‘This organisation will be known as the Special Operations Executive,’ announced its founding charter, signed off by Neville Chamberlain, the former Prime Minister, in his final government role as Lord President.13 Deniable, free from parliamentary control and financed from secret funds, it was formed from an amalgamation of Section D, MI(R) and a third organisation, Electra House, which had been concerned with subversive propaganda, and was placed under the control of the Minister of Economic Warfare. In 1940, this was Hugh Dalton, Labour Member of Parliament for Bishop Auckland. Hugely enthusiastic about the possibilities of irregular warfare and the potential of occupied populations to contribute to the British war effort, Dalton had lobbied hard for SOE to be created, for it to be divorced from military control, and for himself to be put in charge of it. His job was not to direct its operations but to act as the political head to whom all major issues of policy would be referred, speak for SOE when relevant matters were discussed at ministerial level, and liaise with the Foreign Secretary, the Chiefs of Staff and other government and military bodies whenever its activities touched on their interests. It was Dalton who recorded in his diary Churchill’s famous injunction that he should now ‘set Europe ablaze’.14
Today, SOE is rarely mentioned without some reference to that command. But in 1940 the reality was that it was a fledgling organisation scarcely capable of setting fire to anything at all. Before it could function properly a great deal of groundwork was required, ranging from the establishment of headquarters offices and training schools, to the recruitment of prospective agents, to the setting up and staffing of the sections and desks assigned to the various countries and tasks with which it was to involve itself. Even when progress began along these lines, SOE found itself struggling to secure essential support from the Air Ministry, for example, which proved reluctant to divert valuable aircraft from what it considered to be the more profitable and war-winning activity of strategic bombing. MI6, too, proved reluctant to help out, resenting and fearing that the loud crashes and bangs associated with SOE activities might upset the quieter work of its own agents who were anxious not to attract enemy attention.
During this early period SOE inherited many of the plans and personnel of Section D, MI(R) and Electra House, though their value was patchy. Very often there was scarcely anything to inherit, Italy being a case in point. With Salvadori in the United States and his friends in France scattered, SOE knew of no Italians who might be hostile to Mussolini’s regime and were within easy reach. Although Britain was finally at war with Italy, there were few foundations on which to build; the problem was ‘to get the horse in after the stable door has been shut’, as its in-house war diary put it, ‘and first of all the horse must be found’.15
But SOE did inherit the beginnings of one tiny anti-Italian campaign. Since September 1939, when Britain and France had gone to war with Nazi Germany, the Balkans had remained neutral, un-invaded and untouched. Based in cities as far apart as Athens, Zagreb, Bucharest and Belgrade, Section D and, to a lesser extent, MI(R) had nevertheless managed to embark on an underground war against Germany by a variety of devious means: drafting and disseminating propaganda to counter Nazi influence and intentions; trying to sabotage trains en route to Austria and Germany; drawing up plans to prevent German vessels from plying the Danube; preparing coups and revolts; bribing politicians; smuggling arms and explosives across borders; and so on. A good deal of this activity was in the hands of young British agents who were absolute novices in this line of work. ‘We were all very young, very inexperienced, very amateurish and very ignorant,’ remembered one of them, who, as a 24-year-old journalist in 1940, had been sent out to Budapest to bribe locals and print propaganda.16 Nevertheless, and despite the prolonged ban on anti-Italian planning, some of the more successful activities included a few tentative preparations for Italy’s entry into the war.
Partly responsible for that early anti-Italian activity was a young Englishman, Alec Lawrenson, a schoolmaster’s son from South Shields. When war with Germany broke out, Lawrenson, then twenty-nine, had been lecturing in English at the University of Ljubljana on behalf of the British Council, an organisation set up to promote British culture and English-teaching overseas. Not long afterwards, a man named Julius Hanau arrived from Belgrade to see him. Hanau, a South African businessman and Section D’s chief agent in Yugoslavia, asked Lawrenson if he would be willing to work for him, too. Lawrenson agreed to do what he could.
