Agent Zigzag

by Ben MacIntyre

  In 1934, the newly formed “Jelly Gang” selected as its first target Isobel’s, a chic furrier in Harrogate. Hunt and Darry broke in and stole five minks, two fox-fur capes, and £200 from the safe. Chapman remained in the car, “shivering with fear17 and unable to help.” The next was a pawnbroker’s in Grimsby. While Anson revved the Bentley outside to cover the sound of the explosions, Chapman and Hunt broke into an empty house next door, cut their way through the wall, and then blew open four safes. The proceeds, sold through a fence in the West End, netted £15,000. This was followed by a break-in at the Swiss Cottage Odeon cinema using an iron bar, a hit on Express Dairies, and a smash-and-grab raid on a shop in Oxford Street. Escaping from the latter scene, Anson drove the stolen getaway car into a lamppost. As the gang fled, a crowd of onlookers gathered around the smoking vehicle; one, who happened to be a small-time thief, made the mistake of putting his hand on the hood. When his fingerprints were matched with Scotland Yard records, he was sentenced to four years in prison. The Jelly Gang found this most amusing.

  Chapman was no longer a reckless petty pilferer, but a criminal of means, and he spent money as fast as he could steal it, mixing with the underworld aristocracy, the gambling playboys, the roué actors, the alcoholic journalists, the insomniac writers, and the dodgy politicians drawn to the demimonde. He became friendly with Noël Coward, Ivor Novello, Marlene Dietrich, and the young filmmaker Terence Young (who would go on to direct the first James Bond film). Young was a suave figure who prided himself on his elegant clothes, his knowledge of fine wine, and his reputation as a lothario. Perhaps in imitation of his new friend, Chapman also began buying suits in Savile Row and driving a fast car. He kept a table reserved at the Nest in Kingley Street, where he held court, surrounded by bottles and girls. Young remarked: “He was able18 to talk on almost any subject. Most of us knew that he was a crook, but nevertheless we liked him for his manner and personality.”

  Young found Chapman intriguing: He made no secret of his trade, yet there was an upright side to his character that the filmmaker found curious. “He is a crook19 and will always be one,” Young observed to a lawyer friend. “But he probably has more principles and honesty of character than either of us.” Chapman would steal the money from your pocket, even as he bought you a drink, but he never deserted a friend, nor hurt a soul. In a brutal business, he was a pacifist. “I don’t go along20 with the use of violence,” he declared many years later. “I always made more than a good living out of crime without it.”

  Careless, guiltless, and godless, Chapman reveled in his underworld notoriety. He pasted press clippings describing his crimes into a scrapbook. He was particularly delighted when it was reported that police suspected American gangs were behind the recent spate of safecracking because chewing gum had been found at the crime scenes (the Jelly Gang had merely used chewing gum to stick the gelignite to the safes). By the summer of 1935, they had stolen so much money that Chapman and Darry decided to rent a house in Bridport on the Dorset coast for an extended holiday; but after six weeks they grew bored and “went back to ‘work.’ ”21 Chapman disguised himself as an inspector from the Metropolitan Water Board, gained access to a house in Edgware Road, smashed a hole through the wall into the shop next door, and extracted the safe. This was carried out of the front door, loaded into the Bentley, and taken to Hunt’s garage at 39 St. Luke’s Mews, Notting Hill, where the safe door was blown off.

  But cash could not confer all the benefits of class, and mixing with authors and actors, Chapman became conscious of his lack of education. He announced that he intended to become a writer, and began reading widely, plundering English literature in search of knowledge and direction. When asked what he did for a living, Chapman would reply, with a wink, that he was a “professional dancer.” He danced from club to club, from job to job, from book to book, and from woman to woman. Late in 1935, he announced he was getting married, to Vera Freidberg, an exotic young woman with a Russian mother and a German-Jewish father. From her, Chapman picked up a grounding in the German language. But within a few months, he had moved into a boardinghouse in Shepherd’s Bush with another woman, Freda Stevenson, a stage dancer from Southend who was five years his junior. He loved Freda, she was vivacious and sassy; yet when he met Betty Farmer—his “Shropshire Lass”—in the Nite Lite Club, he loved her, too.

