This wasn’t an idle warning. Lewis had introduced Roberts to the group. Roberts had given Jimmy Dickson’s home address to them. But the greatest threat was to Roberts himself. He had spent years working inside the BU under his own name. He’d been involved with his local fascist group. If he was revealed to be a spy, his whole family would be at risk from attacks by anyone inclined to take revenge.
But Maxwell had someone else weighing in on his side. Norman Birkett was one of the most celebrated barristers of the day. In his youth, Birkett had been set for a life as a Methodist preacher, but at Cambridge he discovered the law, and the pleasure of public debate. After joining the chambers of the great advocate Sir Edward Marshall Hall, he had defended the notorious Maundy Gregory on charges of selling government honours, as well as taking high-profile murder and libel cases. When war broke out, he’d been put in charge of the Advisory Committees, which heard the appeals of people who had been interned. As far as MI5 was concerned, Birkett was a good-hearted pest. This was his job. The way the Home Office had squared the internment policy with its conscience was by putting men in charge who would ask awkward questions.
The Leeds group had come before his committee, and Birkett too wanted to know why they weren’t being put on trial. ‘I am bound to say that I think your view was right,’ he told Maxwell. ‘The most satisfactory course is to put the papers into the hands of the Director of Public Prosecutions and to ask him to proceed according to the law.’
Harker had had enough. ‘The only person who is in a position to give evidence which would result in a conviction is our agent,’ he wrote to Maxwell at the end of March. ‘And after very careful consideration I have come to the conclusion that I cannot allow him to appear in court.’ The Home Office weren’t going to get Roberts, and that was that.
The characteristic of the fights between MI5 and the Home Office was that both sides were in the right. Roberts was, in Harker’s words, ‘an agent upon whom we place the very greatest reliance’. The Leeds case had shown the value of having someone who had been inside the BU since its early days. It had also revealed to MI5 officers beyond Knight the extent of Roberts’s skills as an undercover operator. If his cover was blown, there would be no way to replace him.
But Maxwell was equally correct to have deep anxieties about the abuse of emergency powers. The usual rules preventing arbitrary detention and allowing suspects to see the evidence against them had been suspended. Britain, in fighting totalitarianism, was adopting the characteristics of a totalitarian state. The Leeds fascists might well have been dangerous, but they were being locked up in large part on the word of an anonymous agent working for the secret police. Maxwell and Birkett were fighting to keep a Britain whose values were worth fighting for.
For Windsor, Gannon, Longfellow and Jeffery, Harker’s decision had mixed implications: they wouldn’t face a trial for the serious crimes of which they were guilty. There would be no prison terms and no criminal records. But they would, instead, face summary justice. The following month, Windsor spent two days being questioned by one of Birkett’s Advisory Committees. He and the others were told that they would be locked up indefinitely with other designated undesirables on the Isle of Man.
In the middle of the Irish Sea, halfway between the Lake District and Ireland, the Isle of Man was an ideal spot for the government to dump its problems. Even if internees could escape the barbed wire, there was twenty miles of sea to cross to get to the mainland. The prison ‘camps’ were, in reality, groups of buildings, houses and hotels, surrounded by wire and guards. There were eleven camps in all, covering Germans and Austrians, Italians, and Britons, and both men and women. The randomness of internment meant that refugees from fascism found themselves being held alongside British fascists – though in separate camps.
An internment camp on the Isle of Man
The main enemy in the camps was boredom, as internees waited for the war to end, or for the government to relent and release them. And the internees were at least safe from bombing, which was more than could be said for the families many of them had left behind.
Roberts, too, was worrying about his family. Every day the face of London was being changed, as bombs ripped fresh holes in familiar streets, wiping out landmarks in an instant. At such times, and surrounded by so much death, little seemed safe or solid. While Epsom wasn’t a prime bombing target, it was still hit by planes that were lost or simply dropping their payloads before heading home. The house four doors up from the Roberts family was blown to bits by a high-explosive bomb, killing a friend of Max’s.