The fact that Lawrenson was able to achieve anything against Italy from Yugoslavia owed almost everything to the advice and capabilities of his friends and contacts among local Slovene nationalists. Beginning in 1918 and formalised in 1920, Italian control of what became known as Venezia-Giulia, which contained a quarter of the Slovene population and over 150,000 Croats, had sought from the start to suppress any Slovene or Croat feeling through a radical policy of denationalisation, to the point of stamping out Slovene in schools, forbidding Slovene names to be given to new-born babies, and arresting, and sometimes executing, Slovene patriots who tried to protest: of the nine people condemned to death by Italy’s Special Tribunal prior to 1940, five were Slavs. Having endured twenty years of this, the men with whom Lawrenson was in touch burned with hatred of all things Italian and included many with long experience of anti-Italian work.17 By 1940, with their help, which included ready contact with the oppressed and unhappy Slovene minorities inside Italy, he had started to introduce propaganda – letters, news-sheets and posters, mainly – and encourage and help his friends to tamper with goods trains crossing the border. One method of sabotage was to daub small balls of pitch filled with abrasive steel filings on to the axle-bearings of rolling stock. By February 1940, 12,000 of these ‘hotbox drops,’ as they were called, had reportedly been smuggled across.
For months this was about as far as Lawrenson could go. With Britain in desperate straits and fast losing footholds and friends on the Continent, he was hamstrung by the priority placed by British policy-makers on doing nothing to endanger either Italian or Yugoslav neutrality. He had also found himself distinctly out of favour with the local Foreign Office representative, T. C. Rapp, the British Consul in Zagreb. Alarmed that a member of the British Council should be moonlighting as an unpaid secret agent, Rapp went so far as to refuse to give Lawrenson the mail sent up to him from his Section D masters in Belgrade. In the end, Lawrenson’s superiors intervened, Rapp was instructed not to interfere, and Lawrenson resigned from the British Council to become a full-time and paid-up member of Section D with the cover of vice-consul in Ljubljana.
After Italy entered the war and Section D was wound down, Lawrenson, who was absorbed into SOE and given charge of its work in northern Yugoslavia, broadened his efforts and helped organise the dispatch of anti-Fascist newsletters and leaflets to thousands of Italian addresses taken from telephone books. He also helped to equip the Slovenes with some unusual pieces of coal. Hollowed out and filled with high explosive and a heat-operated detonating device, these were meant for secreting inside coal trucks and locomotive tenders on lines inside northern Italy. Lurid rumours of what might be afoot eventually reached the Italians. ‘In an unknown house on the outskirts of Zagreb explosive material is handled, destined for terrorist action in Italy,’ reads an Italian report from September 1940.
Explosives in the form of fountain pens and small pocket bombs with terrific destructive power are said to be manufactured there. The Englishmen have this material transported by certain of our younger [Slovene] nationalists to Italy, where they employ it, according to instructions, for destruction of railway carriages and stations, barracks, factories and ammunition dumps.18
Arrests among his co-conspirators and other enemy counter-measures would soon curb Lawrenson’s work. Then, in April 1941, everything that he was trying to do was extinguished when a lightning German Blitzkrieg swept through the Balkans. Lawrenson was among the men overrun, and he saw out the war as a prisoner in Germany. But though short-lived and small-sca
le, his efforts would remain, for months to come, the only subversive activities inside Italy in which SOE engaged that would have much result at all. They had been dangerous, too, and not without cost.
In the early summer of 1940, a letter arrived at the British Council offices in London from Geoffrey Frodsham, director of the British Council Institute in Zagreb. In it Frodsham highlighted the growing hostility shown by the Germans towards British Council teachers working in Yugoslavia. ‘In German eyes the whole British Council and all its activities are thoroughly suspect,’ he had typed, ‘and all its officers are looked upon as secret agents or the like. This is quite clearly shown by the attacks in the German Press on the Teaching Department here, and the personal attacks over the wireless on myself … The Germans, making no distinction between cultural and political propaganda themselves, cannot believe that we do so.’19 Lincolnshire-born and the son of a bishop, the 38-year-old Frodsham was an unmarried Cambridge graduate who had taught abroad since 1932 when he had taken up his first post in Prague. At noon on 8 September 1940, four months after writing that letter, he was found in bed in his Zagreb flat, dead.
