewish colleague in MI5, Victor Rothschild, was a man he admired and greatly liked, there is not too much to read into this. It is evidence of the passive anti-Semitism of 1930s Middle England, one that usually melted away when challenged by reality.

  These books also reveal something about the man that M aspired to be. An M hero tends to observe a situation before stepping in at the last moment. He is courageous, tough and endlessly patient. He can throw a good punch, but does so only in self-defence. He is not above taking the law into his own hands to protect the people he cares about. He has a dry sense of humour and is an excellent judge of character. Above all, he is loyal – loyal to his country and loyal to his friends.

  Another feature of M’s first book is that the plot does not feature any happily married couples. While the MI5 spymaster slogged away at his first novel, his wife continued to run a pub out on Exmoor. M tried to see her on weekends, but the pressure of work, the distance between them and his desire to finish his thriller made these visits infrequent. Gwladys still saw a lot of her childhood friends, and the pub was loud and jolly, but around this time she began to feel increasingly lonely.

  When Gwladys read M’s manuscript, perhaps she felt a pang of recognition at the scene in which the hero and heroine are about to consummate their relationship before both pull back. ‘You are not my style,’ she tells him, ‘nor I yours.’5 Instead, they agree to remain close friends. In a similar sense, M’s marriage to Gwladys had become an act of distant companionship. They were two friends who got on well and could make each other laugh, but who seem to have accepted that nothing was going to happen between them sexually, and that for now they were unable to live together.

  Gwladys may have been curious about the inspiration for the main character in her husband’s first novel. M described his protagonist as a young man who had spent several years on HMS Worcester before leaving to become a junior naval officer, just as M had done himself. Yet his physical characteristics are not M’s. Instead, he was ‘a decent, well-built young chap, little more than a boy, with a rather florid face and bright brown eyes’.6 Then there is the character’s name, which is the giveaway.

  The hero in M’s first book was called ‘Joycey’, and he was, very simply, a hybrid of William Joyce and M. The MI5 spymaster could have chosen anyone, yet he decided to splice his own character to that of Joyce, a man he would soon describe as having a ‘very violent temper’, a ‘tendency towards theatricality’ and a ‘marked conspiratorial complex’, the kind of person who would never ‘be swayed by arguments where his inherent instincts are touched’.7 But Joyce’s considerable flaws were balanced out, M believed, by his ‘boundless physical and moral courage; considerable brain power; tremendous energy and application’. He was ‘well-read politically and historically’, ‘patriotic’ and, the ultimate accolade, he had ‘a sense of humour’. M was also impressed by the fact that William Joyce had pulled himself up by his own bootstraps. ‘It has been alleged that he is a pompous, conceited little creature,’ he went on, ‘but a tendency to agree with this should be weighed up against the fact that he has made his way in his own small world entirely by his own efforts and in the face of very considerable difficulties.’ He was also ‘very loyal to his friends’.

  M had a strange and abiding fascination with this man. Although he resented Joyce’s cheating on his wife, Hazel, the woman M had once loved, his marriage to her only drew the two men closer together, and M was a frequent visitor to the Joyce household. While there were elements of Joyce’s character that M obviously disliked, he was drawn to the others in spite of himself – Joyce’s unpredictability, his virility, his learning and his wicked, lively intelligence. They were also bound forever by their experiences together at the heart of K, and that fateful meeting at the Lambeth Baths when Joyce had been attacked. Perhaps the MI5 spymaster still experienced flickers of guilt about this, feeling that he should have done more to warn Joyce of what was coming that night, which distorted the way he saw his old comrade.

  Unaware that he was being used to inspire a character in M’s novel, William Joyce had taken a job by then as a teacher at the Victoria Tutorial College in London, and now had a young family to support. He had also enrolled recently for a PhD in philosophy and psychology at King’s College London, and his future seemed to lie in academia.

  Although Joyce may have reminisced occasionally about his days with the British Fascists, like most former members of K he recognised that this organisation was in its death throes. Fascism in continental Europe seemed to have an irresistible momentum behind it. In Britain it was going nowhere. Yet unknown to either Joyce or M, by 1932, one Englishman was mapping out a very different future for the movement.

  Sir Oswald Mosley, a colourful former MP for the Labour Party, had recently gone to meet Mussolini in Rome. On the same trip he had visited Nazi Germany, and was so impressed by what he saw that on his return he decided to start a new Fascist party in Britain.

  Mosley contacted the extant Fascist groups to propose a fresh alliance with a visionary new leader at its head – him. The men he approached at the British Fascists were two of M’s former comrades: Neil Francis-Hawkins, a doctor’s son who had once been touted as a future leader of the movement; and Geoff Roe, a schoolmaster from Lew
isham who asked to be known as E. G. Mandeville-Roe. Both men recognised that the BF was close to collapse and there was little to lose by joining Mosley’s alliance. They also felt that it was time to embrace a more European version of Fascism, including its pronounced anti-Semitism.

  Francis-Hawkins and Mandeville-Roe formally proposed to the leadership of the British Fascists that they join Mosley. Rotha Lintorn-Orman wanted nothing to do with this, and she voted against the proposal. So too did every representative of the BF Women’s Units. The motion was rejected. Rather than accept this, Francis-Hawkins and Mandeville-Roe joined Mosley’s new venture anyway, taking with them several senior BF figures and the all-important membership list.

  In the subsequent issue of British Fascism, the BF’s paper, both Francis-Hawkins and Mandeville-Roe were named as disgraced former members who were now to be deprived of the ‘Order of the Fasces’.8 Curiously, on the same list of prominent members who had recently jumped ship, there was the name ‘Mr Knight’.

  Although C, the head of MI6, had assured the Secret Service Committee several years earlier that M had left the British Fascists in 1927, it seems that he did not formally part company with them until 1932, almost a year after joining MI5. Of course, if he was questioned about this by his colleagues in the Office, he could always say that he was merely keeping tabs on this group. Yet given the feeble state of British Fascism at that time it is doubtful that any of his colleagues were particularly interested, at that point, in M’s Fascist past.

  Several months later, Sir Oswald Mosley launched his new political party. His previous venture had been the New Party. This one was to be called the British Union of Fascists (BUF). Among Mosley’s earliest recruits were Francis-Hawkins, Mandeville-Roe and another of M’s old friends, William Joyce, who had decided to get back into politics.