Churchill's Iceman_The True Story of Geoffrey Pyke_Genius, Fugitive, Spy

by Henry Hemming

  They had come to know each other through meetings of the Cambridge Heretics, a debating society that Sargant Florence had co-founded several years earlier and which was famous by then for its lively, free-flowing discussions. Recent speakers included the poet Rupert Brooke and the author G. K. Chesterton, and over the past year Pyke had become an avid member. For him the open-minded rigour of the Heretics’ discussions was a revelation, and was a lifetime away from his miserable experiences at Wellington College, the militaristic public school where he had spent two unhappy years before Cambridge. It was also a tonic against the sadness of his life at home where he was never really able to escape the ghost of his father or the all-too-real presence of his widowed mother Mary, who liked to tell her four children that if she could swap their lives for that of their late father she would.

  Lionel Pyke QC

  Pyke’s father, Lionel, had been a precocious barrister who took silk at the age of thirty-eight before running unsuccessfully for Parliament as a Liberal candidate. He had become Leader of the Admiralty Bar before his unexpected death at the age of forty-four from a respiratory condition. Geoffrey, his eldest son, was five at the time. This was the defining trauma of Pyke’s life. It left him reaching for father figures throughout his life, and at the same time it broadened the possibilities of his personality. He could fashion the memory of his father as he liked and even then he was not left with a rigid template of how to behave. The loss of his father seemed to produce in Pyke a Herculean drive: he latched on to new ideas with enthusiasm, and none more so than those outlined in a sensational talk he had heard in Cambridge just days before setting out for Norway.

  The Cambridge Heretics had been addressed by the legendary founder of Futurism, Filippo Marinetti, in what was breathlessly described by the Cambridge Magazine as ‘one of the most amazing meetings Cambridge has ever known’. Pyke had been aware of the larger-than-life Marinetti. Only a fortnight earlier he had included the Futurist’s onomatopoeic sound-poem ‘Pont’ in a special edition of Mandragora, the undergraduate magazine that he co-edited. But this was the first time he had seen and heard the Italian in full flight. The effect was like that of a baptism.

  Mandragora, May Week 1914

  Marinetti’s speech to the ‘spellbound’ Heretics, delivered entirely in French, ‘but with such fluency, energy and clarity that few failed to follow his every word’, seemed to be a primal howl against convention, sentimentality and the dumb worship of tradition. These were the targets picked off each week by the Heretics. You might think he was preaching to the choir. What set his talk apart was Marinetti’s underlying enjoinder to his audience to do more than attack the past: they should revel as well in the possibility of an electrified future defined by machines, speed and the limitless potential of human agency. Only weeks later, in Scandinavia, Pyke launched himself at his new surroundings like a zealous disciple of Marinetti.

  Sargant Florence would watch, bemused, as his friend ran up to farmers they passed and ask in puppyish German how a particular machine worked, why it was there, whether it could be improved, and, more often than not, if he could have a go. On one occasion, when the two hikers spied in the distance a team of Norwegian lumberjacks escorting logs downstream, Pyke jogged off to join in. Perhaps he felt there was a better way to move the logs, or maybe he wanted to improve his understanding of the lumberjacks’ technique. In any event, he was soon hopping from trunk to trunk, ‘caused a log jam, and was almost drowned’.

  Pyke was, by his own account, ‘very young, and a firm believer that everything was possible till proved the opposite by oneself, and that the madder the scheme, the better the chances of success’. The experience of being abroad for him seemed to slough off any vestiges of adolescent self-consciousness until there was nothing left but playful curiosity.

  It was in this spirit, in the Swedish port of Malmo, soon after the lumberjack incident, that Pyke began to run at full tilt towards the end of a quay. Ahead of him was the ferry to Copenhagen. Sargant Florence was on board. Moments earlier it had begun to pull away. Still gathering speed, Geoffrey Pyke reached the edge of the quay and jumped.

  It is a moment worth savouring. Suspended in mid-air is a bespectacled young man with a rucksack on his back. The sun angles down on his forehead and the air around him is spiced with the tang of diesel fumes. Passengers on the ferry stare, faces presumably blank as it is not yet clear where the parabola of his jump will take him.