Audrey, meanwhile, was fearful for the safety of the man she loved. He may not have to wear a uniform, but he had swapped the dangers of the battlefront for a less quantifiable peril. Hunting traitors and spies carried its own risks. As Audrey struggled with the stress of war, Roberts advised her to start smoking, to calm her nerves.
Though his wife knew the truth about his work, their neighbours knew nothing. Many of the husbands had joined up, and Roberts had faced questions about why he wasn’t doing the same. A vague reference to a job in the War Office would have been problematic for someone so well known locally as an enthusiastic Blackshirt. Instead, he said he was a conscientious objector, and had registered for non-combat service. To cover his long absences, Roberts said he was working on a farm ‘up north’. His son Max hated this. Other boys, whose fathers were in uniform, told him that his old man was a coward. In fact his father had a far better understanding of why fascism needed to be fought than the average conscripted soldier. And dealing daily with traitors, he felt in more imminent peril than many of those wearing khaki.
Not all the neighbours were convinced. At least one reported Roberts’s suspicious pattern of movements to the authorities. Still, the likeable nature that had made Windsor and Gannon trust Roberts seems to have generally protected him. His returns home on leave, often without notice, would begin with him catching up with his sons and then, in the early evening, he and Audrey would walk to the pub for a drink. The stroll together, in which the couple could exchange their news and discuss their worries, was as important for settling Roberts’s mind as the beer at the end of the journey.
Now that Roberts was an MI5 officer, he had his own desk. Initially, this had been in Wormwood Scrubs, but when the prison was hit by a bomb in September 1940, most of the staff – Roberts among them – were moved to Blenheim Palace, the Duke of Marlborough’s country seat in Oxfordshire. Senior officers were left behind in London, in a headquarters on St James’s Street that was camouflaged behind a ‘To Let’ sign. The autumn was proving to be as pleasant as the summer had been, and the vast Blenheim estate provided an agreeable respite for many of the staff after spending most of the year working in a prison. Desks were set up under tapestries. From the balcony near his, Roberts could see the young women of the Registry, as MI5’s archive of files was known, relaxing in their lunch breaks on the lawns. There was a lake for swimming in or, when it froze in the winter, for skating on. When it snowed, staff discovered that their in-trays could serve as toboggans.
Pleasant though his surroundings were, Roberts found sitting behind a desk little more enjoyable at MI5 than he had at the Westminster Bank. He wanted to be in the field, not shuffling papers. But at the start of 1941, he was doing the bread and butter work of MI5, sending memos to other branches of government requesting information about people of interest.
Roberts would be rescued by a young man who, like him, had a mischievous, enquiring mind, and nerves of steel. Like Roberts, he’d worked in a bank but hadn’t enjoyed it. This was slightly more awkward in his case, as the bank in question was the most famous in the world, and it carried his name.
* A religious group whose teachings forbade fighting.
** The Soviet code for Germans. France was ‘Gastronomica’.
5
‘He is quite ruthless where Germans are concerned’
On a Saturday afternoon in March 1941, two women arrived in the
courtyard of Swan Court, a modern nine-storey red-brick block of flats just off the King’s Road in Chelsea. They walked into the entrance hall, where they had arranged to meet a man who lived there. One of the women, Molly Hiscox, had been introduced to him a few days earlier, by an acquaintance of hers from the now-closed Right Club. She had been told he was a German agent, who could help her with a mission she’d given herself.
She had a friend, Norah Briscoe, with her. The man took them up to flat number 74. In the sitting room, the two women looked at the view from the window, admiring the damage done by a bomb that had fallen on Shawfield Street, over the road. Molly asked the man if he’d seen the big crater near the Bank of England. ‘Wasn’t it marvellous?’ she said. The high-explosive bomb that had fallen there two months earlier, leaving a huge crater that was still disrupting traffic, had killed 111 people.
