Tales From the Tower of London

by Donnelly, Mark P.

  It was inevitable that the execution of a man who had undergone such a sensational trial and dramatic fall from grace would make headlines. On the day of his execution the Irish Times wrote, ‘Roger Casement’s death is a miserable end to a life which, for the most part of its course, was honourable and distinguished.’ Germany’s Foreign Minister, Arthur von Zimmerman, wrote that he had never known, ‘a man of loftier mind, of higher honour, of more burning love of home. It was a matter of personal grief to me when I heard he had made up his mind to accompany the [Irish] expedition. . . . So I urged him . . . to remain with us and to do work among the prisoners. . . . But he only shook his head, saying “I must go, I must be with the boys”.’

  Nearly ninety years after Roger Casement’s execution, his tragic story still raises eyebrows and arguments by historians, politicians and Irish Republicans in Ireland, Britain and the US. Since word of the Black Diaries first leaked out, and even more so since their publication in the late 1950s, the argument has raged as to their authenticity. Many, particularly the Irish, insist they were clever forgeries, concocted by the British government in an effort to discredit a man whose life had become a rallying point for the spirit of Irish Republicanism. What is certain is that only days before he went to the gallows, Casement wrote a letter to an ex-lover referred to in the diaries only as ‘Millar’. Years later, the man was identified as Joseph Millar Gordon, a Belfast bank clerk. What all this says about Roger Casement is left to the judgement of history.

  15

  THE WEATHERMAN

  Josef Jakobs 1941

  By the twentieth century, the Tower of London had long since given up any real military role. Beyond its capacity as a well-guarded storehouse for the Crown Jewels, it served primarily as a museum dedicated to displaying a massive collection of ancient arms and armour that had seen action centuries earlier. The one important role it did maintain, however, was that of an enduring symbol of the monarchy and the British Empire. Even during the darkest days of the Second World War, when German bombs threatened to destroy London, King George VI and the government agreed that the Tower would remain open to the public as long as it remained safe and intact. The Tower, like the British people, would stand defiant in the face of the Nazi onslaught.

  Much of London was reduced to ruins during months of incessant bombing, and during these raids the Tower was struck no less than fifteen times, killing twenty-three people and two ravens. But, almost miraculously, little serious damage was done to the medieval fabric of the building. As one of the few public places which was never forced to close its doors, the ancient grey walls saw more tourists than ever flock through its gates, including millions of American GIs, all gaping in wonder at the lurid stories of medieval torture and death on the ‘block’, with which the tower warders regaled the tour groups.

  There were always rumours that Hitler’s number one henchman, Rudolf Hess, was stashed safely away somewhere in the vast Tower complex, but no one knew for certain where he was, or even if the stories were true – and the government had no intention of making the whereabouts of their most important prisoner public knowledge.

  Of course, Hess was there for a short period and he would have probably remained the last prisoner of the world’s oldest and most venerable fortress, except for one curious incident; and this came and went so quickly that only a handful of people even knew it had taken place. At least, almost no one knew, or remembered, until one day during the summer of 1991 the Tower was once again reminded of the official role it has played throughout history and even within living memory.

  It was the height of the tourist season and the tower warders were working double shifts to cater to the massive crowds of tourists flocking daily through the ancient prison doors. As they had done for nearly two centuries, the once fierce Beefeaters were now mostly retired army officers who guided the crowds from one site to another, entertaining them with an endless string of long-ago tales of murder and mayhem. ‘Here is where the young princes were held before they disappeared; probably murdered by their uncle, Richard III’ . . . ‘Here is where Anne Boleyn was beheaded; and they say that her ghost still roams the walkways of the tower, holding her head under her arm. . . .’ It was the same routine every day, but both the Beefeaters and the crowds loved it.

