M

by Henry Hemming

  45

  REBIRTH

  The marmoset is a small South American primate that is usually found in the upper reaches of a rainforest canopy, not a well-lit television studio. In 1961, during the live recording of Good Companions, a popular BBC television programme about pets and unusual animals, one of the show’s regular hosts began to tell the audience at home about the marmoset he had in his hands. Yet this creature was on edge, and the presenter knew why. The previous item had featured a number of dogs and the smell had proved to be unnerving. Before the presenter could finish his piece, the small primate drove its long incisors into his flesh. The bite was so deep that it reached his bone.

  To be bitten live on air was a first for Maxwell Knight, and yet, at the same time, his reaction was familiar. He covered it up. He had spent most of his life erecting Chinese walls between what he thought and what he did, his life often resembling a drawn-out negotiation between who he was and how he came across, and few viewers at home registered what had happened. All they could see was a familiar and much-loved naturalist doing what he had done so many times before on the same programme. You could probably count on one hand the number of people watching him on television at that moment who knew that he had spent the last thirty years of his life working for MI5.

  Max – he was no longer ‘M’ – was by 1961 one of the BBC’s most prolific broadcasters. In the 1950s alone, he featured in at least 306 original radio broadcasts, he had no fewer than 20 books published in this one decade, he appeared on television more than 40 times, excluding repeats, he gave lectures throughout the country and he wrote numerous magazine articles, all on the subject of natural history. His rich, reassuring voice was synonymous by 1960 with radio programmes such as The Naturalist, Country Questions, Nature Parliament and Naturalists’ Notebook. Max also popped up on Woman’s Hour, did schools programming and featured on television programmes such as Look and the panel show Animal, Vegetable, Mineral. When children became junior members of the London Zoo in 1965, one of the advertised benefits was the chance to attend ‘film shows and lectures given during the school holidays, when you can meet famous animal experts such as David Attenborough, Maxwell Knight, and Peter Scott’.1

  The name Maxwell Knight was so well known to the British public by the start of the 1960s, especially among children, that he was often invited to open schools or public natural history displays. When Max was absent from one of his regular radio slots, the audience feedback frequently included questions about when he would be back.

  Max was also invited, in his new guise as a loveable naturalist, to be a castaway on Desert Island Discs, the long-running BBC radio programme in which public figures choose records relating to different parts of their lives. Almost all his choices were jazz recordings. He spoke about his childhood, his pets and his former clarinet teacher, Sidney Bechet, but that was it. The book he asked to take with him to the desert island was The Cambridge Natural History. His luxury was a microscope. This was not an interview with M, but with Maxwell Knight the popular naturalist, a public persona he had spent the past decade meticulously stitching together so that he could step into it when he finally left the Office.

  What made this reinvention so remarkable was that most of it took place while he was still working for MI5. In 1956, two days after appearing on the BBC television programme Countrywise, in which he and another presenter performed an unrehearsed eight-minute piece to camera, Captain Knight of MI5, as he then was, passed on to a fellow officer a copy of a Guy Burgess letter that had been received by one of his agents. Having interviewed the former Soviet agent and journalist William Ewer, codenamed ‘Trilby’, part of MI5’s ongoing attempt to find out whether ‘there might still be persons in high Government position who would not be above giving information to the Russians’, Max then went to chair an episode of The Naturalist, on the subject of how to tame animals.2

  Although he preferred to keep his life as a naturalist hermetically sealed off from his rival incarnation as an MI5 officer, there were times when the two overlapped. Max once told his readers about a clever pet otter of his that he had named ‘Olga’.3 He christened a rather vain tawny owl that loved to bask in the sun ‘Oswald’. There was a bush baby of his named ‘Wee Jaikie’, after a John Buchan character, and a Cairn terrier called ‘Kim’. Occasionally, as a naturalist he encountered individuals he had known from his other line of work. The illustrations in two of Max’s books were drawn by John Le Carré. The photographs in another were taken by Wolf Suschitzky, whose sister Edith Tudor-Hart had supplied Percy Glading with his camera (although Max was probably unaware of this when they collaborated). In April 1965, Max was one of five Fellows of the Zoological Society of London invited to fill a vacancy on its council. Another was Ivor Montagu, a Soviet agent who had been followed around London thirty-nine years earlier by Eric Roberts, acting on Max’s instructions. Now these former adversaries, one unknown to the other, found themselves working together on the management of London Zoo.

