If the public and political outcry at the behaviour of Mosley’s followers wasn’t enough, events in Germany at the end of June added an extra spur to action against fascism. As the Robertses were returning from their honeymoon hiking along the Rhine, Hitler ordered the arrest and execution of dozens of his enemies and former allies.
Hitler was unlikely to have known or cared, but the timing was especially poor from Mosley’s point of view. ‘The almost simultaneous occurrence of “the night of the long knives” and the ruthless beating up of their opponents by Mosley’s fascists at Olympia had the double effect of discrediting Mosley’s movement in the eyes of many people who had tended to sympathise with it, and of drawing attention to its close affinities with the Nazis,’ wrote one of Knight’s colleagues.
The time for leaving British fascism alone was over. Knight was ordered to target the movement just as he had done the communists. And that instruction came just as Eric Roberts had got back in touch, wanting to discuss German fascism and possibly angling for a job. It was a happy coincidence. Although Roberts had failed to make much headway infiltrating the communists, Knight clearly had faith in his abilities. He decided he’d found his man.
Two months after Eric and Audrey married, Knight wrote to him again, this time in more specific terms. ‘I am anxious to see you as soon as possible,’ he said. ‘I have what might be a very interesting and mildly profitable proposition to put to you. It is one that I cannot discuss on paper.’
Knight’s proposal was identical to the one that Sir George Makgill had made to him a decade earlier: penetrate the fascists. ‘Get in touch with our friends at their head office,’ he told Roberts. ‘Put in some evening work there as and when it is most convenient to you.’
Knight liked to pay his agents ‘a small regular sum’. He argued that payment by results created the wrong incentives for people whose work he needed to trust. For Roberts, whom he suggested would be working two evenings a week, he proposed a ‘retaining fee’ of a pound a week, plus half as much again to cover expenses. A little over a quarter of the average annual wage at the time, it was hardly a fortune, but it would help.
As with Knight’s other agents, Roberts would be working under his own name. That carried a series of risks. Roberts’s manager at the bank disapproved of the BUF, so it might harm his already limited prospects if it became known that he was a fascist. Much more seriously, both Knight and Roberts were very well aware of the Blackshirts’ propensity for violence. The Olympia rally had shown what they could do to hecklers. What would they do to spies?
To the teenage Roberts of 1925, such dangers must have seemed exciting, and in any case remote. To the 27-year-old of 1934, they were more serious. He had a wife now. Was he putting Audrey in danger?
While Eric’s life was becoming more exciting, Audrey’s horizons were shrinking. The bank required women to resign when they married. Her job now was to keep house and wait for motherhood. She occupied herself playing the violin in a symphony orchestra.
Roberts didn’t keep her in ignorance of his activities. One Sunday evening in February 1935, Knight even visited the couple at home. To some, this would seem an extraordinary step for an intelligence officer to take – a breach of security protocol. For Knight, it was essential to his approach of winning his agents’ complete trust by getting as close to them as possible. ‘The officer should take an interest in the agent’s home surroundings, family, hobbies, personal likes and dislikes; and must bear all this in mind when setting an agent to work on any particular task.’
But Knight’s idea of intimacy involved control: both with his menagerie of animals and with the spies he ran, it was clear who was in charge. In his private life, he continued to struggle. In 1936, Gwladys died of an overdose of barbiturates. Although her family suspected that Knight had driven her to suicide or even murdered her, her death was likely accidental, as she was suffering from acute back pain and had been prescribed the medicine to ease it. The following year, he married again, to Lois Coplestone, a country-loving woman a decade his junior, with whom he had fallen in love while they were fishing together. But again, he was unable to consummate the marriage.
In 1934, the BUF headquarters were on the King’s Road in Chelsea, in a former teacher training college named Whitelands House. The locals had renamed it ‘Black House’ in honour of its new occupants, and the threatening name suited the building. Even the exterior brickwork was dark. It felt more like a fortress than a political headquarters. Indeed, there were sentries posted regularly around its quarter of a mile of corridors, on the lookout for intruders and infiltrators. The rumour was that in an emergency, 5,000 fascists would be able to live in and defend the building.