The two women sat on the sofa, while the man sat in the armchair opposite. If the guests hoped for a cup of tea, their host made no move towards the kitchen. The man said to Norah that he’d heard she had a son living in Germany. This was true. The boy, now ten, had been born in Britain, but after Norah’s husband died, she’d travelled to Germany and become infatuated with Nazism. When she’d returned to England before the war, she’d left him behind, to be raised by her German lover. As war approached, she’d made no effort to get him back.
The three discussed places in Germany they all knew, and how much they preferred Germany’s food and climate to Britain’s. Molly quoted another friend as saying that it was a pity they had been born in the wrong country.
Norah moved things on. ‘We might as well get down to business,’ she said, opening her handbag. She showed the man her pass from the Ministry of Supply, where she worked as a typist. Though her job was unimportant, she said she saw a lot of official files. She paused, nervous. ‘Can anybody hear us here?’ she asked. The man reassured her that the flats had been very quiet since the bombing, with residents staying away.
Norah pulled a bundle of papers from her bag and put them on the small table between them, then began to explain what they were. The first, dated two months previously, gave the location of factories in Northern Ireland. Another showed supplies to be sent to Turkey. She could, she said, sometimes get the dates of shipping, although she apologised that she couldn’t always find out which ports the ships would be sailing from. Other papers covered different firms, their labour conditions and shortages.
Then the door opened, and two more men walked in from the kitchen. One of them identified himself as Inspector Evan Jones of the Special Branch. He informed all three occupants of the room that they were under arrest. The other man was Maxwell Knight. The supposed German agent, to whom Norah had been trying to pass documents, was one of his men, Harold Kurtz, codename M/H. Having left Nazi Germany for London, he had been recruited by Knight three years earlier with a promise of help towards British citizenship if he spied on his fellow émigrés. He was now being used on short-term operations like this one.
Two days later, on the Monday, Knight had lunch with Liddell. ‘He told me all about the Briscoe case and showed me the documents,’ Liddell recorded afterwards. ‘They are voluminous and cover a wide field. If the information had leaked it would certainly be a serious matter.’
In the total war in which Britain and Germany were now engaged, factories and supplies were as important as troops. These delivered the aircraft, tanks and bullets without which victory would be impossible. This was just one of the technological aspects of modern warfare for which MI5’s staff were ill-equipped. It was for that reason that Liddell had brought in a most unusual recruit the previous year.
Nathaniel Mayer Victor Rothschild, always known as Victor, used to say that his family could be divided into those who made money and those who spent it. Born to be the former, he soon determined to be the latter.
When Victor was born in 1910, his gender came as a great relief to his family. A century earlier, the dynasty’s founding father, Mayer Amschel, had decreed that only Rothschild sons could inherit a stake in the family bank. While this ensured that the House of Rothschild remained in the hands of Rothschilds, it created a practical pressure to produce boys: in 1901 the Frankfurt branch of the bank had closed for want of a male heir to run it. And at the start of the twentieth century, it was an area in which the English branch of the family was also struggling.
The patriarch, Nathaniel, had two adult sons, Walter and Charles. The elder, Walter, wasn’t suited to banking. At the office, he threw his correspondence unopened into huge wicker crates where it lay undiscovered until some years later. His private life was equally chaotic. He hadn’t married, but had several mistresses, one of whom was blackmailing him. Another bore him a daughter. Only one subject truly engaged him: the study of animals and insects. On this, he spent his fortune, amassing one of the world’s largest private collections of specimens, living and dead. It ranged from butterflies and moths – he had two million of those – to giraffes and giant tortoises. He even had a team of zebras to pull his pony trap. At the family home of Tring Park, north-west of London, he built a museum to house his collection. Every item was carefully catalogued and cross-referenced.