  ‘The only time I realised there was something different about him,’ recalled Desmond Morris, the zoologist and broadcaster, who frequently performed with Max, ‘was when I saw an enormous, official-looking black car pull up and out stepped Max.4 The two didn’t fit.’

  The idea that a BBC national treasure was also a senior MI5 officer was unusual. Even more remarkable was just how prolific Max managed to be in his new guise. He wrote more books in the 1950s than most authors manage in a lifetime, to say nothing of his radio programmes, his television shows, his articles and his talks. In one sense this was testament to an intense work ethic. It also reflected his popularity. Max was certainly not invited back repeatedly and commissioned to write so many books because of his academic credentials. Desmond Morris remembered him as ‘an avuncular, friendly old bloke, who loved animals and had written several books about how to keep pets’, but one who ‘wasn’t, in my book, a serious scientist’.5

  What Max lacked in scientific qualifications he made up for with an almost endless supply of stories about the animals he had kept – and he had kept a great many. ‘There are very few kinds of animal which it is possible for a private person to keep that I have not at some time had in my care,’ he told his readers.6 ‘On the whole casualties have not been heavy.’ In his various books he referred to having kept sparrows, robins, thrushes, blackbirds, magpies, bantam hens, rabbits and a parade of different dogs, including ‘Spaniels, Labradors, Great Danes, bulldogs and my favourites, bull terriers’7 as well as Haakon, an elkhound, who was ‘an excellent house-dog’ with ‘a tiresome habit’ of eating Max’s pet rabbits.8 He also kept harvest mice as well as frogs, toads, snakes, more than a dozen parrots, tortoises, mongeese, civet cats, lemurs, monkeys, foxes, barbary ducks, almost ‘all the species of crow which we have in this country’, a pair of badgers, an otter, a bat, a bear, a baby hare, a White’s tree frog and a number of tropical and cold water fish.9 ‘I made it a rule to spend some period every day just sitting still and looking at them,’ he wrote.10 ‘I learned a great deal by doing so.’ ‘Spiders have always intrigued me,’ he went on, ‘and I have kept quite a number of these wonderful creatures’, as well as beetles.11 ‘I have even managed to get stag beetles to become tame and feed from sugar water from the tip of my finger.’ ‘It will be apparent that I have a weakness for spotted flycatchers,’ he also confessed.12 ‘I have had jackdaws, rooks, owls, starlings, and even a house martin and a cuckoo.13 The last of these was, perhaps, the most interesting bird pet I ever owned.’

  Just as he took on agents from every walk of life, Max seemed incapable of sticking to one type of pet. Perhaps the only creature he could not abide was the cockroach. Nor was he very fond of cats, only because they interfered with his attempts to look after birds.

  Yet his success as a broadcaster was about more than his experience of keeping pets. It was also down to his personality, the burr of his voice and his tone. He came across as warm-hearted, sensible and sturdy, if at times a little st
ern. The answer to little boys who harmed small animals was, he wrote, ‘a good hiding – preferably from a parent’.14 He bemoaned ‘the constant and usually ill-informed stream of propaganda against any kind of physical correction’.15 ‘My views will be called old-fashioned or sadistic by a few of our wishy-washy reformers,’ he wrote, ‘but I can truthfully say that I have not formed my ideas in early senility – I have maintained them since I was a young man.’ In some ways this lent to his appeal. It made him more familiar, more authentic, more of a ‘type’: a kindly, tweedy figure who knew a great deal about the natural world and seemed to enjoy passing it on in the grand tradition of an elderly storyteller.