  It was during the height of this busy season when one of the warders was leading a tour group from Canada through the ancient, blood-soaked alleys of the Tower. Having finished showing them the site where the headsman’s block had once stood, he was about to gather them up and move on to the next stop on the tour, when a middle-aged woman touched him on the arm and whispered apologetically, ‘Excuse me, but . . . can you show me the place where they shot my father?’ Dumbfounded, the warder could only stare open-mouthed at the woman. He had no idea what she was talking about. When she told the old soldier her father’s name was Josef Jakobs, all the colour drained from his face. Now he knew – the Tower remembered.

  Turning the tour group over to one of his colleagues, the guide led the woman to the office of Head Warden Major-General Chris Tyler, and asked her to repeat what she had told him. Again, the woman explained that her father had been Josef Jakobs and that she understood he had been executed in the Tower as a Nazi spy some time during the Second World War. General Tyler assured the woman that he would personally show her the spot and asked her to wait in his office for just a minute. When he returned, he handed her a pair of old-fashioned, wire-rimmed glasses and a small Bible, explaining that the glasses had been her father’s and that he had requested a Bible the day before he was shot. They were hers if she wanted them.

  Clutching the only surviving mementoes of her father, the woman followed General Tyler across Tower Green towards a car park. During the war a corrugated metal shed had stood in this area, and it was here that Josef Jakobs was executed by firing squad. As they walked, Tyler told her everything he knew about her father – the last man to be executed in the Tower of London.

  An integral part of Nazi Germany’s plan to bring Great Britain to its knees without mounting an actual invasion of the island depended on massive waves of aerial bombardment carried out both by day and night. The notoriously unpredictable English weather, however, made it imperative that updates on weather conditions be broadcast to the German air force, the Luftwaffe, almost continually. To supply this stream of information dozens of spies were smuggled into England, each equipped with a radio transmitter, a code book and a basic knowledge of meteorology.

  But spying has always been dangerous work, and in the razor-edged atmosphere of the Second World War any suspicious activity could lead to instant arrest. Consequently, spies were considered nearly as expendable as bullets; pawns in an endless and violent game of power politics and war.

  Exactly how Josef Jakobs was recruited as a spy for Nazi Germany remains a mystery. What we do know is that by the time he was drafted into the German army in 1940, he was already forty-two years old and had been a dentist all of his working life – hardly a likely candidate for the high-risk job of espionage.

  In July of that year Corporal Jakobs was sent to a training camp run by the German Meteorological Service in occupied Holland, to which he had been assigned. There he underwent three weeks of training sessions in radio communications and meteorology. There seem to have been no special training in espionage techniques, or how to carry out such activities without raising suspicion. This probably did not concern Jakobs too much, however; after all, as far as he knew he was just a weather reporter.

  By the end of the year Jakobs was deemed ready to begin his life as a spy. He was issued with a long-range radio transmitter cleverly hidden inside a briefcase, road maps of eastern central England with RAF bases at Upton and Warboys clearly marked so he could avoid getting too close to the military, a false set of identity papers, an ample quantity of counterfeit British money and a Mauser pistol. With these few tools, Jakobs was ordered to parachute into England and establish a clandestine weather station – radioi
ng regular weather reports to German Headquarters in occupied France.

  During the night of 31 January 1941, Josef Jakobs parachuted out of a German plane into the cold, quiet countryside of Ramsey Hollow in rural Huntingdonshire. Having no more experience as a paratrooper than he had as a spy, Jakobs’ poor landing in a roughly ploughed field left him with a shattered left ankle. Exhausted, freezing cold and racked by wave after wave of searing pain, Jakobs lapsed into unconsciousness only minutes after pulling the parachute over him in an attempt to keep warm. When he awoke in the cold, grey light of morning Jakobs realised immediately just how desperate his situation was. There was no way he could walk, or even stand, but if he didn’t get help very soon he could very well die of exposure. In a desperate attempt to attract help, he fumbled through the briefcase for the pistol and fired two shots into the air, hoping the noise would attract some attention. It did.