As Roberts approached, he was determined that this time he would make a success of espionage. Knight’s instructions were clear: ‘Nothing is too small to report’; ‘Do whatever task is allotted to you as well as you can, and allow yourself to drift along with the tide’; ‘You have to be very patient in this game’.
It was easy to say, but hard to do. Roberts’s early attempt to join the BUF’s Foreign Relations Department, where he had hoped his language skills might be appreciated, was rebuffed. Knight reassured him. ‘They will obviously regard with suspicion any new recruits,’ he explained. ‘I should not make any more obvious attempts to get in touch with them or find out about them for a week or two.’ Instead, he advised Roberts to read a couple of foreign newspapers each day and clip out items of interest, which he could pass on to the department. ‘In this way you will gradually establish confidence. The great thing is not to be in too much of a hurry.’
It was a difficult time for Roberts to be joining the BUF. Following the uproar over Olympia, they were suffering from a ‘spy mania’. Indeed, Roberts himself suspected that one of his fellow activists was an undercover journalist. Knight repeatedly urged his agent not to be anxious about results, or to push for information in any way that might arouse suspicion. Roberts’s reports were already excellent, he assured him.
But three months into his mission, Roberts sought Knight’s advice. He had encountered a group of apparently disgruntled BUF members. Should he now drift along with them instead, in the hope that they would be loose-lipped? Knight suspected a trap. ‘Don’t utter a single word or phrase that could be used against you on some future occasion,’ he urged, going on to explain that one of the senior BUF members, William Joyce, had his own internal intelligence service, keeping him informed of the views of the party’s various factions. For all his talk of honesty with agents, Knight omitted to mention that he knew this because he was still in regular contact with Joyce, a friend from their early days together in the British Fascisti.
The caution was well advised. Roberts learned a week later that an entire conversation he’d had with a disaffected BUF member had been reported back. ‘One has to tread very warily in these organisations,’ Knight sighed.
For the next five years, Roberts worked his way steadily up through the BUF, rising to the senior rank of inspector. He would leave the bank after work, and find somewhere to change into his uniform before reporting for duty. ‘I rather liked myself in my blackshirt, knee boots and breeches,’ he later recalled. ‘But found it awfully embarrassing after leaving the bank to change in some public toilet.’ Once, he was pursued from the facilities at Sloane Square by an outraged janitor who had taken offence at his jackboots.
Roberts was Knight’s first successful infiltrator of the BUF. His reports, under his new codename M/F – M for Knight’s ‘M Section’ within the Security Service, F probably for ‘fascist’ – formed the basis of much of MI5’s knowledge of the organisation.
It wasn’t just fascists that Roberts supplied information on. In the middle of 1935, he handled a transaction at the bank. A woman wanted to cable £25 to a Hungarian who was staying in Zurich. Roberts was struck that the woman seemed ‘excited and urgent’. As she was married to a member of one of Britain’s more prominent communist-sympathising
families, the moment seemed worth noting. Looking through her account, Roberts saw that she gave money to the King Alfred School in Golders Green – a location burned on his memory as the place he’d carried out his first work for Knight, spying on the Soviet deputy foreign minister a decade earlier. The woman’s name was Edith Tudor-Hart. He reported back to Knight. ‘She is of interest to us, and anything further about her will come in useful,’ Knight’s assistant replied.
Some of Knight’s agents came close to cracking under the strain of a double life, but Roberts thrived on it. Knight’s confidence in him was rewarded as he proved a natural agent, able to inhabit his life as a fascist without losing touch with reality. His likeable nature meant that, even as war approached and fascism became unpopular, he wasn’t cut off by family or neighbours, something that probably helped him to keep his grip. At home, his first son was born in 1936, and named Maxwell, after Knight. Another boy, Peter, arrived the following year.