  What would also set him apart from the other big names in natural history, such as James Fisher and Peter Scott, both good friends of his, was that he urged his listeners to get out of the house after the programme and look for wildlife. Max coined the term ‘nature detective’, once telling his readers ‘that field naturalists must be good detectives; and that the way to set about investigating the many exciting and interesting problems which all naturalists, young and old, encounter from time to time, is to model themselves on those officers of the law whose duty it is to solve crimes’.16 Just as his naturalism informed his espionage, the opposite was also true.

  ‘His books emphasised the need for young people to get out into the field,’ said the veterinarian John Cooper, who got to know Max around this time.17 ‘He related natural history to ordinary people. As a listener, you felt that you could go out and do it, you could catch a beetle or a caterpillar, and I think we need more of that now.’

  But what did Max get out of all this? This new career did not fall into his lap. He had to work hard to become a well-known presenter, and would always write to thank the BBC producers involved after appearing on a programme. He turned up well prepared, made himself available and, on at least one occasion, cheekily asked a producer whether he could appear on a prestigious television programme –‘if that doesn’t sound impertinent!’18

  It would have been much easier for him to retire quietly to a suburban street with his collection of animals. Instead, this distinguished, decorated MI5 officer went out of his way to reinvent himself.

  The main reason was money. Max’s MI5 salary had never been large, he spent what little he had and, in 1961, he forfeited his full pension by retiring early due to ill health. This was largely because of his worsening angina. He needed to earn more in order to look after himself and his pets, and to support his new wife.

  Max’s marriage to Lois had been annulled during the war, on the grounds that it had not been consummated. Lois later blamed their physical incompatibility for the separation. Max had always said that he would see a doctor about his problem, but as far as she knew he never did. ‘If only he could have been honest with me – about everything,’ she told the author Anthony Masters, ‘I’m sure we would have found the strength to face it together.’19

  Lois did not resent Max, and their separation in 1943 was largely amicable. Lois went on to remarry and have children and stayed in touch with Max and his sister, Enid. Many years later she would conclude that her former husband was simply someone who preferred the company of pets.

  A similar sentiment crops up in other portraits of him, yet it never rings true. If this had been the case, in the years after his divorce Max would have become a recluse. Yet rather than hide himself away, he got married again and set out to become a famous broadcaster. This suggests an individual who not only enjoyed society but needed it, perhaps in ways that he did not recognise in himself.

  Max’s third wife was Susi Barnes, who was working in the MI5 Registry when they first met and was a little in awe of him as the grand old man of counterespionage. She was well-spoken, well-educated and discreet, as well as being fifteen years younger than him. She had also emerged recently from an unhappy relationship that had apparently put her off sex.

  In one of Max’s last books he referred, with some distaste, to ‘human sex-maniacs’, by which he meant people who thought too much about sex.20 For all the theories about Max’s sexuality, that he was secretly gay or bisexual, it seems that most of his experiences in this department were simply unhappy, and that by this stage of his life sex was not something that interested him. In this sense, Susi Barnes was ideal. She offered love, companionship and care, and she probably demanded nothing of him physically.

  Max and Susi were married at Windsor Register Office in 1944 and would remain together for the rest of their lives. Their marriage was not without difficulties. As Max began to suffer more from his angina and Susi spent an increasing amount of time looking after him, there were moments when he was unpleasant towards her and controlling. She sometimes resented the boundaries in their relationship. Like almost anyone married to an intelligence professional, she knew that there were parts of her husband’s interior world that were shared with others but not her. Yet to most people who got to know the new Mr and Mrs Knight in Camberley, where Max had moved after the war, they came across as an attractive, glamorous and contented couple, two big fish in a small pond who were well suited to each other.