  Pyke’s leap out over the harbour waters was a typically bold and bravura move, the kind of impulsive act that would have made Marinetti proud. Without any way of knowing how far to jump, or how high, Pyke had plunged himself into this uncertainty, conscious that every second spent dithering would reduce his chances of landing on the ferry. He was not assured of success but the chance of it easily justified the small risk of drowning. Only when he had launched himself off the edge of the quay and begun to fly did he realise – could he realise – that the ferry was out of reach, and rather than land heroically on board he fell like a deadweight into the scum-topped waters of Malmo harbour.

  Bobbing about, Pyke yelled at Sargant Florence over the din of the engine to wait for him in Copenhagen. He took the next ferry across the Öresund and arrived in the harbour area of Nyhavn, popular with sailors and prostitutes, where he found his friend amid the purplish shadows of another glorious summer evening. In ways that neither could have foreseen the complexion of their trip was about to change.

  Waiting for them in Copenhagen was Sargant Florence’s sister, Alix. Elfin, tall and dark, she too was a Cambridge Heretic and doubtless she spent the night bringing both men up to speed on what had been happening in the rest of Europe since their departure. There was Austria-Hungary’s ultimatum to Serbia, the Kaiser’s support for the Austrians, Russia’s backing of Serbia, France’s resolve to weigh in, Britain’s refusal to rule herself out, and more recently – more ominously – the Kaiser’s decision to cut short his own holiday in the Norwegian fjords.

  Not long after, on 28 July, these three Cambridge Heretics heard that Austria-Hungary had declared war on Serbia. This was not an elaborate ‘newspaper scare’. It was real. It had begun. There followed across Europe more than forty declarations of war and orders to mobilise. In Paris the word heard on every street corner was ‘incroyable’. ‘The world is gone mad,’ wrote Winston Churchill to his wife. There were drunken celebrations in Berlin, Paris and Vienna as youthful crowds bawled out patriotic songs late into the night. As young men began to be called up, thousands of rushed marriages took place over that sweltering weekend. In Copenhagen, meanwhile, Philip and Alix Sargant Florence took a ship back to Britain. Pyke remained where he was.

  Rather than return to London he chose to send a telegram to the head office of Reuters, news agency of the British Empire, offering his services as a correspondent. It was a reckless move: the longer he stayed in Denmark the harder it would be to find a ship back to Britain, and he was not even assured of a reply from Reuters, let alone a positive one.

  Reuters, it turned out, was facing the worst crisis in its history. Its arrangement with the Berlin-based Wolff News Agency was on the brink of collapse, which would soon open up enormous gaps in its news-gathering service. Letter codes, whereby Reuters correspondents used code to reduce the length of their telegrams back to London, were soon to become illegal, which would force costs to soar, while the ill-conceived Reuters Bank was in dire straits now that its manager, a Hungarian, had been conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian Army. Shortly before the outbreak of war the company’s senior management had decided that only a handful of war correspondents could be sent into the field. Otherwise they must rely on freelancers, known either as ‘String’ or ‘Special’ Correspondents.

  Just days after making this decision, Reuters received an offer of correspondence from an unknown twenty-year-old in Copenhagen. He was English and appeared to be literate. In that strange hiatus between the outbreak of war and Britain’s entry into it, with
the shape of the war hanging in the balance, Reuters agreed to take on Pyke as a Special Correspondent.

  Pyke would later refer to himself with pride as ‘Reuters’ special correspondent in Denmark at the time of the outbreak of war’. It was an audacious coup, born of little more than his being prepared to look foolish. But, as he soon discovered, writing the telegram had been the easy part; finding some news was going to be more difficult.

  Though Pyke once described Copenhagen as ‘the Athens’ to which Norwegians flocked ‘when their own barren hills did not provide enough intellectual intercourse’, his initial experience of Danish conversation was Spartan. ‘Woe betide him who finds himself a correspondent on those silent shores,’ he groaned. The people of Copenhagen seemed to have perfected the ability to ‘answer the most pointed of questions with a discreet evasion, and the most subtle by ignorance’. Instead he looked beyond the city for news, where he learnt that four German warships and a handful of U-boats had been seen to the south. Now he had the material for his first Reuters dispatch. It would also be one of his last.

