Whatever it was, the Chief Constable did nothing about Hadley’s note until he read, several days later in a local newspaper, about a public lecture that Pyke had given in aid of the Ruhleben detainees. It was an account of his escape, a talk that he would give repeatedly over the coming years. What concerned the Chief Constable was not the lecture but its introduction.
Eminent literary critic Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch had told a full house at the Guildhall that what Geoffrey Pyke might go on to say ‘neither included nor suggested any controversial matter. If it did, that platform would be no place for him, and if he only guessed or believed that it did, he would not be there, and he imagined that in spite of things foolishly said from time to time, they were a united nation.’ The room had thundered with applause before Pyke stood up to speak. As far as the newspaper report allowed, he did not suggest any ‘controversial matter’. Yet for the Chief Constable the possibility that he might have done was enough in itself.
‘You must remember,’ wrote the historian A. J. P. Taylor, ‘that the civilian enthusiasts for the First World War developed a hysteria almost wholly absent in the second.’ Even in Cambridge, with its tradition of dissent and religious nonconformity, public expressions of anything less than outright patriotism were rare. Britain had been gripped by a desire for collective discipline and displays of public unity and the mere suggestion that one was capable of delivering ‘controversial matter’ was serious.
The Chief Constable in Cambridge decided to contact the Home Office about Pyke. He followed up his initial call with a letter to the Inspector of the Constabulary asking for Pyke’s correspondence to be monitored. The matter was passed on to MO5(g), where Vernon Kell organised a warrant for Pyke’s post to be opened.
Pyke was described by the Cambridge Chief Constable – who never met him – as ‘a very unsettled sort of person’. Add this to Hadley’s account of him as ‘not a desirable person’, or Quiller-Couch’s warning that he might deliver ‘controversial matter’, and a picture emerges of an individual who was hard to place, singular and irregular. For those in the Home Office, the Police and the Security Service this, together with his dubious ‘escape’, was more than enough to warrant a letter-check.
It revealed almost nothing, for Pyke was no longer living at home. Only when fresh reports came in from the most unlikely quarter did MI5 realise where this young man was and what he might be up to.
Admiral Denison could not believe his eyes. This retired naval officer, who had spent more than three decades at sea, had witnessed a feat of sailing in Falmouth Harbour so astonishing that it raised his hackles. Earlier that day a man who claimed to have no ‘previous knowledge of yachting’ had asked him, as Senior Naval Officer at Falmouth, for permission to take his yacht beyond the harbour limits. Denison then watched in disbelief as this novice succeeded ‘in manoeuvring, single-handed, the 10-ton yacht in Falmouth Harbour; but to anybody with a knowledge of yachting this feat is so remarkable, if not impossible, as to throw considerable doubts on the whole story’. This was not the only problem that Admiral Denison had with Geoffrey Pyke’s story.
Pyke had also claimed that the yacht was his, but did not produce proof of ownership. Then there was his letter of introduction from Admiral Charles Napier, apparently a family friend from his father’s days as Leader of the Admiralty Bar, which he had failed to show Denison ‘until the day he left (15 June), and it would appear that he had then completed the business on which he was engaged and for which it is possible this introduction was to be used as a cover’. Cover for what, exactly?
On 21 June 1916, Denison’s report on the suspicious behaviour of ‘Geoffrey Pike’ as he sailed out beyond the harbour limits – perhaps to deliver material or pick up fresh instructions – arrived on the desk of one of MI5’s longest-serving officers, Reginald ‘Duck’ Drake, head of ‘G Branch’, who was responsible for cases of suspected espionage, sedition or treason. This time the misspelling of Pyke’s surname was corrected straight away.
Drake found the report ‘disquieting’. He began by asking the Chief Constable in Bodmin for more information on Pyke’s ‘movements and associates at Falmouth, and if possible, his present whereabouts’. In his letter he included an outline of Pyke’s escape from Germany, stressing that this story contained ‘awkward gaps in material points, so much so, that there are suspicions that his “escape” was effected with the collusion of the German authorities’. After this, Drake contacted the country’s best-known detective.