  Providing for Susi and his pets was one of the reasons for Max’s reinvention as a broadcaster. He had never owned a property, and when his broadcasting work dried up in the last few years of his life he and Susi were so short of funds that they had to move in with one of Max’s former officers, Guy Poston.

  Yet there was more to this reinvention than money. It was also for Max an escape. The natural world offered a respite from war, radical politics and the slow disintegration of the British Empire. The Frankenstein mutation of the Fascist movement to which he had belonged was saddening for him, it tore at parts of his identity and the way he remembered his past. By investing so much of himself in his new life as a broadcaster, Max was perhaps trying to create a different legacy and to leave behind some parts of his history.

  In a different sense, Max’s broadcasting allowed this intensely patriotic man to share with his listeners something of his own version of Britishness. ‘I myself must plead guilty to having kept my share of foreign animals,’21 he wrote, ‘but I have also made a point, wherever possible, of keeping British species’, adding elsewhere that ‘the British’ are ‘supposed to be people who are first and foremost in their love of birds and animals, and in their interest in natural history’.22 His patriotism had always been rooted in a love of the British landscape and its wildlife. He wanted Britain to remain a nation of nature lovers, and he hoped to inspire the next generation of naturalists. He saw this as the first step towards slowing down man’s destruction of the natural world, a subject that concerned him greatly by the end of his life. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, an early classic of environmental writing, was a book that made a lasting impression on him.

  Above all, Max’s rebirth as a famous broadcaster was a chance for him to step into the spotlight after a lifetime spent in the shadows. Towards the end of his life, Max described how he liked to take his golden marmoset, Sadie, to local cafés where ‘she would suddenly appear from under the table and would look up at me and chatter.23 I would chatter back, and then she would accept a piece of sweet cake or a currant or sultana. This performance was generally very popular.’ There are many other stories of him taking out unusual pets in the hope of getting a reaction from passers-by. He clearly enjoyed all this. He liked being seen as an eccentric Dr Doolittle and all the ‘friendly leg-pulling’ that came with it, just as he had done many years ago as a boy.24 Indeed, throughout his life Max showed himself to be someone who craved recognition. His decision to tell Gwladys’s friends on Exmoor about his secret work, those lunches with Colonel Carter of Special Branch and the publicity shots for his novel all suggest that a life of anonymity did not come easily to him. When he left the secret world, this spymaster needed to be in the public eye, just as a celebrity longs for anonymity. As one of the country’s best-known natural history broadcasters he certainly achieved this.

 
Max did not imagine that his work for MI6 and MI5 would ever become public knowledge. Nor did he think that his moniker, ‘M’, would come to be associated all over the world with a pipe-smoking British spymaster.

  In late 1962 Max may have visited one of the cinemas in Camberley to see the first James Bond film, Dr No. The audience would have been mostly teenage boys, all in love with the idea of being a spy – as Max had been at their age. Within the first ten minutes of the film, Bond’s spymaster, ‘M’, appeared on-screen. Although Max would have known about this character from Fleming’s books, which had begun to be published ten years earlier, the legend of the James Bond ‘M’ only really took off once the films came out.

  Fleming never revealed who had inspired this character. Yet in manner, M was clearly based on Fleming’s former boss, Admiral John Godfrey, who had been Director of Naval Intelligence. But Godfrey was never called ‘M’. The name of this character was most likely a nod to Max. He and Fleming may have met each other either professionally during the war or socially through Ian Menzies. Otherwise Fleming would have heard of the MI5 spymaster. Max had been known as ‘M’ within MI5 and beyond since 1931. He ran ‘M’ Section. His agents had codenames such as ‘M/1’ and ‘M/A’. He signed off all correspondence as ‘M’ and had dealings with individuals and organisations throughout the secret world. Although there was one other figure in wartime British intelligence who was briefly known as ‘M’ – Major-General Sir Colin Gubbins, the head of SOE – by the time Fleming began to write his James Bond novels the man with the greatest claim to the moniker ‘M’ in British intelligence was undoubtedly Maxwell Knight.