Agent Jack

by Robert Hutton

  The ideal, he believed, was for a spy to become ‘a piece of the furniture’ so that visitors to an office ‘do not consciously notice whether the agent is there or not’. This approach made Knight unusually forward-thinking in his use of women; because they were so likely to be overlooked, and to occupy apparently unimportant secretarial roles, he had used them with great success to penetrate the communists in the 1930s. Properly directed by an agency that wanted to use her, Perigoe could have been just as effective. She had a ‘remarkable aptitude’ for espionage, Rothschild and Clay concluded. But Roberts’s job was to divert her talents in other directions.

  For fifteen years, Roberts had been an agent. Now he was an agent-runner. According to the man from whom he’d learned his craft, Knight, this was a harder task than simply being an agent – a role Roberts was, of course, also still playing. The runner, Knight wrote, ‘will have to be continually adapting himself to agents who vary very much in character and personality’.

  The ideal agent-runner, in Knight’s mind, was ‘a man of very wide understanding of human nature; one who can get on with and understand all types and all classes’. The Fifth Column operation didn’t test that very hard: most of its recruits were drawn from the English lower middle class: administrative staff, salesmen, skilled tradesmen. They were people who felt that they worked hard but saw little fruit from it. Many had reason to believe that they had been held back from what they wanted by the snobbery of others. They saw themselves in G. K. Chesterton’s The Secret People, which talked of a quietly resentful English population, ruled over by a series of masters, from the Norman conquerors, to Oliver Cromwell’s roundheads, to the twentieth-century bureaucrat, none of whom understood the people they governed, ‘For we are the people of England, that never have spoken yet.’

  Britain’s current rulers, according to Chesterton, were

  Lords without anger or honour, who dare not carry their swords. They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes; They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies.

  It was a view with which Roberts could empathise. At MI5 he was surrounded by university dons, lawyers, former Army officers. He was simply a clerk, on loan from the Westminster Bank. Like Chesterton’s silent English heroes, he preferred ale to wine. ‘I still pin my faith to English beer,’ he said. ‘And, I could add, to English beef and Yorkshire pud.’* His colleagues looked down on him, he said, because he had ‘plebeian tendencies – not the Officer type’.

  He was getting on no better with Edward Blanshard Stamp, who made little attempt to conceal his contempt for Roberts. Class often made its way into their rows. When Roberts tore one of his shirts in the course of his duties, he asked the office for help replacing it. Stamp refused the claim. For Roberts, it was more than the question of the seven shillings and sixpence that it would cost to buy a new shirt. Clothing rationing had been introduced in 1941, and coupons were scarce. To the wealthier classes, this was merely an irritation: they had large wardrobes to fall back on. But Roberts owned only three shirts. He had to appeal to Curry – and, in a sign of how difficult his relationship with Stamp had become, offer to resign – to get the five ration coupons he needed for a replacement.

  Fascism had offered Perigoe’s recruits a political programme that would have protected them from the forces they felt were making their lives more difficult. It promised to recreate the greatness of the British Empire, building a country that acted in its own interests, not the interests of foreigners or money men. And it offered an enemy, who also featured in Chesterton’s poem: the ‘cringing Jew’.

  Whatever they differed on, Perigoe’s recruits were united in their anti-Semitism. Special Branch reported that her friend Gleave ‘remains violently anti-Semitic and complains of the number of Jews residing in her block of flats’. Edgar Bray cancelled his subscription to an astrological newsletter, suggesting its editor was under the influence of Jews and freemasons. Hilda Leech was ‘violently anti-Semitic’.

  ‘There are few, if any, of these people who are not anti-Semites,’ an internal MI5 report concluded, ‘and it matters little if they became admirers of Nazi Germany and fell for its anti-Semitic propaganda, or whether they admire Germany solely because of her treatment of the Jewish problem. The result is the same.’