Basil ‘Spycatcher’ Thomson was the flamboyant head of Special Branch and the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), a man whose career had included stints as an Iowan farmer, Governor of Dartmoor Prison and Assistant Prime Minister of Tonga. Though notorious for taking credit where it was not due – before the end of the war Drake would refer to him as a ‘dirty dog’ – ‘Spycatcher’ Thomson was a fine detective.
Drake set him to work on Geoffrey Pyke, asking him to find out precisely what this ‘unsettled’ undergraduate was doing in Falmouth and, in particular, whether he had recently visited Harwich. German agents working for ‘N’ had been known to visit major ports and seeing that Pyke had been acting strangely at Falmouth, ‘whence he disappeared under circumstances rather suspicious’, evidence of him at Harwich would be enough for an arrest.
Even before Thomson could begin his investigation, Drake received further intelligence from Cornwall where the MI5 District Intelligence Director, whose purview included Falmouth, had reported the suspicious ‘movements of a boat owned by PIKE’. Again the word ‘suspicious’ was left undefined, the ambiguity only adding to its potency.
Two days later Drake heard back from ‘Spycatcher’ Thomson after he had completed a long interview with Perris at the Chronicle. Thomson felt as though he had the measure of Pyke, describing him as having done ‘brilliantly’ at Cambridge and someone who ‘boasts of having no nationality; he is a friend of Bertrand Russell; is concerned in the editorship of the Cambridge Magazine; and is probably a Sinn Feiner and everything else that goes with that class of mind. His father is a K. C. who does not at all share his son’s views.’
This was largely because Lionel Pyke had been dead for seventeen years. Otherwise this section of Thomson’s report on Pyke reads like an MI5 checklist of undesirable anti-war affiliations, which only confirmed their initial suspicions. Bertrand Russell, for example, was known to MI5 as a pacifist and a prominent member of the Union of Democratic Control (UDC), one of many organisations campaigning against either military conscription or the war itself, all of which had become more of a worry in light of the new German policy of Revolutionierungspolitik, designed to slow down the British war effort from within. One of the few mainstream publications fully sympathetic to Russell and those of his ilk was the Cambridge Magazine. Thomson was absolutely right about his involvement.
Pyke’s formal title was London Advertising Manager, yet he appears to have had an informal editorial role as well in a magazine that had changed beyond recognition from the light-hearted university publication for which he had written before the war. By 1916 it was leaner and more internationalist with a nationwide circulation of 20,000. Its output was later described as ‘a dazzling display of Dissent at its most aridly intellectual level’. Thomas Hardy, for one, ‘read the Magazine every week’, as it would ‘enable one to see England as bare and unadorned, her chances in the struggle freed from distortion by the glamour of patriotism’.
The Cambridge Magazine – and the same could be said of Pyke – was not just anti-war but opposed to the principle of defensive nationalism on which war had been waged. Pyke’s claim that he had no nationality was not a rejection of his country so much as a protest against the idea which permeated parts of Fleet Street whereby Germans were all inherently militaristic and should be fought to the last man. The Cambridge Magazine pushed for a negotiated armistice rather than a knockout blow, on the grounds that this would make for an enduring peace. Pyke later acknowledged that this sta
nce marked him out as ‘almost a traitor to my country’. Yet he did not waver. Tellingly the fear of being called a traitor was not enough to change his political position.
While Thomson’s report gives us a fascinating glimpse of the man Geoffrey Pyke was becoming, it supplied MI5 with little to get its teeth into – but for one detail. Perris had revealed that Pyke ‘intended going to Scandinavia’ and ‘in the meantime he meant to learn how to manage a boat, and for that purpose was going down to Cornwall’.
What was he planning to do in Scandinavia? Why had he told Perris? More importantly, how did the boat fit in?