His late father had been a zealous and adventurous evangelist in Southeast Asia, but ‘Geoffrey Frodsham could never have championed a particular cause’, considered the author of his Times obituary, printed a week later. ‘His mind was detached and his habits bookish … [T]emperamentally he bore less resemblance to the sturdy Frodshams than to the artistic Swinburnes, his mother’s family.’ In Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia this quiet and gentle man had become, ‘in spite of himself, a cultural missionary’. But ‘the blows delivered by the Munich agreement and the German occupation of Prague’ had been hard to bear, while that summer there had been ‘a still greater blow – the capitulation of his beloved France’.20 Now he was dead in a flat full of gas from a disconnected pipe in the kitchen.
When Frodsham’s body was found, the police let some of his friends inspect the scene. One was Alec Lawrenson. ‘At first sight the circumstances of his death appeared to indicate suicide,’ he wrote afterwards. ‘The flat was full of gas and the windows were tightly shut … Accident was out of the question [as] … the rubber tube through which the gas escaped into the flat had been carefully propped up after it had been disconnected from the gas‑ring.’21
For Lawrenson, however, Frodsham’s flat was the scene of a murder. His friend had been ‘suffocated,’ he felt, and the gas turned on ‘in order to give the appearance of attempted suicide’. He noted that ‘no attempt had been made to pack the window crevices with paper, etc.’, and that Frodsham’s flat was on the ground floor: ‘he normally slept with his windows open so that it was easy for any person to enter the flat from the street. Both the front door to the flat and the main house door were fitted with spring locks; once inside the flat it would be a simple matter to open these doors from the inside and let them slam-to after leaving.’ Lawrenson noted, too, that the night had been a hot one, which made it even more odd that Frodsham’s windows were found closed, while little alcohol had been found in Frodsham’s blood, which dispelled one idea suggested by the Zagreb police that he might have succumbed to some sort of drunken accident. As for Frodsham’s mental state, Lawrenson learned that a British Council colleague in Zagreb had found him in ‘an equable frame of mind’ at dinner the previous evening; the pair had also agreed to meet for lunch the next day. ‘It might be added that [he] was devoted to his mother, who was in part dependent on him, and that there was no message of any kind left for her.’ Also, Lawrenson felt, it was inconceivable that Frodsham would have ‘made away with himself’ while leaving ‘everything in disorder, even to the extent of leaving compromising papers and material in the flat’.22
By ‘compromising’ material, Lawrenson meant ‘secret’. The objects left lying around included pieces of explosive-filled coal. Earlier that summer, while still employed by the British Council, Frodsham had started working quietly on the side for SOE. Having known him for years, Lawrenson had sought him out because he needed a good assistant. ‘[He] worked hand in hand with me in Slovenia and Croatia,’ Lawrenson wrote of him later. ‘I introduced him to all my contacts in this territory and he accompanied me twice to Belgrade.’ Frodsham was ‘keen, conscientious and completely reliable’; he seemed to have been ‘looking forward to a long and successful period of activity for SOE’; and he had died when he was being relied upon: Lawrenson, away visiting sub-agents, had left him in charge.23
This seemed to provide further grounds on which to doubt that Frodsham’s death was suicide. It also emerged that he had died not long after three Gestapo killers were heard to have arrived in Belgrade with orders to murder Julius Hanau, Lawrenson’s boss. Lawrenson himself had been warned to watch his back after a report was received that ‘the chief Gestapo agent’ in Ljubljana was ‘a dangerous assassin’.24 On top of that, Frodsham had last been seen alive in a bar frequented by Germans and complaining of a headache: ‘possibly due to dope’, Lawrenson thought. There was a question mark too over the ‘gratuitous efforts’ made by Frodsham’s housemaid to prove that the death had been suicide when his body was found next day.25
