In less than a week, each of the five Frankfurt conversationalists had questioned as many as ten Germans a day, making sure to vary the age of their interviewees as well as their occupation, gender and social background. They had tried to shoehorn into each exchange ten distinct questions, always in a set order. These covered everything from where the subject got their news to whether Germany would win a future war; did they want Germany to win; whether Britain should stand up to Hitler; how the Nazi government treated the workers, the Jews, the Church; whether territorial conquest justified another war, and, a tricky question, was the interviewee prepared to rise up against Hitler? ‘I only once reached that question,’ confessed Raleigh.
The technique was demanding and risky, yet the survey’s success depended on it. Several months earlier Pyke had been granted permission by Dr Gallup, founder of the eponymous survey and head of the American Institute of Public Opinion, to imitate the Gallup technique ‘as closely as is possible in a totalitarian state’. In return any profits from the publication of Pyke’s survey would go to Gallup.
It made poor financial sense, but Pyke needed this Gallup connection to reinforce his survey’s credibility and to make it hard for the Nazi regime to discredit its results. In a broader sense, the German government would find it difficult to criticise the idea of attaching political weight to public opinion. Hitler had used plebiscites to rubber-stamp everything from Germany’s exit from the League of Nations (95 per cent approval) through to the Anschluss with Austria (99.7 per cent approval). Just as the plebiscite had become a recognised political tool in recent years, so had Gallup surveys. Mass Observation, which Pyke had helped to bring about, had also come to the fore with the publication that year of the bestselling Penguin Special Britain by Mass-Observation. Public-opinion polls had never been so fashionable, so scientific and so plausible – which was why Pyke was thrilled by what his team had found.
According to their survey, most Germans did not think Hitler’s desire for territorial conquest justified war. This was remarkable. Nor did they think that war was imminent. ‘Though they admitted the political situation was dangerous,’ explained Raleigh, ‘they seemed to have perfect faith in the fact that [. . .] Hitler didn’t want war and could obtain what he wanted without precipitating one.’ Equally surprising, and key, was the high proportion of those interviewed who were either fed up with the government or professed no opinion. Ambivalence about the Nazi regime – given its nature and the effort required to be anything other than supportive – suggested that these subjects were closer to being anti-Nazi in sentiment than pro-Nazi. A surprising number of people wanted a war just to see Germany lose, as this would mean the end of Nazi rule. Others opened up about their dislike of anti-Semitic discrimination, one man confiding in Smith that he had recently been playing the Violin Concerto in E Minor by Mendelssohn, a banned Jewish composer. ‘If that’s bad music,’ he had told him, ‘then it’s a bad government.’
Of course, these were the results Pyke wanted his conversationalists to find. There is the small possibility that his team deliberately exaggerated their findings. But given the long and detailed reports later produced by each one, and the memoirs they wrote, this seems unlikely.
After several more days in Frankfurt, Pyke returned to London eager to flood Germany with more pollsters. Earlier that summer he had spoken to various statisticians, all of whom had agreed that he needed the results of at least 1,000 interviews, preferably 1,500, for his survey to be statistically valid. So far he had just under 100. If he was able to add more members to his team, and they carried on at their present rate, then in a matter of weeks there would be enough data. But there was still the problem of getting the results out of Germany.
How to Get the Results Out of Germany (with the Help of Josef Goebbels)
There are so many of us out here in Frankfurt that we should form a team and challenge the local golf club to a match.
This was the gist of what Peter Raleigh had just said. We do not know the precise wording, only that he was sitting on the terrace of the Frankfurt Golf Course and was talking to Pyke, and that on hearing this remark the older man had begun to laugh – yet almost immediately his face froze.
‘I felt as epileptics must do when they are about to have an attack, a condition of great but generalised tenseness. I knew that a revelation was coming into my mind, and that the details were falling fast into place. I concentrated on the horizon and in another breath or two my mind was quite clear and I felt as loose and content as I imagine people do when they have received [. . .] religious revelation.’
Pyke’s idea was ingenious, if a little far-fetched. It is interesting mainly for what it tells us about his intellectual technique, and how quickly he was able to develop a new idea.
His first step was to take Raleigh’s joke seriously. Then he extrapolated it. Having imagined his pollsters forming a team, he pictured them taking on every golf club in the area.
What would happen next?
It would be a magnificent PR opportunity for the Nazi regime. ‘A lot of flap’ could be made about England and Germany’s shared love of sport and fair play, as evidenced by this series of golf matches.
Then what? Pyke’s pollsters could exploit Nazi interest in this sporting exchange by inviting a team of German golfers back to England. Crucially, they would have to make sure that both teams left from the same airport. This would guarantee the presence of official German photographers and camera crews at the airport. In turn, this would more or less rule out the possibility of Pyke’s pollsters being strip-searched, so they could bring out the survey results on their persons. Better yet, it would mean that if the Nazi government ever came to question whether this survey had actually taken place, which he hoped they would, Pyke could casually refer to those Nazi publications which had run the story.
