Churchill’s pledge to fight on was made more credible by what was to happen that week on the other side of the Channel. With hundreds of thousands of British troops stranded at Dunkirk, the Royal Navy ordered every ship on the south coast of England to sail for France. Over the space of nine days, between 26 May and 4 June, more than 330,000 men were rescued, despite attacks from the German navy and air force. Britain now had the troops to fight Hitler, even if they’d been forced to leave much of their equipment behind.
But this victory in turn raised an immediate question on both sides of the Channel: if Britain could move hundreds of thousands of men from France to England under enemy fire, why couldn’t Germany? German planners began to work out how they might pull off such a feat, while in Britain the generals debated how best to fight off the invader. Everywhere there were reminders that the government expected the Germans to arrive soon: obstacles in fields to stop planes from landing; road signs removed for fear they might assist the enemy.
If ordinary Britons questioned whether invasion really was a possibility, the government did its best to remove such doubts when, in the middle of June, it sent a leaflet to every household in the country entitled ‘If the Invader Comes’. Its message was that everyone must play their part in the coming struggle. ‘Hitler’s invasions of Poland, Holland and Belgium were greatly helped by the fact that the civilian population was taken by surprise,’ the leaflet explained. ‘They did not know what to do when the moment came. You must not be taken by surprise.’ The public response was mixed. Some people were terrified, while others felt the leaflet’s patronising tone was ridiculous.
Everywhere, able-bodied men were being pressed into service. In his late twenties, Windsor was a prime candidate for the military. Failing that, he could have been among the 1.5 million men who by August had signed up for the Local Defence Volunteers. But when he was called up, he secured an extension, saying he needed time to sell his business or find a manager. He was, he claimed later, prepared to sign up as an engineer, but what he wanted ‘to avoid if possible was getting into any part of the Army where I might have to walk miles’, because it disagreed with his feet.
One of Churchill’s first acts as prime minister was to respond to growing fears about the loyalty of the British Union by outlawing the party and locking up Mosley and the group’s other leaders. The popular press welcomed the move. ‘Britain’s pocket Fuehrer is hauled in,’ the Daily Express trumpeted. The Daily Mirror felt this was long overdue. ‘Precautions that should have been taken years ago are now being applied to the Judas Association (British Branch),’ it told its readers.
Windsor had responded to the crackdown by destroying all of his BU branch’s paperwork – he said he didn’t want the police to find anything that might lead them to other members. But in secret, he fought on. He kept his branch going, organising meetings in the back room of his shop where his little group discussed how Britain had been dragged into war against its natural ally by the Jews, and what they might do to restore common sense to the nation. Which would clearly come only with a swift military defeat for the Churchill government.
How could they help to bring that about? They discussed carrying out sabotage operations against airfields and factories. They considered whether they could gather military intelligence and pass it to Germany. And they talked about whether they could blow things up during the blackout. It was the final idea that Windsor and Gannon planned to put into action that August evening. By starting a fire in Leeds city centre, they hoped to guide the Luftwaffe’s bombers in. They would strike a blow against the war effort, against the blackout, and for Germany. And they would do it in a way that chimed with one of Windsor’s personal grievances.
Sidney Dawson and his wife Dolly together ran a small chain of shops across Leeds. Known locally as ‘the Murder Man’, thanks to his slogan ‘We Don’t Cut Prices – We Murder Them’, Sidney was the kind of competitor – undercutting his own business – that Windsor loathed. This was also, he knew, exactly the sort of business Mosley had in mind when he attacked ‘alien finance’ and ‘price-cutting’: the Dawsons were Jewish. ‘A cheap place where actually it was all rubbish,’ was Windsor’s verdict on Dawson’s. Even though the stock was cut-price, ‘it was not worth the price the fellow used to ask’.