  In London it was noted that: ‘Four German destroyers were also reported off Hammerfest, apparently bound for the White Sea. Reuters’ correspondent at Copenhagen stated that on the afternoon of August 5 three German submarines were sighted at the southern outlet of the sound. They appear to have taken up their position there as a sort of advance guard.’

  This was first-rate news. In Reuters there must have been murmurs of congratulation for those who had given Pyke his opportunity. Now they wanted more.

  In a confident and expansive mood, Pyke cast his net wider and over the coming days met Edward Lyell Fox, a young American with a high forehead who was later described by Special Branch as ‘a rather seedy individual’. Fox was a twenty-six-year-old Special Correspondent with only a handful of pieces to his name, mostly travel and sports. As Pyke would later find out, he was not everything he appeared to be.

  At one point in their conversation, no doubt to impress the young Englishman, Fox let on that he was able to smuggle uncensored material into and out of Germany. The implications for Pyke were stunning. There were no British correspondents in Berlin and it was illegal for British, French or Russian nationals to enter the country. Editors on Fleet Street had given up all hope of getting uncensored correspondence out of Germany, and yet ‘the desire to know the truth of what was going on at that time in the interior of Germany was intense,’ wrote Pyke. ‘The floodgates of news had clanged to, and not a word that could be prevented, or had not a purpose in it, was leaving Germany.’ If Fox was to be believed, then Pyke had only to find willing correspondents in Germany who could pass their reports to Fox before he took them out to Copenhagen. Pyke would then courier this material to London. On Fleet Street the bidding war would be frenzied. All Pyke needed was a list of correspondents in Germany.

  On 17 August, at a quarter to eight in the evening in Copenhagen, Pyke sent the following telegram to Reuters in London (the breaks were added by the censor, who let it pass): ‘Have means of uncensored communication interior Germany | literary and telegraphically | send name address of trustworthy intelligent individuals | not press Bureaux | to act as correspondents there.’

  If there was a reply he never saw it. By revealing the position of warships in his first Reuters dispatch Pyke had publicised sensitive German naval intelligence. After the publication of this report Germany’s Minister to Denmark had made a formal complaint, which had by now percolated through various diplomatic channels. Pyke was told to pack his rucksack and leave. Crestfallen, he sailed to Greenock, Scotland, arriving during the last days of August.

  It had been a fascinating adventure, but one which appeared to have run its course. At least, that was the impression Pyke gave for most of the journey home. Yet by the time he reached London his mood was transformed. He had come up with a new plan, one so outrageous that just the thought of it made him smile.

  Pyke had spent most of his childhood, including the long and unhappy years after his father’s death, in an elegant Kensington town house with a white stuccoed facade. It was from this house, several days after his return from Copenhagen, that he set out for Fleet Street. We may never know whether it was charm, luck, personal connections or a cocktail of all three which was responsible, but somehow he had secured an interview with Ernest Perris, News Editor of the Daily Chronicle, a newspaper with a circulation exceeding that of The Times and Daily Telegraph combined.

  Like most editors, Perris was at that time in a state of sustained shock after the publication three days earlier of the ‘Amiens Dispatches’. These were two frank assessments of the British Expeditionary Force’s first engagements of the war – at Le Cateau and Mons – by veteran correspondent Arthur Moore for The Times and Hamilton Fyfe for the Weekly Dispatch. Ordinarily they would not have been published but both had been approved by the censor, F. E. Smith, later Lord Birkenhead, who even added lines about the urgent need for reinforcements.