Lawrenson had no doubts as to how Frodsham had met his end. ‘I was firmly convinced’, he wrote, ‘that D/H 36 [Frodsham’s ‘symbol’] had been the victim of assassination – almost certainly engineered by the Germans.’26 His colleagues agreed. Although investigations went no further and no assassin was ever unmasked, SOE files record Frodsham’s death as ‘killed in action’ and that his colleagues in Yugoslavia urged London to reassure his mother that his death was ‘not rpt not suicide’.27 It is possible that that reassurance never reached Frodsham’s family. His name seems to be absent from official lists of Britain’s wartime dead. It is missing, too, from the war memorial of Magdalene College, Cambridge, his beloved alma mater. Indeed, the loaded tone of his Times obituary may well indicate that the family had details of his death only from the British Council, which had been studiously kept in the dark about his clandestine activities in order to avoid an ‘unfavourable’ reaction. Certainly someone failed Frodsham’s family. Years later, when he emerged from his German internment, Lawrenson heard that Frodsham’s mother first learned of her son’s death when she read about it in the paper. Unworthy, too, Lawrenson felt, was the fact she failed to receive a suitable pension in recognition, as he put it, of the ‘short but valuable services’ of a man ‘killed in the performance of his duties’.28
Notes
1 ‘Report by the Right Hon. Sir Percy Loraine, Bt., GCMG, on his Mission to Rome, May 2, 1939, to June 11, 1940’, TNA FO 371/33232.
2 M. Muggeridge (ed.), Ciano’s Diary 1939–1943 (London: Heinemann, 1947), pp. 263–4.
3 R. Lamb, Mussolini and the British (London: John Murray, 1997), p. 286.
4 J. Colville, The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries 1939–1955 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1985), p. 152.
5 Ibid.
6 ‘SOE: Early History to September 1940’, TNA HS 7/3.
7 John F. Parke, ‘Hamilton Ellis – An Appreciation’, Railway World, September 1987.
8 C. H. Ellis to Mr Strauss, 9 June 1940, TNA HS 9/477/7.
9 ‘SOE: Early History to September 1940’, TNA HS 7/3.
10 ‘Mr Hamilton Ellis’, F. Strauss to Major L. Humphreys, 9 July 1940, TNA HS 9/477/7.
11 ‘SOE: Early History to September 1940’, TNA HS 7/3.
12 Ibid.
13 W. J. M. Mackenzie, The Secret History of SOE, p. 754.
14 B. Pimlott (ed.), The Second World War Diary of Hugh Dalton (London: Jonathan Cape, 1986), p. 62.
15 SOE War Diary, TNA HS 7/211.
16 Basil Davidson, interview No. 8682, Imperial War Museum Sound Archive. ‘We were totally amateurish – totally, one hundred per cent amateurish – and it couldn’t have been otherwise,’ Davidson adds in his interview. ‘You can’t suddenly create an effective organisation with the aims that SOE had, which were to support resistance and promote resis
tance in countries that might be occupied and, when they were occupied, to keep the links going and to help the people who were resisting.’
17 For more on British activities in Slovenia during and after this period, see: G. Bajc, ‘Collaboration between Slovenes from the Primorska Region, the Special Operations Executive and the Inter-Services Liaison Department after the Occupation of Yugoslavia (6 April 1941)’, Annales: Series Historia et Sociologia, 11/2, 2002, pp. 363–84; G. Bajc, Iz nevidnega na plan: slovenski primorski liberalni narodnjaki v emigraciji med drugo svetovno vojno in ozadje britanskih misij v Sloveniji (Koper: Založba Annales, 2002); and J. Pirjevec, ‘Britanska tajna organizacija na Slovenskem (1940–1941)’, Prispevki za nojejšo zgodovino (2010), 40/1, pp. 323–30.
18 ‘Italian Information on English Terrorist action in Jugoslavia’, 26 September 1940, TNA HS 5/895.
19 G. S. Frodsham to M. H. S. Everett, 17 May 1940, TNA BW 66/6.
20 The Times, 14 September 1940.
21 ‘Note on the death of G. S. Frodsham’, A. Lawrenson to Colonel G. Taylor, 5 June 1945, TNA HS 9/546.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid.
24 Section D History, TNA HS 7/4.
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