As Drake considered his next move, two Cornish policemen tracked down Pyke to St Mawes, a fishing village across the water from Falmouth, where they began ‘secret observations’. Every day they watched Pyke leave his boarding house, walk to the harbour and take out his yacht. As Perris had suggested, he seemed to be in training. One night the two policemen stole onto his boat in the hope of finding incriminating material but they came away empty-handed.
Unlike Admiral Denison, however, the local policemen were less than impressed with Pyke’s seamanship. ‘With reference to his handling the Yacht, I have seen him sailing it on six occasions,’ wrote PC Tonkin, ‘and I think that he has no practical knowledge of sailing her, and it is only by good luck that he has not come to some misfortune.’
Otherwise there was little to report. Drake told them to keep an eye on him, as Pyke was ‘quite likely to do something foolish as he loves notoriety’, and ‘should he transgress in any way, he should be prosecuted immediately’. Yet before Drake’s message could reach Cornwall the two policemen had a breakthrough.
On the morning of 6 July 1916, just days after the start of the Battle of the Somme, the bloodiest battle in British history, these two Cornish policemen watched Geoffrey Pyke leave St Mawes, noting with hopeful precision the colour of his bag (yellow) and the initials on his case (those of his father). They then called on the guest house where he had been staying.
‘Whilst Mr Pyke was out in his yacht, yesterday,’ the landlady explained, ‘a telegram came for him. When he came in, he read it and said that he had to go to Scandinavia in a few days’ time and that he would be leaving this morning.’ Perris was right. Pyke really was planning to go to Scandinavia. Even more remarkably, he appeared to be acting on instructions.
By the time this report arrived with MI5 in London, Pyke had been gone for three days, and even when leaving Cornwall he had somehow attracted further suspicion. A signals officer at St Anthony who knew nothing about the allegations against him contacted MI5 to report this young man’s ‘suspicious’ behaviour.
This left Drake in a spot. He did not know why Pyke was heading to Scandinavia, with whom he was in contact, nor was he aware of how far he had travelled. All he knew was that Pyke must be stopped.
On 13 July 1916 the following directive was issued to all British ports, the Foreign Office, the Home Office, the Permit Office, Scotland Yard, the French High Command (GQG), Glasgow Police and MI1c (later known as MI6 or SIS).
P Y K E, Geoffrey
British subject, of Jewish origin, age 21.
Early in the war he was interned at Ruhleben, from whence he managed to escape. Latterly he has been staying at St Mawes, Cornwall.
He left St Mawes by the Bristol-Manchester train on the 6th instant. His present whereabouts are not known.
He should not be allowed to leave the United Kingdom.
At some point in the weeks that followed, Pyke attempted to leave the country but was stopped. Nothing survives from this incident apart from the covering slip on the CID report which includes an angry scribbled note, probably from Thomson:
‘Couldn’t this youth be nailed down by use of the Military Service Act?’
Pyke on board his yacht
‘He is unfit for service,’ went Drake’s reply.
So why was Pyke trying to get to Scandinavia? It is possible that he hoped to sail into northern Germany, perhaps to write another article for Perris or to gather material for a second book: in the space of less than a year this twenty-two-year-old had become a best-selling author.
Pyke’s account of his German adventure, To Ruhleben – And Back, was published by Constable in January 1916 to critical acclaim. He had written it in his spare time during his first term back at Cambridge. Just two months after publication it had gone into its fourth impression and an American edition had come out with Houghton Mifflin. Later that year a ‘Popular Edition’ came out; a new cloth edition followed in 1917; and eventually it would be described as ‘one of the First World War’s best sellers’. More recently, eighty-seven years after its initial publication, this book was reissued by the American publisher McSweeney’s.
‘He writes extraordinarily well,’ went the Punch review, describing To Ruhleben – And Back as ‘a piece of expansive writing’. The Times called it ‘a very fine story of a great and perilous adventure’. ‘The narrative of his escape is indeed thrilling,’ according to the Chicago Tribune. ‘Very exciting and very well told,’ wrote the reviewer in the Manchester Guardian. ‘“Thrilling” has become a kind of courtesy epithet to apply to an adventure well described,’ began the review in Country Life, where it was Book of the Week, ‘but we can apply it sincerely to Mr Geoffrey Pyke’s book. Mr Pyke not only had the pluck and the resource to carry out a nerve-shattering enterprise; he also has the ability to relate it brilliantly.’