The Roberts family at play
With the arrival of children, some wives would have urged their husbands to give up a hobby as dangerous and all-consuming as spying. But whether because she believed in the national importance of the work or because she simply knew how much it mattered to Eric, Audrey supported her husband’s frenzy of covert activity. She even took part herself, helping to entertain their local BUF parliamentary candidate and his wife for dinner.
In Roberts’s secret life, he was meeting leading BUF figures and joining every fringe group he could find. Though Knight advised him not to mention his past membership of the British Fascisti, it helped him understand the thinking of those he was now infiltrating. Kind-hearted, fond of a joke and a drink, on the surface he couldn’t have been further from the image of the guarded, furtive spy. But the friendliness was a front. The keenly observed, occasionally waspish reports that he passed on to Knight revealed his true opinions. ‘Capt. Hick struck me as a most unpleasant piece of work,’ he wrote of one senior fascist. ‘Extremely guarded in what he said and beyond grunts committed himself to nothing.’
The people he was spying on were completely taken in by his impression of ‘the most loyal pro-German’. Shortly after war broke out in 1939, a fellow BUF member sought Eric out to warn him to distance himself from the group – ‘my best and safest plan during the next six months would be to steer clear of politics in any shape or form’. It was good advice, meant kindly, but Roberts had no intention of following it. War was going to give him the chance to play on a bigger field than ever before.
Roberts hadn’t just found purpose in his work for MI5, he’d found friends, too. In particular, he got to know Jimmy Dickson – codename M/3. A couple of years older than Roberts, Dickson was another free spirit whose mind was wasted in his day job – in his case, as a civil servant. In the evenings he wrote thrillers, chased women and spied.
Like Roberts, Dickson had begun his espionage career in the early days of the British Fascisti, where as a young recruit he’d been ordered to spy on Knight – while working for him – by the BF’s previous head of intelligence. ‘To be an accomplished double-crosser in one’s early twenties is nothing to be proud of, but by God it was fun,’ he recalled. By the start of the 1930s, he’d regularised his position somewhat as one of Knight’s agents inside the Communist Party. Then, in 1937, Knight asked him to turn his attention to fascism.
He and Roberts enjoyed letting off steam together, in particular employing the skills as a burglar that Dickson had learned in Knight’s service. They’d break into pubs after closing time to help themselves to a final drink. Their plan if interrupted by a policeman was to tip a glass of Scotch over Roberts’s head and then for Dickson to apologise and explain that he was trying to rescue his inebriated friend and get him safely home.
Roberts also began seeking out other contacts within MI5. This wasn’t straightforward: Knight avoided the Security Service headquarters, and operated instead out of his own flat. Those who deal in secret information are often reluctant to share their sources. Some of the reasons for this are good: security, a desire to ensure a clear chain of command. Some are less good: a fear that the customer will go direct to the source and cut out the middle man, or embarrassment about the source’s identity.
In the case of Roberts, though, Knight felt no need for shame, and apparently didn’t object to his meeting more senior men. So in 1935, Roberts received an invitation to dine at the East India Club. The grand Georgian building in St James’s Square, decorated with hunting trophies sent in from around the world by members, including the head of a hippopotamus, was not a place bank clerks often visited. For Roberts, walking in could well have been a more intimidating experience than walking through the entrance of Mosley’s Black House. That it wasn’t was down to his ‘excellent host’, Jack Curry. After a twenty-five-year career in the Indian Police, Curry had returned to London and joined the Security Service, in the section responsible for finding German spies. He had taken an interest in Knight’s new agent in the BUF, and wanted to meet him.
Despite their different backgrounds and a twenty-year age gap, Curry and Roberts enjoyed each other’s company. Both were men who had experience of practical action but who were capable of stepping back and looking at the larger picture. As they discussed the BUF, Roberts suggested that many of the problems of fascism might be dealt with by outlawing the wearing of political uniforms, which gave its members their militaristic swagger. The older man agreed.