This tickled him. Indeed, the idea ‘that the Nazi regime itself had been compelled to bring out of Germany without knowing it the truth about the feelings of the German people would make it ridiculous. It would be an excellent jest. A jest which would achieve an important political result. The laughter would be a double weapon. It would concentrate attention. And it would make them [the Nazis] less paralysingly terrible.’
Laughter played an increasingly prominent part in the way Pyke came up with new ideas. This plan had its roots in a moment of laughter, while at the same time it made use of the political power of laughter when directed at someone or something. Pyke had trained himself to pause every time he laughed and to consider what had set him off. Indeed, laughter was becoming, for him, a gateway to innovation, for, as he wrote, ‘it is the concealed truth that makes the jest’.
In the days after Pyke’s return to London, on 15 August, a German teacher called Lal Burton was dispatched to Hamburg – ‘I find it all interesting here’ – and Edith Lamb was cleared by Professor Higgins. Two more were to go to Bremen; Fred Fuller was in Berlin where he teamed up with one of the only recruits never vetted by Higgins, and on the day that London experienced two mock air-raids, with Spitfires swooping down on a fleet of corpulent French bombers, Stanley Smith’s fiancée was given the all-clear to join him in Germany. Two days later she arrived in Frankfurt laden with cigarettes, money and a list of instructions for Pyke’s team – all of which she had ‘memorised perfectly’. None of these, however, could prepare the linguists for what happened next.
Marjory Watson had been enjoying her evening until a ‘pale, wild-looking young man’ burst into the restaurant and began to shout. She had been conducting an interview with six Frankfurters who had all agreed that territorial gain did not justify another war, and had even come round to her point that the average Briton enjoyed greater political freedoms than their German counterpart. These were typical of the views she had already heard. The conversation had then moved on to rather less combustible questions, like the quality of the wine grown in the Rhineland, only for the young man to fly into the room and shout: ‘We have the non-aggression
pact with Russia. Ribbentrop is going there on Wednesday to sign it!’
It was late on Tuesday, 21 August. Earlier that day talks on a putative military alliance between Britain, France and the USSR had collapsed and now Germany and Russia were to sign a pact of non-aggression to complement the recently finalised economic agreement. Fascism was to unite with communism or, as one Foreign Office official quipped, ‘All the isms are wasms.’
Watson experienced the passivity of extreme shock. ‘There was an almost tangible spirit of excitement spreading amongst the people assembled round the table, and the hostility to my country, latent a moment before, was now alive in each pair of eyes that encountered mine. The wireless was turned on, and amidst a breathless silence the clear, even tones of the announcer made that momentous pronouncement, which was followed by the playing of the Deutschland and the Horst Wessel song. I felt quite stunned with horror, but tried to look as though the news was of but little importance.’
Her companions began to speak over each other in their excitement. War was out of the question . . . Their children would not be sent to the front . . . England was finished . . . Germany could do what she liked in Poland . . . The wound of Versailles would heal at last as Germany took her rightful place in the world . . . One by one they made their excuses and left to celebrate.
The following morning Watson observed the crowds gathering around news-sheets pinned to kiosks and reading with ‘what I can only describe as gloating chuckles’. The national mood was transformed. ‘The word “England” seemed to be on everyone’s lips, and the attitude taken showed me beyond the possibility of doubt that any more work along the lines I had been investigating would not only be useless but actually dangerous.’
At half past three in the morning, several hours after the announcement of Ribbentrop’s trip to Moscow, Pyke drove to the offices of The Times to buy that day’s first edition. Anxious and confused, he returned to his flat and by dawn had composed a series of telegrams to be sent later that morning. He climbed into bed at about six, with a telephone alarm set for nine.
It rang. He came to. He called Sir Robert Vansittart, latterly of the Foreign Office and MI6, who mentioned that he had been up until two in the morning. Pyke chose not to share his own bedtime, asking only that they should meet as soon as possible. Vansittart suggested they talk as he was driven in to work, which was why, at just past ten o’clock, Pyke clambered into the back of Vansittart’s chauffeured car. He was now sitting next to one of the few men in England who could help him extricate from Germany both his conversationalists and their results.
‘I found him full of the same charm as I did last year – a charm which is quite peculiar to him,’ wrote Pyke in his diary. ‘Most unlike a Foreign Office official. Far from holding himself in and making a demonstration of his reserve, he has all the appearance of giving himself with enthusiasm to whatever is in his mind at the moment.’ Vansittart ‘agreed straight off as to the value of the work and the value of the material’, before offering to instruct the British Consul in Berlin to contact Pyke’s conversationalists, collect their results and have them sent to London by diplomatic bag. Pyke agreed, and suggested also that he be appointed King’s Messenger in order to fly out to Berlin and make sure that the survey results made it into the diplomatic bag. Vansittart refused, perhaps realising that there was more to this suggestion than the bearded man was letting on.
At the Foreign Office, Pyke was handed over to a different kind of official – the opposite of Vansittart, ‘typically Foreign Office’ – who worried about endangering the British Consul in Berlin and only agreed to Vansittart’s instructions with reluctance. The telegram had been sent to the British Consul, but still Pyke could not bring himself to order his conversationalists home. Only after calling R. T. Clark, News Editor at the BBC, a man with the inside line on most political crises, did he accept that for the safety of his team he must now scuttle the operation.