  The Jelly Gang might mock the dozy coppers studying their abandoned chewing gum for clues, but Scotland Yard was beginning to take a keen interest in the activities of Edward Chapman. A “gelignite squad” was formed. In 1938, the Police Gazette published Chapman’s mug shot, along with those of Hunt and Darry, identifying them as suspects in a recent spate of cinema safe breaks. Aware that the police were closing in, early in 1939, the gang loaded several golf bags packed with gelignite into the trunk of the Bentley and headed north. Having checked into an expensive hotel, they broke into the offices of the Edinburgh Cooperative Society and emptied the safe. As Chapman was climbing out through a skylight, he smashed a pane of glass. A passing policeman heard it and blew his whistle. The thieves fled over the back wall and onto a railway line; one of the gang slipped, breaking an ankle, and was left behind. The others met up with car and driver and immediately headed south, but were intercepted by a police car, bell clanging. Chapman fled over a wall but was caught. The four burglars were thrown into the Edinburgh prison, but then, for reasons no one can explain, Chapman was granted fourteen days bail at £150.

  When Case Number Seventeen came before the Edinburgh High Court, it was found that Chapman and his accomplices had absconded. A general bulletin was issued, photographs were distributed, and every police force in Britain was told to be on the lookout for Eddie Chapman—crook, jailbird, adulterer, blackmailer, safecracker, Soho denizen, and now among Britain’s most wanted men. On February 4, 1939, the gang extracted £476 and 3 shillings from a co-op store in Bournemouth. Darry had sent a letter to his girlfriend hinting that the gang was heading for Jersey; police intercepted it and a warning went out that the suspects might make for the Channel Islands, and then the Continent: “Be prepared for trouble22 as one at least of the men might be armed and all are prepared to put up a fight to resist arrest.”

  Which is how Eddie Chapman came to be pounding down a Jersey beach leaving in his wake two plainclothes policemen, a distraught young woman, and half a sherry trifle.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Jersey Gaol

  The Jersey Evening Post

  Monday, February 13, 1939

  STARTLING SCENE AT JERSEY HOTEL

  ———

  POLICE SWOOP AT LUNCH HOUR

  ———

  TWO GUESTS HANDCUFFED

  THIEF GETS AWAY THROUGH WINDOW

  ALLEGED DANGEROUS GANG OF SAFE BREAKERS

  A letter sent to a girl in Bournemouth led yesterday to the arrest of two members of a gelignite gang wanted for the ‘blowing’ of a safe at a cooperative store and the theft of £470. A third man got wind of the impending police swoop on the Hotel de la Plage, Havre-le-Pas, and escaped.

  Residents at La Plage Hotel were at lunch when Centenier C. G. Grant of St Helier, and six members of the paid police in civilian clothing entered and, before most of the lunchers knew what had happened, two men had been handcuffed and chase was being given to the third man, alleged to be the leader of the gang. One of them, apparently more alert than the others, made his escape by way of the windows of the dining room overlooking the promenade and got clean away.

  The third man, for whom active search still continues, is described as:—Edward Chapman, alias Arnold Edward Chapman, Edward Arnold Chapman, Edward Edwards and Thompson, a professional dancer, slim build, six feet in height, fresh complexion, small moustache, dressed in white shirt, yellow spotted tie, blue sleeveless pullover, grey flannels and brown sandals and no socks. He is believed to be a dangerous character. He may, by now, have obtained a jacket or an overcoat from somewhere as he has money in his possession.

  The search for
Chapman goes on and all ships are being watched. Anyone who may see this man or who may know anything of his whereabouts is requested to inform the Police Station immediately.

  * * *

  Although the police soon abandoned the chase, Chapman continued running for a mile or so up the beach before doubling back, and then cutting across the island. He found a school, empty on a Sunday, and hid inside. That evening, he strolled back into Havre-le-Pas wearing a mackintosh he had found on a peg, the collar turned up. On the edge of town, he checked into a tatty boardinghouse and shaved off his mustache with a soapy penknife. When he came downstairs, the landlady, Mrs. Corfield, demanded cash up front. Chapman gave her what he had in his pocket, and said he would pay the balance in the morning. Without money, he was trapped. He would need to steal some more.