Until then, Knight had been Roberts’s only experience of MI5. Now he began to see that there might be a world beyond his spymaster, and he started to consider whether he might better flourish out of Knight’s shadow. There was no immediate prospect of escaping it, but Curry and Roberts kept in touch.
The opportunity came with war. MI5 needed recruits, and when in the middle of 1940 the BUF was wound up, there was little point of Roberts continuing to infiltrate it. It was time for him to go official. At the end of May, a note was sent upwards. ‘Roberts is thoroughly familiar with everything connected with the various pro-Nazi organisations in this country and Maxwell Knight has the highest opinion of his character and abilities,’ it read. A few days later, Mr Jones at the Westminster Bank received the letter marked ‘Secret And Personal’. Its subject was a clerk at the Euston Road branch.
‘Would it be possible for you to arrange for him to be spared to my organisation for the duration of the war?’ Jasper Harker asked.
Fifteen years after filing his first report for MI5, Eric Roberts was formally joining the Security Service.
* Knight was right to be worried about Montagu. By 1940 he was a Soviet agent, under the codename Intelligentsia. However, even though his brother Ewen helped to coordinate Operation Mincemeat, one of the great Second World War deception operations, Ivor’s main interests were film-making and table tennis, and he seems to have provided little useful intelligence.
** One trace of Eric’s reports on Montagu found its way into the official MI5 file on the young communist. ‘On May 6th was observed to be in the company of several communists,’ a note read, without giving details of who had supplied this information. As an unofficial source of an unofficial source, that was all that Eric Roberts merited.
3
‘A beacon for the enemy’
The interrogation Roberts was given in the back room of Windsor’s shop in Leeds might well have exposed a simple police spy. That was exactly what Charnley accused him of being, as he fired names at him, asking who he knew and what he knew about them, all with the goal of tripping him up.
He was a good choice for the job of inquisitor. Unlike Windsor, a relatively recent recruit to the British Union, Charnley had been in from close to the start. He’d joined in 1933, a year before Roberts, and had been a serious member, lucky to escape being locked up along with his brother. But he had been living in Hull, meeting senior members of the group only when they visited northern England. Roberts, who had been in London, was equipped to match Charnley name for name. As C
harnley asked about northerners that Roberts had never heard of, the MI5 man shot back with questions about London, putting his questioner on the back foot.
Roberts began to sense he was winning the room. The Leeds fascists desperately wanted to believe him: if he was genuine, he was their link to a wider world of resistance to Churchill and the war, and proof that they were part of a movement, not just lone partisans. ‘They spent the whole evening cross-examining each other,’ Windsor said afterwards. He wasn’t convinced by the effort to make him doubt Charnley, but he was certainly reassured about Roberts.
Eventually, Charnley too was convinced. Indeed he felt he had to justify himself after his initial suspicions. He was, he assured the group, loyal to the British Union. If its leaders had a plan for revolution, he would play his part. He said he was sure Germany would invade in the coming weeks, and if fascist leaders called for an uprising, he was certain that every Blackshirt in the north of England would answer. Personally, Charnley drew the line only ‘where it would lead to British soldiers losing their lives’. On this issue, Roberts noted, ‘the other members present did not appear to agree with Charnley’s reservation’.
The following day Roberts woke to the news that every Londoner had dreaded: the Luftwaffe had bombed the city over the weekend. The Battle of Britain had been raging for a month and a half, but until now, the German bombers had targeted RAF airfields and warning stations. The Roberts family, south-west of London in Epsom, ought to have been away from the main point of danger. The morning papers suggested that few people had been killed, but they did say that the suburbs had been hit. Security restrictions on printing the exact locations meant that, for Roberts far away in Leeds, the reports were frustratingly vague. Like most homes, his didn’t have a phone line, so there was no easy way to establish if the family was safe. The wider question was whether the dramatic pictures of the capital city’s skyline lit by flames signified a shift in enemy tactics.
Agent Jack Page 5