  The ‘Amiens Dispatches’ had sent shock waves rippling across the country, undermining some of the popular belief in a swift and easy victory for Britain and her allies. In Parliament the decision to publish these reports was slammed as defeatist. Churchill wrote a furious letter to the publisher of The Times. Yet the shock on Fleet Street was as much envious as it was outraged. The Chronicle, for one, had recently assured its readers that ‘the censorship that we exercise over our news will not affect its value’. The Amiens Dispatches had shown that to be nonsense. Perris needed to strike back with vital news, to let his readers see the war as it really was. He was desperate for a scoop, which was why he was even prepared to meet this callow undergraduate.

  ‘Yes, yes, what is it you want?’ Perris began. ‘Quickly, please, I’ve got no time to spare.’

  As if to emphasise the point he picked up a pair of telephone receivers and dictated foreign telegrams into each. Next, as Pyke remembered, he ‘rang a bell cunningly hid under the edge of the table, glanced about him in all directions at once, first at a row of large clock dials showing the hour in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Petrograd, Berne, Madrid, Belgrade, Antwerp, and Amsterdam, frowned, looked at the large wall map, gave instructions to a pallid, overworked clerk for yet another foreign cable to go, and repeated, “Yes, quickly, please, I’m busy.”

  Pyke’s plan was ingenious and a little mad, and over the next ten minutes he did his best to explain it.

  How to Get a Job as a War Correspondent (as an Inexperienced Twenty-Year-Old)

  For many young men like Pyke, who had grown up in upper-middle-class Edwardian London and liked to read, the idea of being a war correspondent had a heroic and at times breathless appeal. In 1912 the journalist Philip Gibbs described it as ‘the crown of journalistic ambition, and the heart of its adventure and romance’. The life of a war correspondent seemed to combine the most attractive elements of explorer, spy and best-selling author. Marinetti had been a war correspondent several years earlier in Libya, as had Churchill in South Africa, and by 1914 Pyke described himself as ‘absolutely determined to be a correspondent somewhere’.

  But where?

  On his way back from Denmark Pyke had pored over a map of the world in the hope of finding a newsworthy spot which did not yet have a full complement of correspondents. Yet whenever he found a likely destination his ambition foundered on his almost complete lack of journalistic experience. Apart from a handful of Reuters dispatches, by the age of twenty he had written no more than two short stories, a handful of book reviews, forty-two lines of doggerel and various interviews, including one with the actor Henry Lytton (then playing ‘Ko-Ko’ in The Mikado), all for the Cambridge Magazine or Mandragora, both of them parochial university publications. Nobody on Fleet Street could mistake him for a seasoned correspondent, and even they were finding it hard to get work.

  The novelist Arthur Ransome, a decade older than Pyke, a Russian speaker and the author of books and numerous articles, was unable to persuade any British newspa
pers to take him on. Indeed, what was sometimes known as the ‘Street of Adventure’ had been besieged since the outbreak of war by a ‘procession of literary adventurers’. There were ‘scores of new men of sporting instincts and jaunty confidence, eager to be “in the middle of things,” willing to go out on any terms so long as they could see “a bit of fun”.’ Pyke spoke no foreign language fluently, he had published no books and had left the country just twice. He did not stand a chance.

  The problem appeared to be intractable, unless, that was, he could turn it upside down. Rather than look for a way past his inexperience he placed it at the heart of this puzzle. Instead of trying to identify towns or cities where there were not enough correspondents – but where there soon would be – he needed to look for a place in which correspondents would always be in short supply and where he might never face any competition.

  He looked at the map afresh. No matter how long the war went on there were unlikely to be many correspondents in Reykjavik, surely. Or in Timbuktu, for that matter. ‘Suddenly it came to me. We had no correspondents in Berlin. Supreme ass of all asses – of course – Berlin; the very place; no competition; no editor would say with an air of tired resignation that he was already very well served there, and had no necessity for further assistance, though of course he was very grateful, etc. etc. No difficulty at all, except of getting there, and out again.’

  Geoffrey Pyke, Special Correspondent in Berlin.

  His heart must have lurched at the thought. To produce a single report from the German capital would be the journalistic scoop of the war. Berlin was the last place where anyone would think to go as an English war correspondent, yet there were editors on Fleet Street who would sell their grandmothers for a stream of reliable news from the heart of the German Reich.