  In the darkness, Chapman reemerged and set off toward the West Park Pavilion nightclub, where the gang had spent the previous night. As soon as her lodger was gone, Mrs. Corfield put on her bonnet and headed down to the police station.

  Chapman found the pavilion deserted. He broke in through a window in the men’s bathroom, discovered the office safe, and carried it to the basement. Turning it upside down, he worked off the bottom with a pickax and a pair of pincers from the boiler room of the building. Inside lay £15, 13 shillings, and 9 pence in silver, several pounds in coppers, and twelve 10-shilling notes. Chapman returned to the boardinghouse, his pockets laden, and went to sleep, resolving to steal or bribe his way onto a boat the next morning.

  The Jersey Evening Post

  Tuesday, February 14, 1939

  ALLEGED SAFE BREAKER BEFORE COURT

  ———

  WANTED MAN ARRESTED IN BED

  CHARGED WITH BREAKING INTO WEST PARK PAVILION

  ACCUSED APPEALS FOR ‘GIRL FRIEND’

  ———

  The island-wide search for the man Chapman, who escaped when police raided the Hotel de la Plage, is at an end. Chapman, through information received by the St Helier Police, was found last night in bed in a lodging house in Sand Street, and admitted his identity to police constables. He also admitted breaking into West Park Pavilion last night.

  Chapman gave the police no trouble and made a voluntary statement that he had ‘done in’ the safe.

  This morning Chapman appeared before the magistrate, and after being remanded asked if his girlfriend could be allowed to leave the island. ‘I have a girlfriend here,’ he said, speaking in a cultured tone, ‘and she is in a very embarrassing position. She has been cross-examined by police and watched and I would like to ask if these investigations might cease as she knows nothing of why we are here.’

  The Magistrate: ‘If she had been wise she would have gone already. We do not want her here. There is nothing against her and she is free to leave the island when she likes.’

  The accused was then removed to the cells and his ‘girl friend’, an attractive blonde with blue eyes and a long page-boy bob, whose name is said to be Betty Farmer, also left the court.

  * * *

  Betty had suffered many indignities in the preceding forty-eight hours: being searched by the manageress at the Hotel de la Plage, being grilled by those horrible detectives, and then having to move to the smaller, cheaper, and far scruffier Royal Yacht Hotel. As Chapman was led from the court in handcuffs, she handed one of his guards a love note to pass to him, written on hotel letterhead. He put it in his pocket, grinned, and waved.

  Breaking into the West Park Pavilion nightclub had been an act of astonishing foolishness but also, on the face of it, an immense stroke of luck. Darry and Anson had already been shipped back to the mainland to face multiple charges at the Central Criminal Court in London. Chapman, however, had broken the law in Jersey, with its ancient legal code and traditions of self-government, and would now have to face island justice.

  On March 11, 1939, Edward Chapman appeared before the Royal Court of Jersey and pleaded guilty to charges of housebreaking and larceny. The attorney general of Jersey, prosecuting, cited Chapman’s extensive criminal record and pointed out that the safebreaking at the nightclub had been “done with deliberation1 and skill which showed considerable experience and showed he was determined to rely on this sort of conduct for a living.” He demanded that this “dangerous criminal who had failed2 to accept certain chances that had been given to him” receive the maximum sentence of two years’ hard labor. The jury agreed.

  Jersey Gaol, Chapman soon discovered, was a “dreary little cage”3 where the handful of prisoners stuffed mattresses for eight hours a day and slept on planks raised a few feet off the concrete floor. The prison regime was remarkably lax. The governor, Captain Thomas Charles Foster, a retired soldier, regarded prisoners as an inconvenience in an otherwise pleasant life that revolved around visiting his neighbors, sunbathing, and fishing. Foster took a shine to the new inmate when Chapman explained he had been a soldier, and he was soon put to work as the governor’s personal batman,4 weeding the garden and cleaning his house, which backed onto the hospital block.