  Two farmers out for an early morning stroll with their dogs walked towards the source of the two sharp reports. To their amazement they found a slim, balding man in a business suit and glasses lying unconscious, pistol in hand, nearly covered by a camouflage-patterned parachute, in the middle of a frozen field. While one of the men stayed behind to guard the curious visitor the other went to the nearby town of Ramsey for the police and an ambulance. As a precaution, the local constable asked several members of the Territorial Army to accompany him to the site. As they extricated the semi-conscious Jakobs from his parachute, the soldiers uncovered his briefcase with its radio transmitter, maps and a fistful of banknotes. Obviously, something was very wrong.

  After being taken to the local hospital where his shattered ankle was set and put into a cast, the man was subjected to routine questioning by local authorities. Jakobs constantly denied he was working for the Germans, insisting he had only parachuted into England to escape the Nazis. Certain they had captured a spy, the authorities turned the case, and their prisoner, over to the military authorities who moved Jakobs to Brixton prison where he was officially charged as a spy and sent to appear before a military court martial under strict secrecy. Because of the war, everyone accused of espionage was tried in secret to ensure the enemy never knew which of their agents had been captured and which were still roaming free.

  Under intense questioning Jakobs held to his story, insisting that he was not even German; he was a citizen of Luxembourg who had spent his life in Germany working as a dentist. He even claimed that he was half-Jewish – he couldn’t be a Nazi. As his story unfolded, Jakobs claimed that he had helped other Jews escape from Germany after the Nazis had come to power, and had been arrested and thrown into a concentration camp when his activities were discovered. Although he admitted he had joined the German army, he said he had only done so as a means of escaping almost certain death in the camps and had agreed to become a spy only as a means of escaping the Nazis. All he wanted was to join the anti-Nazi resistance and fight to free his native Luxembourg from German occupation. It was a good story, but the military judges knew that German spies routinely said they were only trying to escape Nazi-occupied Europe. No final decision would be made on the case until there were more facts to go on.

  It didn’t take long for the truth to come out – and it was a strange mixture of Jakobs’ own story and a mountain of far more damning evidence. Josef Jakobs had, indeed, been born a citizen of Luxembourg, but had renounced his citizenship to serve in the Imperial German Army during the First World War. Then, from Switzerland came court records showing that Jakobs had been arrested in 1924 for selling counterfeit gold. And finally came evidence that Jakobs had, indeed helped Jews escape from Germany, but he had charged them extortionate fees for his services. Josef Jakobs was not a victim of Nazi oppression; he was a convicted criminal, an extortionist and a Nazi spy and saboteur. The sentence was death by hanging.

  The problem was, that to be hanged, the condemned had to stand on the scaffold long enough for the trap to be opened – but because of his shattered ankle, Josef Jakobs could not stand at all. Reluctantly, the military court decided Jakobs would face a firing squad; unfortunately, because Brixton prison did not have an active military contingent on duty, there was no way to assemble a firing squad on site. Jakobs would have to be moved elsewhere; and the only place where there were both unused, secure cells and an active military presence was the Tower of London, a contingent of the Scots Guards having been assigned there to guard Rudolf Hess and carry out routine military duties for the duration of the war. Josef Jakobs was duly loaded on to a stretcher, placed in the back of an army lorry and driven from Brixton prison to the Waterloo Block of the Tower. Two days later, on 15 August 1941, he was bundled back on to a stretcher and lifted into the back of an open lorry with two guards. But this time the journey would be much shorter. In his hand was the small Bible which Jakobs had requested from the warden when he first arrived at the Tower.

  As the dark green truck wound its way through the early morning maze of alleyways and lanes inside the Tower complex, one of the guards pinned a small patch of black cloth to the front of Jakobs shirt, just beneath his left breast; it had been cut roughly into the shape of a heart. In front of a long, low building of corrugated metal the truck rolled to a stop. Carefully helping Jakobs off the stretcher and resting him on the tailgate of the lorry, the guards could hear men at the far end of the shed grunting and shuffling something heavy.