The book belonged to the literary zeitgeist while at the same time transcended it. By 1916 the British reading public was swamped with war novels, some of which would be read for years to come, like John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle, while the others were formulaic romps centred on a self-deprecating, plucky hero who made light of the worst situations. To Ruhleben – And Back had elements of all this but was more expressive, better written and contained the rudiments of a Bildungsroman. It also had the considerable advantage of being true.
The only drawback was that Pyke’s language could be too showy. But, as the critic in Punch put it, the author was ‘too young and too clever (both charmingly venial faults) to write simply’. The Spectator echoed this. ‘If sometimes his irreverent cleverness is a little oppressive, we may remember that he was only in his second year as a Cambridge undergraduate when the war broke out.’
If the language was occasionally too much, the story that Pyke told was imbued with personal modesty. Only Teddy Falk knew the truth of their escape and, as he would later write, Pyke failed to allude in this book to his ‘indomitable doggedness’ or his ‘great courage in combating the physical distress caused him by a weak heart’.
This all adds to our image of the man Pyke was starting to become, one who had the imagination and gall to think of smuggling himself into an enemy nation as well as the courage to actually do it. He also had the modesty to downplay his own physical bravery, and the literary nous to write a best-selling book in less than two months. Though he had been subjected to four months of solitary confinement in Berlin and had almost died in Ruhleben for want of medical attention, he was prepared to campaign for a negotiated peace with Germany – even if this meant being cast as a pariah in the eyes of his family. In short, he was becoming a principled adventurer who seemed to be unencumbered by the need to conform.
The year after Pyke’s attempt to leave the country the Security Service’s interest in him spluttered back to life when the Detective Superintendent at CID asked angrily why someone like Pyke, who had escaped from Ruhleben, should be allowed to edit a ‘pro-German publication’ such as the Cambridge Magazine. Vernon Kell’s response was to summon ‘Spycatcher’ Thomson again.
He asked him to find out where Pyke was living. Thomson ordered an observation to begin on Pyke’s family home in Kensington, and several days later it was established that Pyke had left home the previous year after an explosive row with his mother.
Their quarrel arose out of Mary Pyke’s reaction to her youngest son Richard’s dec
ision to become a conscientious objector. Rather than risk the social stigma of having a child who chose not to fight, she had co-opted relatives and friends into talking him down. Pyke loathed the idea that his mother would rather her younger son fought against his will than that she should be the subject of social disapproval. After a noisy argument Pyke left home for the last time. Yet as we shall see, this row belonged to a broader and more troubling sequence of confrontations between Geoffrey and Mary, and that for some time Pyke had been looking for an excuse to leave home.
Having worked out where Pyke was not living, MI5 discovered that he had been put up for membership of a new club that they were keeping tabs on. The ‘1917’ was a Soho members’ club described by Virginia Woolf as ‘the centre of life’. Her husband called it the ‘zenith of disreputability’. Named after the February Revolution of 1917, which led to the collapse of the Russian monarchy, the club’s appeal went beyond traditional Bloomsbury and attracted figures like Ramsay MacDonald, Siegfried Sassoon and Henry Nevinson, as well as Bertrand Russell, Maynard Keynes and a full house of Stracheys and Sitwells. Which is not to say that the 1917 was ostensibly glamorous. One member described the ‘overpowering aroma of stale cat’; Virginia Woolf complained about how ugly everyone was (she found most people ugly). ‘Each time the door at the 1917 Club opens, a fresh deformity enters. I sit in a corner and stare in a kind of trance, as though one had fallen to the bottom of some awful pit in a nightmare. And they’re all quite young – the coming generation – which makes it seem worse.’
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