So, Windsor had selected as the evening’s target a branch of Dawson’s on Wellington Road, which ran south-west out of the city centre. The shop had the strategic advantage of being close to several railway yards and right next to the main London, Midland and Scottish Railway line. Some nearby gas towers would also burn well if bombed.
The buildings along Wellington Road were black with soot and grime. Tramlines ran down the middle of the wide, cobbled street, but there was no sign of activity that night. The two men approached Dawson’s cautiously and stood in the doorway. The building was silent. They took turns to peer through the letter box. No one there. But then, just as they were preparing to act, they heard a noise from the flat above the shop. The pair panicked and fled.
Once they’d got to what they judged a safe distance, they collected themselves and considered what to do. They wanted to go through with their plan, but they didn’t dare go back to Wellington Road. There was, however, another branch of Dawson’s about twenty minutes’ walk away. It wasn’t quite as central as the Wellington Road branch, but it was right next to a railway viaduct, and another gasworks. Surely those would be useful targets for the Luftwaffe?
This time, the two were determined to go through with their mission. As they peered through the second shop’s letter flap, they could see some kind of curtain on the other side, probably a blackout measure. They didn’t have much to start a fire with, except a cigarette lighter, so they pulled out the petrol-soaked wool from it, and started to push it through the slit.
Just then, the slow rising and falling wail of the air-raid sirens began. The bombers were coming! Windsor would later claim he’d told Gannon to wait for the raid to pass, but it seems unlikely that the two nervous young men would have been prepared to stay crouched in a shop doorway as the sirens howled above them, especially when their purpose was to help the bombers.
With Windsor standing with his back to the door to conceal his friend, Gannon lit the wool from the lighter and quickly pushed it through the door. They saw a flash as some paper on the floor caught fire, and ran.
The two were therefore not around to see their arson attempt thwarted. After they’d disappeared, someone spotted the flames in the shop and called the fire brigade, who put it out before much damage had been done. In any case, there was no Luftwaffe raid. The enemy planes that had been spotted over England’s north-east coast sixty miles away turned back without attacking.
Windsor and Gannon may have been disappointed not to have caused a larger fire, or to have summoned the bombers, but they still succeeded in scaring Sidney and Dolly Dawson. Two weeks after the arson attempt, the couple put their only child, twelve-year-old Olive, on board the Duchess of Atholl liner to Canada, where she would spend the next four years living with her aunt. In their view, England wasn’t safe for Jewish children any more.
What neither Windsor nor Gannon suspected that Sunday evening, as they hurried away through the darkness with the sirens sounding the single high note of the All Clear, was that MI5 was already on their trail.
Three weeks earlier the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, responsible for espionage operations outside British territory, had passed a letter to its sister agency MI5, the Security Service. From someone calling himself A. D. Lewis, it warned that some members of the banned British Union of Fascists were continuing to meet in Leeds. A second letter repeating the allegation arrived at MI6 a fortnight later, which, since domestic counter-subversion was MI5’s job, they again passed on.
That summer, MI5 was a service in chaos. The declaration of war had led to a huge expansion of its responsibilities, and a recruitment drive to match. In search of more space, the organisation shifted its offices
from the seventh floor of Thames House, a few minutes upriver from the Houses of Parliament, to Wormwood Scrubs prison. Sitting in the recently vacated cells – and, on occasion, accidentally getting locked into them – the staff were overwhelmed by reports of German spying and sabotage sent in by suddenly suspicious members of the public.
But the letters from Lewis were noticed, and taken seriously. Three weeks after the first one arrived at MI5, and a couple of days after Windsor and Gannon’s arson expedition, Lewis visited London, where he was interviewed by MI5 officers responsible for investigating right-wing groups. He had a story to tell.