  While a suspicion of Jews continued to run widely through British society, the war meant that it was less acceptable to admit to such thoughts in polite society. Newspapers had toned down their anti-Semitic language. But, even in wartime, fascists had their own news sources. One of Maxwell Knight’s agents, reporting on a different group of former British Union members, noted that ‘all, without exception, listen in to the German news bulletins, believe them and consider the BBC broadcasts as “democratic lying propaganda”. Their only hope seems to be that Hitler will kindly oblige by giving Britain her own National Socialist Government when he has won the war against the democrats and the Jews, and to that end they believe in a German victory.’

  As Roberts was learning, those beliefs were held by the most unexpected people.

  On a Saturday afternoon at the end of August 1942, Roberts met up with Perigoe, and together they made their way to Piccadilly.

  The papers that day carried news from Stalingrad, where the Russians were clinging on as Hitler threw men and machines into battle in an attempt to make a breakthrough. The war had now been raging for three years, and it was not at all clear that it was going Britain’s way. For much of the year, the news from the Western Desert had been of British retreats and defeats at the hands of Rommel. At home there were signs of weariness. In Scotland, 2,000 miners were out on strike in a row that started when three of their number were arrested for non-payment of a fine.

  The Daily Mirror carried a light story on its front page about how a telegram from the Admiralty telling a mother that her son was missing in action had been opened by the young man himself, who had arrived home an hour earlier. It was less amusing than it was made to sound. The sailor had taken part in the disastrous raid on the French port of Dieppe a week earlier. Poorly planned and executed, driven by political rather than strategic needs, the raid had left most of the largely Canadian attacking force dead, wounded or captured.

  For Roberts, 1942 was proving to be a good year personally as well as professionally. A daughter, Crista, had arrived at the start of the year. She was named for a German friend that Audrey and Eric had made on their honeymoon. He tried to get home as much as he could – his son Max, now six, noticed how Audrey would brighten when he did. After hearing the family’s news, Eric would disappear into his study. Through the door, Max could hear his father’s typewriter clicking away over a recording of Sibelius on the gramophone player, a sound he grew to hate, because it meant his father couldn’t be disturbed. Work aside, these visits were a happy time for the family. At weekends they would walk over Epsom Downs, along the old Roman trail, and have a picnic near Headley Court mansion.

  Even on these walks, the family couldn’t escape the war. Max delighted in watching the planes flying overhead, and finding bomb fins to add to his shrapnel collection. Their long garden was dug up so that Audrey could grow her own vegetables, and keep chickens and ducks. At the bottom of the garden was a railway cutting, where Max and his little brother Peter watched injured soldiers being unloaded from carriages with red crosses painted on top – the Canadian Army had a hospital nearby. And when the sirens sounded while Eric was away, it fell to Max to lead Peter down into the air-raid shelter, while his mother carried the baby.

  Peter and Max Roberts

  As Roberts and Perigoe walked in to the Piccadilly outlet of the upmarket Slaters restaurant chain, he knew he was being taken to meet another prospective Fifth Columnist. They found Perigoe’s friend Eileen Gleave at a table with a fresh-faced young woman. She introduced her as Nancy Brown, up from Brighton, on the south coast, where she worked for the council. The pair had known each other before the war. Gleave gave Roberts a look. ‘We h
ave been having a long discussion on old times,’ she said meaningfully. That was the signal she had agreed with him beforehand that Brown was willing to join their group.

  Brown wasn’t the sort of recruit Roberts was used to. She was young and attractive and full of verve. Frankly, she looked a picture of health, and after three years of rationing, that wasn’t to be taken for granted. ‘I found it almost impossible to believe that she would form suitable material as a Gestapo agent,’ he reported afterwards. ‘There was humour and decency written on her countenance.’

  Whatever his doubts, Eileen had given him the nod, so Roberts suggested they go somewhere more private, and the little group made their way to the Park West flat. They avoided the grand art deco reception area and went into a smaller entrance opposite, where there were stairs and two lifts. Coming out of the lift, Apartment 499 was on the left, one of four flats at the end of a short corridor.