His younger brother shared his passion. But as he was more capable of dealing with the real world than Walter, Charles at least attempted to become a serious banker. This effort was stifled by his overbearing father, and a reluctance within the bank to adopt his novel ideas. In particular, his suggestion that Rothschilds should invest in a new invention called a ‘gramophone’ was rebuffed.
Charles was more successful in his marriage, however, falling in love with a woman he met while on an expedition to catch butterflies and fleas in the Carpathian mountains in central Europe. Rózsika von Wertheimstein was a great beauty, known as ‘the Rose of Hungary’. She was also considered quite daring, as among other things she had been the first woman in Europe to serve a tennis ball overarm, a motion that revealed an unladylike amount of information about the shape of her breast. But she was in her late thirties when they married, seven years older than Charles, and their first two children, Miriam and Liberty, born in 1908 and 1909, were girls. So the arrival of a healthy boy in 1910 allowed the entire family to breathe a little easier, knowing the bank’s future was secure for another generation at least.
Victor was doted upon, especially when Charles and Rózsika’s final child, born in 1913, proved to be another girl, Nica. As an infant, the young heir was delighted by the sight of flames, and so a servant was told to walk backwards in front of his pram, lighting matches. He looked back on his childhood as ‘simultaneously spoilt and regimented’. Both his father and his uncle instilled in the children their shared love of natural history, and in so doing taught them the value of precise observation. Victor’s earliest memory was of being sent into the garden aged four by his father to catch a rare butterfly. But his youth was overshadowed by a tragedy from which no amount of wealth could protect him.
As Charles had grown older, he had suffered increasingly from depression. His daughter Miriam would later attribute this to the Rothschild tradition of inbreeding, noting that Charles’s parents had been cousins – but the growing responsibilities of work can’t have helped. Nathaniel Rothschild had died in 1915, leaving Charles partly responsible, with his uncles, for running the British branch of the bank just as Europe was being ripped apart by war. The bouts of illness increased, and Charles was sent away to Switzerland to recuperate. Then in 1916 he contracted encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain. Although he recovered, the disease seems to have been the final blow to his mind.
Charles returned home from treatment in December 1919, a shell of a man. On his arrival, he didn’t even acknowledge his eager children. In the following years, his moods would swing wildly, and staff and children found themselves dreading the next manic episode. Finally, in 1923, he walked into the bathroom and cut his own throat.
The children weren’t told how he’d died. Servants were f
orbidden from speaking about it, and any newspapers that might carry a report were banned from the house. Two years later* Victor, by then fifteen years old and away boarding at Harrow School, called Miriam in distress, asking his big sister to come at once. When she arrived, he told her the other boys had been teasing him, saying that his father had killed himself. Miriam assured him this wasn’t true, and drove back to Tring to confront her mother. Instead, Rózsika confirmed the bare fact, refusing to say another word on the matter.
School had already exposed Victor to some of the harshness of the world outside Tring Park. He described his preparatory school, Stanmore Park, as ‘a hell hole’. But at Harrow things were a little easier. His skill as a cricketer, augmented by private coaching, meant he wasn’t a target for bullies. Naturally intelligent and particularly gifted at biology, he was tempted to slack off in other subjects. This his mother wouldn’t tolerate, and the teenager was forced to spend his holidays writing daily essays on the Punic Wars until he mended his ways.
By the time Victor arrived at Cambridge University, he had all the makings of a playboy: limitless wealth, good looks, enviable sporting skills and the prospect of an inherited title. He played cricket for Northamptonshire, facing the bodyline bowling of Harold Larwood – fast deliveries aimed directly at the batsman with the goal of terrifying him into a mistake – without protection. He played jazz piano, signing up for lessons from American swing legend Teddy Wilson. He drove fast cars, setting a Cambridge-to-London record in his Bugatti – 60 miles in 49 minutes. He motored down to Monte Carlo for his vacation to try his hand in the casinos, and completed another area of his education by visiting a brothel in Rheims on the way.
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