Back at Great Ormond Street Pyke sent the telegrams he had prepared the night before to Hentschel in Wiesbaden, Fuller in Berlin, Brook in Bremen, Burton in Hamburg, Cunningham and Raleigh in Frankfurt (to whom he sent money as well). Each member of his team was told to get his results to the British Consul before leaving Germany immediately. He then cabled his network of English correspondents – Ridley, Webber, Hicks and Dowdall – telling them to telephone if any messages came through before taking a moment to write to his son, David, then eighteen and soon to win a place at Cambridge, to see if he would ask his mother to leave London. ‘She will listen to you.’ But not to him.
Later that same day, in spite of not being appointed King’s Messenger, Pyke made the decision to fly out to Berlin. He contacted his friend Sidney Elliott at Reynolds News to see if he would give him press accreditation. He wanted to be the paper’s Berlin correspondent. Twenty-five years after his first attempt with the Chronicle, Pyke hoped to have another go at being an undercover war correspondent in the German capital. Clearly this episode still rankled.
Yet before he could find a flight, messages began to arrive at Great Ormond Street. His plans went on hold. Lamb, Hentschel and Raleigh were together in Frankfurt. The others had already left. For a moment, receiving one telegram out of chronological order, Pyke imagined Raleigh to be missing, which led to ‘a momentary loss of consciousness from shock. Owing to Peter’s youth and appearance, I identify him with David, and the idea of his being in any danger is quite unendurable to me.’ Perhaps he also identified Raleigh with a younger version of himself, having been the same age when he first set out for Germany. Raleigh was not missing, but he was not heading for home either.
The night before he should have returned to London, Peter Raleigh, in Frankfurt, had met the Mexican Consul in ‘a rather dreary night-club’ and had promised to play table tennis with him the next day. ‘Which is how I found myself in a grand suburban villa playing ping-pong with this tiny man whose chest hardly cleared the table, while outside in the garden confidential documents burned slowly in a brazier and flakes of ash rose into the still afternoon air.’ Having never received the message about getting his results to the British Consul in Berlin, Raleigh merely shoved them in his pocket and made for the frontier.
Just before entering Holland the train stopped for German police to search everyone’s belongings. Raleigh was in trouble. Thinking fast, he took out his wallet where he found a picture of ‘a former girlfriend posing on a Cornish beach in a two-piece bathing costume’. He slipped this into his passport and hopped off the train with the survey results in his pocket. One of the soldiers on the platform stepped forward and asked to see his papers. Opening Raleigh’s passport, he saw the picture of the ex-girlfriend.
There followed a colourful conversation ‘about the pleasures that were to be found in life’, before Raleigh was waved through to the station café where he sipped patiently at a cup of tea while the inspection continued on board. Once it had finished the train began to pull off, at which point Raleigh ran back on with the survey results still in his pocket.
Pyke’s relief at the safe return of his team was little short of parental. ‘I felt so delighted that I almost kissed her on the spot,’ he wrote of seeing Edith Lamb. ‘The more I see of Stanley [Smith], the more I admire his qualities and like him.’ Lamb had become ‘full of quiet self-confidence’. Cunningham, on the other hand, appeared to have been ‘knocked out’ by the experience. The change in Raleigh was most compelling. ‘I find his posing delightful. He will not, I think, be capable, like my David would, of saying quite frankly that he felt pleased with himself. I shall tease him gently so as to introduce him to the idea that one’s emotions are as much fact, and as little to be ashamed of, as a brick wall.’
That night, as the conversationalists swapped tales of Nazi Germany, of close shaves with men and women who might have been with the Gestapo, or those who had guessed what they were up to – they would never know for sure – all agreed that once the results had arrived back from Berlin they should
be publicised as soon as possible. War might erupt at any moment, but as they knew from Munich the year before, the crisis might just as easily blow over. None of them was sure what the next few weeks could hold. Nor did they have any inkling that their operation had come to the attention of MI5.
On the day that Ribbentrop flew to Moscow, a young woman in Golders Green remarked to her neighbour that ‘there will be no war’. This was hardly unusual. All over the country similar and opposite views were exchanged, but this woman claimed to know that there would be no war because she was ‘in the Secret Service’. Her neighbour happened to be friendly with someone else who worked for British intelligence, and who soon established that this young woman was not part of MI5 or SIS. He also discovered that she was receiving letters from Germany, which raised the indelicate possibility that she was working for a different ‘secret service’.
For most of the 1930s, MI5 was a small and often unloved government department which suffered periodically from cuts. Its greatest coup over the last few years had been the infiltration and exposure of a Soviet spy ring in the Woolwich Arsenal. While MI5 did not possess the resources to follow up every lead this case had presented, it managed to prosecute the ringleader, Percy Glading, who turned out to be a Soviet agent. What piqued their interest in the woman from Golders Green was that she had a friend in common with Glading.
She had told her neighbour that she could be contacted during the day on Holborn 6119. This number was passed on to B.2.b, the MI5 Counter-Espionage section, where the subscriber was found to be a man who had come to MI5’s attention several times over the last few years – Geoffrey Pyke.
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