  They got there just before five – the perfect time to serve drinks. When everyone was settled, Roberts got down to business. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘I hear you are more or less of our way of thinking.’

  Brown met his gaze. ‘Yes I am,’ she said. ‘Not more or less, it’s definite.’ This was greeted with appreciative noises from Gleave. Brown went on. ‘I’ve always had to play for safety, because I live with my parents, and my father’s retired, and they haven’t much money to live on.’

  Roberts nodded understandingly, and she continued. ‘Of course, I have to go to work, and he’s pretty nervous. So even right at the beginning of the war I had to be pretty careful. But the more Eileen’s told me this afternoon, I think I would like to start now.’

  Seventeen years inside subversive groups hadn’t blunted Roberts’s capacity for surprise. He had only just met Nancy Brown, yet she was pledging loyalty to him in the belief he was a Nazi spy. Her only request was that he keep her address out of his records until it was time for Germany to invade.

  Brown, it emerged, had long loved both Germany and fascism. She had been involved with the British Union before the war – which was how Eileen knew her – and also The Link. This group had been set up in 1937 to promote good relations with Hitler’s Germany. By the middle of 1939 it had had more than 4,000 members, opposed to Britain joining what one called ‘a Jewish war of revenge’. The Link’s founder, Admiral Sir Barry Domvile, the former director of Naval Intelligence, was a regular speaker at public meetings, where he operated on the assumption that all awkward questions came from Jews.

  But although Brown had been a committed supporter, she was sure her name wasn’t on any of the government’s lists of fascists. ‘I once called at the local headquarters of the fascists a long time before the war, but I never joined them there,’ she explained.

  Gleave reassured her that, if the government had her down as a supporter of The Link, she would have been questioned by now. ‘They’ve made enquiries about all those that they knew,’ she said. ‘You know Stella? They came and searched Stella’s place.’ Gleave was right about this: Brown’s name wasn’t on the list of Link members that MI5 had.

  But there was one place it did appear: at the top of an article in the August 1939 edition of The Link’s magazine, the Anglo-German Review. In the article, headlined ‘Rhineland Holiday’, Brown enthused about the ‘physical perfection’ of a party of schoolchildren that she watched on a hiking expedition in Germany.

  ‘One bright-eyed boy was playing his accordion, and as he played the shining plaits of the little girls around him gleamed in the sunlight like neat braids of gold,’ she sighed.

  Fortunately, Gleave had a suggestion for how Brown could answer any awkward questions about that piece. There was, she pointed out, another Nancy Brown, who had worked for John Beckett, a fascist politician who had split with Oswald Mosley in the late thirties. ‘Nancy Brown was secretary of that other business,’ she said. ‘Did you put your address in that Review?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, Nancy Brown was the secretary of that business Beckett was in. Spelt exactly the same way. You can always put that down to her.’**

  Brown’s Rhineland holiday had been only one of a series of visits she’d made to Germany in 1938 and 1939, where she’d made a number of friends, including one young man in particular. ‘When war was declared – or rather, a week before – I wrote to him and said, “It looks pretty bad,”’ she told Roberts. ‘I had a card from him written in the train. It said, “I hope we won’t struggle. You will hear from me again.” And of course I never did. He was going to be a teacher.’

  Could ‘Jack King’ get word of him? ‘I’d very much like to hear what happened to him,’ Brown explained.

  ‘May take a little time, but I could find out,’ Roberts assured her.

  Now Brown wanted to know how she could help Roberts. ‘Very often one hears what one thinks is gossip, don’t you?’ she said. ‘You don’t know whether it’s really true or not.’

  ‘Gossip is valuable,’ Roberts told her.

  ‘Is it?’ Brown asked.

  Gleave insisted it was, ‘even if it sounds crazy’.

  ‘Um . . .’ Brown prepared to give her first intelligence report. ‘Last week they said that the Brighton hospitals were full of the Dieppe dead and wounded. They were all lying about. I didn’t get in the hospitals to see whether they were or not, but I should think it’s highly probable.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Roberts, coaxing her for more.