  The long, low shed was the rifle range used by the Scots Guards for routine target practice and the men inside were moving bales of hay into position against the rear wall. It was hard work in the August heat, and it was all the more difficult because the ceiling was barely 5 feet high at the end of the shed where the target normally stood. But the target had been removed. In its place was a simple wooden chair. It was towards this chair that the two guards slowly moved the crippled Corporal Josef Jakobs. The nearer they got to the low end of the building, the slower their progress became. Finally they managed to help Jakobs bend forward and turn round so he could sit in the chair facing the open end of the shed.

  Once seated, the officer in charge approached Jakobs and asked him to remove his spectacles. Fumbling with the Bible, his hands shaking, Jakobs complied, handing over his glasses. As the officer gently placed a black hood over Jakobs’ head, eight members of the Scots Guards filed across the open end of the shed. One of the Springfield rifles they carried held a blank cartridge, so there was always the chance that any given man had not fired a fatal shot.

  When the officer of the day walked out of the shed, the eight men threw the bolts in their rifles, loading a shell into the chamber, and took aim at the small black patch on Jakobs’ shirt. At 7.12 a.m. on 15 August 1941, Josef Jakobs became the last man to be executed at the Tower of London in a bloody history stretching back more than nine centuries.

  After his execution, Jakobs was quietly buried at Kensal Rise Cemetery in north-west London. The bullet-riddled chair on which he had sat during his last moments was placed in storage where it remained, almost forgotten – at least it remained nearly forgotten until the summer of 1991.

  As General Chris Tyler led Josef Jakobs’ daughter across the car park near Tower Green, he explained that the old rifle range had been pulled down during the 1960s but he knew approximately where it had been. Leading his charge to the spot, Tyler returned to his office, leaving her to contemplate the fate of a father she had never known. He may have wondered whether he should have told her about the chair.

  In 1997 the Royal Armouries collection was preparing to move from its long-time home in the Tower to a new, modern building in Leeds. In the final special exhibit before the move, a glass case appeared among the objects on display. Inside the case was a simple wooden chair, riddled with small, round holes, each surrounded by a dark brown stain. When questioned if it was appropriate to have put Josef Jakobs’ death chair on display, especially since Jakobs still had living relatives, the Tower’s assistant registrar Robert Chester answered: ‘It was a difficult decision, but in the
end we decided to go ahead. It is, after all, part of the Tower’s history.’

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  GENERAL REFERENCE

  Abbott, G., Great Escapes from the Tower of London, Heinemann, London, 1982

  ——, The Tower of London As It Was, Hendon Publishing, 1988

  Arnold, T. (ed.), The History of the English by Henry, Archdeacon of Huntingdon, Rolls Series, 1879

  The Book of Prisoners,

  Butler, Sir Thomas, Her Majesty’s Tower of London, Pitkin Pictorials, London, 1972

  Carey, John (ed.), Eyewitness to History, Avon Books, New York, 1987

  Carkeet-James, Colonel E.H., Her Majesty’s Tower of London, Staples Press, London, 1953

  Catholic Encyclopedia,

  Chamberlin, Russell, The Tower of London: An Illustrated History, Webb & Bower, London, 1989

  Davey, R., The Tower of London, no publisher given, 1919

  Foxe, John, The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, Vol. VIII, Seeley, Burnside & Seeley, London, 1843–9

  Handbook of British Chronology, 3rd edn, 1986

  Harper, Charles G., The Tower of London, Chapman & Hall, London, 1909

  Hassall, W.O. (ed.), They Saw It Happen 55 BC–1485, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1963

  Headley, Olwen, Prisoners in the Tower, York Minster Library, York, 1979

  Hibbert, Christopher, Tower of London, Reader’s Digest, London, 1971

  Hudson, M.E. and Clark, Mary, Crown of a Thousand Years, Crown Publishers, New York, 1978

  Impey, Edward, and Parnell, Geoffrey, The Tower of London: The Official Illustrated History, Merrill Publishers, London, 2000

  Lewis, Jon E. (ed.), The Mammoth Book of How It Happened, Robinson Publishing, London, 2001