Two months earlier, shortly after the BU leaders had been arrested, Lewis had walked into Windsor’s shop and, after checking they were alone, turned back the lapel on his coat to reveal a badge with the distinctive lightning-bolt-in-a-circle of the BU. ‘I am not a copper,’ he’d begun. Instead, he said, he was a bus driver called Wells, and a fellow fascist. He also claimed that he’d been sent to make contact with Windsor by a mutual acquaintance in the West Leeds BU. According to the account he gave MI5, Lewis was a loyal citizen who had learned that Windsor’s group was still meeting in secret, and had decided to find out what it was up to.
Business had been hard for Windsor in recent months – a number of customers had taken to avoiding a shop run by a fascist – but he’d begun to pick up business from soldiers training at the Royal Army Medical Corps hospital up the road. On their afternoons off, they would often come to loaf around his shop’s back room, play cards or darts, or borrow books from the tiny library he kept there. But on Sunday evenings the room had another purpose, as Lewis discovered when Windsor invited him to come to a meeting.
As well as Windsor and Gannon, there were around half a dozen fellow BU members present. Lewis told MI5 that the group had come up with three plans to further the fascist cause: throw bombs; sabotage factories and airfields; and pass information on to Germany.
The first idea had been rejected because they didn’t have the funds (or, in all likelihood, the ability) to make bombs. They also feared that such a brazen act would lead the government to decide to arrest those BU members who were still at liberty, such as themselves. The other two plans, they felt, had merit but so far had remained simply talk. The only woman in the group, a nineteen-year-old shop assistant called Angela Crewe, was particularly taken with the idea of passing information to Germany. Lewis told MI5 that she’d ‘said that she could contact serving officers and could obtain information regarding the location of aerodromes and vital factories’. How exactly she planned to do this wasn’t explained, but she may have seen herself as Yorkshire’s answer to Mata Hari.
Windsor would later claim that he had been suspicious of ‘Wells’ all along, not least because of his initial insistence that he wasn’t with the police. But he invited him to the meetings, and agreed that Wells should travel to London to try to make contact with other BU members. Which was what Windsor thought Wells was doing as he sat with the men from MI5.
Lewis’s account excited the Security Service. ‘Although these people are of no great importance in themselves the case is worthy of mention in that it throws considerable light on the general question of Fascist and “Fifth Column” activities in this country,’ a report noted. This was the question greatly troubling MI5 at the time: how many disloyal people were there in the country, and how might they be uncovered?
Around the world it was accepted that part of the reason for Hitler’s swift advance through Europe had been networks of agents behind the lines, so-called ‘Fifth Columnists’ who passed information to the advancing troops, sheltered parachutists and carried out sabotage operations. The Chicago Daily News told its readers that the capture of Norway’s cities was not the work of soldiers. ‘They were seized with unparalleled speed by means of a gigantic conspiracy,’ it explained. ‘By bribery and extraordinary infiltration on the part of Nazi agents, and by treason on the part of a few highly placed Norwegian civilians, and defence officials, the German dictatorship built its Trojan Horse inside Norway.’ The article, which was reprinted in several British papers, claimed that the commander of a Norwegian naval base had been ordered not to oppose the German forces, and that a minefield elsewhere had been disconnected from its control point. If anyone was inclined to doubt these tales, it was undeniable that in the hours after Germany invaded Norway, the country’s former defence minister and leader of its fascist party, Vidkun Quisling, had attempted to seize power and order troops to stand down. In Britain, his name rapidly passed into the language as a synonym for ‘traitor’.
MI5’s job was to find the Fifth Columnists in Britain before the Germans invaded. One avenue was to monitor German citizens still living in Britain, but British fascists were the next obvious people to investigate.
Lewis’s testimony seemed to offer both proof that Fifth Column groups existed and a way into the organisation. Guy Liddell, MI5’s head of counter-espionage, noting the group’s existence in his diary, mused that perhaps the Security Service itself could put the Leeds fascists in touch with German spies in Portugal – the neutral country with links to both Britain and Germany that was the jumping-off point for much of the war’s espionage – possibly with the goal of using them to gain access to the enemy’s intelligence networks.