  ‘That sort of thing, you mean?’ Brown asked, uncertain that anything she had to say could really be of interest to the German high command.

  ‘That’s the sort of thing we’re very interested in, yes,’ Roberts reassured her.

  Brown carried on, encouraged. ‘Eileen said something about gun positions. I know where, definitely where there are some at the moment, they’re in the Brighton Grammar School grounds.’

  ‘Do you know what sort of anti-aircraft guns?’ Roberts gently pushed her. ‘Heavy, or . . .?’

  ‘Heavy, pretty heavy, yes,’ Brown replied, then laughed. This wasn’t as hard as she’d thought it might be. ‘I know a lot of local civil defence stuff. That’s not so interesting, of course.’

  ‘Well, they’re quite interested in that,’ said Roberts, using ‘quite’ to mean ‘very’, as only an Englishman can. ‘You might have special instructions about invasion.’

  Brown wasn’t sure about that. ‘I don’t see anything about the invasion plans,’ she said.

  Gleave piped up: ‘But then, of course, you haven’t really been trying to find out.’

  ‘No, that’s true. No, I haven’t thought about it really.’

  Gleave explained the transformation that Nancy was about to undergo: ‘Once one becomes conscious, one becomes sort of . . . brighter.’

  Brown thought that if she’d been approached a year earlier, she’d probably have refused. But she had now been at war for three years, and there was no prospect of either side winning, and she was ‘fed up’. War was miserable for a woman. At least the men could run around with guns. For women, war meant endless shortages, of food, of tobacco, of clothes, of make-up. Nancy Brown was supposed to be at a carefree age, but instead she was being urged to dig for victory, to make do and mend, to consider whether her journey was really necessary. Even the colour had gone out of life. There was no light in the evenings. US soldiers embarking for Britain were warned not to be shocked at the drabness of the place. ‘Britain may look a little shop-worn and grimy to you,’ a guide to the country for servicemen read. ‘The houses haven’t been painted because factories are not making paint – they’re making planes. The famous English gardens and parks are either unkempt because there are no men to take care of them, or they are being used to grow needed vegetables.’

  The more she thought about it, the more excited Brown became at the prospect of being able to help Germany. ‘I want to do anything to hasten on the end now,’ she explained. Her great fear, she confided, was that Hitler wouldn’t invade – ‘That would be awful,’ Gl
eave agreed.

  ‘The majority of our people, honestly, are such fools that they’re really worth nothing,’ Brown explained. What the country needed was to be ruled by the Germans. ‘They’d make a better race of us.’

  For Roberts, the conversation wasn’t getting any less astonishing. Brown and Gleave were now fantasising about life under Hitler. They asked him to reserve some nice blond SS men for them. Brown said she much preferred them to the American and Canadian soldiers that other young women swooned over – ‘Germans have far better manners.’

  It was a relief for Brown to be able to say what she really thought for once. Usually, she had to pretend to be enthusiastic when someone told her of an Allied victory, or a German plane being shot down. ‘Very hard sometimes, but I try my best,’ she laughed.

  Others in her family weren’t as good at concealing their feelings about the war. ‘Mother says she doesn’t know how I can do it,’ Brown said. ‘We have to keep her away from people, otherwise she’d spill the beans. She’d shout at the top of her voice and tell them where they got off.’

  They began to discuss bombing targets. Brown described the location of a nautical instrument factory – ‘it is beautifully camouflaged’. And she told Roberts about a hotel on Brighton seafront where pilots were sent to recuperate.

  ‘Well, we will try and hasten their recuperation,’ Roberts said, acting his part with appropriate menace. Brown said she thought the Luftwaffe had tried to hit it before, ‘but they weren’t quite good enough’.

  She paused briefly to consider the fates of these young airmen. Gleave was philosophical. ‘By probably having a few of them killed we are saving a lot in the long run,’ she said. Brown agreed.