  On the sunny afternoon of July 7, Captain Foster, Mrs. Foster, and their eighteen-year-old son, Andrew, climbed into the family car and headed down the coast to St. Brelade to attend the Jersey Scottish Society’s annual summer fete, a highlight of the island’s social calendar. Chapman was instructed to clean the governor’s kitchen in his absence. Chief Warder Briard had taken the day off, leaving Warder Packer to mind the shop. Packer unlocked the front gate to allow the governor’s car through, and Captain Foster, resplendent in his kilt, muttered as he motored off that he should “keep an eye on Chapman.”5

  As the sound of the governor’s car faded, Chapman put down his mop and darted upstairs to the empty bedroom of Andrew Foster. From the young man’s wardrobe, Chapman extracted a gray pin-striped suit, brown shoes, a brown trilby, and two checked caps made by Leach & Justice of Perth. The suit was a little tight under the arms, but a reasonable fit. He also found a suitcase, into which he packed the governor’s spectacles, a jar of sixpences Mrs. Foster had been saving, £13 from the governor’s desk drawer, a flashlight, and a poker from the fireplace. Climbing through a skylight, he scrambled over the roof, dropped into the hospital compound, scaled a wall topped with glass, and walked away. Mrs. Hamon, who worked in the laundry, noticed a figure on the roof, but assumed he must be a workman.

  An hour later, Warder Packer—who had been busy flirting with the matron’s daughter, Miss Lesbird—casually wandered into the governor’s kitchen to see how Chapman was progressing with his chores. He did not worry unduly to find the house empty. “At that moment,”6 he recalled, “I still thought Chapman was playing a joke, and was hiding in the prison.” He searched the garden and the outhouse; then he summoned the other warders to help search the prison. Then he panicked. It took a full two hours to track down Captain Foster at the Scottish Society fete. The chief constable was unearthed in the golf club, and a posse led by young Andrew Foster was dispatched to watch the airport. Hotels and boardinghouses were scoured, boats were prevented from leaving harbor, and every policeman and volunteer on the island was mobilized for the greatest manhunt in island memory.

  Walter Picard, resident of Five Mile Road, was one of the few people on the island unaware that a prisoner had escaped. He had spent the evening under a hedge with a woman who was not Mrs. Walter Picard. After this encounter, Picard and his girlfriend were strolling back to his car in the darkness when they were surprised to see a man in an ill-fitting suit bending over the open hood of the car, apparently attempting to jump-start it.

  The man looked startled, but declared: “Do you know7 who I am? I’m a member of the police.” Picard launched himself at the “car thief.” His girlfriend screamed. A scuffle ensued; Picard was upended and thrown over a wall, and Chapman vanished into the night. On the passenger seat of his car, the shaken Picard found a brown trilby, a flashlight, and three sticks of gelignite.

  Chapman had passed a most eventful day. Barely a mile from the priso
n, Mr. A. A. Pitcher had obligingly offered him a lift in his car, and driven him to a public telephone box, where he had phoned the airport, only to be told the last plane for the mainland had departed. Pitcher dropped him off at the pier. After a meal at the Milano Café, Chapman had checked into La Pulente Hotel, and ordered a taxi. Telling the Luxicab driver he was “interested in quarries,”8 Chapman took a tour of the island’s mines and selected his target. That afternoon, when the workers had left L’Etacq Quarry on the western edge of Jersey, Chapman scaled the gate, found the small, reinforced bunker that served as the explosives storehouse, and prized open the door with a crowbar from the quarry toolshed. He emerged with five pounds of gelignite and two hundred detonators. It was while walking down Five Mile Road with his explosive loot that evening that Chapman spotted Walter Picard’s parked car and decided to steal it.

  Knowing that the encounter would be reported immediately, Chapman walked on until he came across an empty bungalow belonging to Frank Le Quesne. He broke in, made himself a cup of tea (using enough tea bags “for about fifty people,” the owner later complained), and fell asleep.

  In the meantime, Walter Picard made an edited report to the police.

  He was driving his car on his way home when he was hailed by a young woman, whom he did not recognise, who asked him for a lift as far as a bungalow on the Five Mile Road. He replied that he would take her as far as his house; he did so but she then persuaded him to drive her further on and some little distance along the road his lights failed for no apparent reason. He stopped the car and his passenger then told him that the bungalow she wished to get to was fairly close and asked him to walk as far with her. After some demur he complied with her requests, but only went half way and then, turning round, saw the lights of his car had come on again. He approached the car and saw a tall man bending over the ignition. The stranger turned round and struck him and then made off.