MI5 sent Lewis back to Leeds and considered their options. The idea of allowing Lewis to work the case on his own was rejected. Although he was obviously a man of some initiative, and MI5 were inclined to think him both honest and loyal to his country, a case such as this required considerable subtlety. It was vital not to cross the line from undercover operative to agent provocateur – from observing illegal acts to instigating them. As they questioned Lewis, it had become clear to the MI5 officers that he had not observed this rule. Leaving the ethics of such behaviour aside, it would scupper any prosecution if the government’s witness was revealed to have encouraged the wrongdoing.
So they decided to send in their own man alongside Lewis. On Friday 23 August, Eric Roberts, late of the Euston Road branch of the Westminster Bank, arrived in Leeds. His orders were to assess Windsor’s group for himself, and report on their intentions, what danger they represented – and to what extent their behaviour was the result of Lewis’s encouragement.
It was a delicate mission to give to a man who had joined MI5 less than two months earlier, at the start of July. Before he left for Leeds, Roberts was warned about how far he could go as an undercover agent. ‘It was impressed on him very strongly that once he was satisfied that these persons either separately or jointly were prepared to act in an illegal manner, it was quite justifiable for him to represent himself as a sympathiser or collaborator,’ Sydney Noakes, the lawyer running the case, wrote. ‘But that under no circumstances must he make suggestions to them which might in any way be considered provocation.’
The man who walked with ‘Wells’ into Windsor’s shop that afternoon was six foot tall with tanned skin and dark, close-cropped hair that was thinning on top, making him look older than his 33 years. He was well built, with the controlled movements of an athlete. Under the shade of his trilby hat could be seen a distinctive scar on his cheek. It hinted that this man was familiar with danger, and might be dangerous himself. Windsor’s immediate instinct was caution.
But then the man began talking.
Eric Roberts’s charm was hard to resist. His smile carried warmth and humour but also something more: a sense that he was genuinely pleased to meet you. It was a smile that made other people smile back. Windsor’s momentary doubt disappeared. Whoever this man was, he liked him.
Lewis introduced him. This was Mr Roberts, a British Union contact he had made in London. Windsor was enthusiastic. The men chatted briefly, but agreed that it would be best to talk in private. They would rendezvous that evening at Windsor’s home.
The shopkeeper lived with his wife a couple of minutes away, on an estate of recently built bay-fronted houses. When they met there, Roberts set about winni
ng Windsor’s trust. Smoking cigarette after cigarette, he took the role of a senior BU man, now operating underground since the arrests of his colleagues, building a network around the country. He played the part with humour and gentleness, coaxing his target to trust him. The introverted Windsor was delighted to have this important man on his secret mission sitting in his house and listening with such interest to his opinions and plans, and his enthusiasm for their mutual cause came pouring out.
Under the affable exterior, Roberts was assessing his target. Windsor was ‘violently anti-Semitic’, he noted, and ‘talked a great deal about sabotage and arson’. But was he a serious threat? He certainly claimed to be: the shopkeeper wanted Roberts to put him in touch with someone senior in the BU who could set him to work.
The next day was Saturday, and Windsor took Roberts round Leeds, keen to introduce some of the members of his network. It proved an underwhelming tour, consisting as it did of an elderly Italian waiter whom Windsor insisted was a keen fascist and an optician who could apparently tell them how to make bombs – but refused to do so.
Windsor was keen on bombs. He asked Roberts for his views on the relative merits of throwing them or planting them: personally, he favoured the idea of hurling them from the top of a tram as it made its way through the city. The height would be a great advantage in increasing the range of your throw, and you would be carried away from the site of the blast before anyone had worked out what was happening.
Just as Roberts was wondering if this man was merely a fantasist, Windsor said something that made him sit up. His talk of arson wasn’t all theoretical: he and his friend had set fire to a Jewish shop three weeks earlier.
Agent Jack Page 2
