Agent Jack

by Robert Hutton

  As he described the attack on Dawson’s shop to Roberts, Windsor gave it the air of a spur-of-the-moment act. He didn’t mention the first, abortive attempt, but instead suggested their failure to start a bigger fire was the result of not having brought out the proper tools with them.

  The conversation moved Windsor into a new category. Arson isn’t a difficult trick to master, and one attempt meant another was likely. It was only a matter of time before Windsor succeeded in starting a fire. Even if he didn’t summon the Luftwaffe, he could still kill people.

  At 6 p.m. on the Sunday, Roberts arrived to meet the rest of the group in the back room of Windsor’s shop. Angela Crewe wasn’t there, but Gannon and three other men were. Their host introduced their guest, and announced that he would now address them on current BU policy. As the party’s leaders were all in prison and the organisation was effectively illegal, this was something of a challenge for Roberts, but he did so as best he could. In brief, he said, Mosley’s policy since the start of the war had been to leaven his pacifism towards Germany with patriotism for Britain: the BU believed the war was a mistake, but its members would defend their country if it was attacked.

  At least one of those present was dissatisfied with these platitudes. One of four brothers who had joined the Blackshirts in the early 1930s, Sydney Charnley was a baker, a small, tough, angry man with receding hair and a thin moustache. His younger brother John had been the BU District Leader in Hull, and was now in prison. The whole family were veterans of the running battles between fascists and communists of the previous decade. One of those fights, in Manchester, had ended with John being thrown through a plate glass window.

  Charnley had come along hoping to hear about how the BU was organising active resistance to the government. He wanted Roberts to explain what part they could play and give them orders on illegal activities to undertake – not simply tell them things they already knew about the difficulties they faced.

  But there was another reason for Charnley’s presence. Windsor had asked him to come and take a look at Roberts. Despite his enthusiasm over the previous two days, Windsor wasn’t completely sure of the man from London. Just as other citizens were on a constant lookout for fascist spies, Windsor and his fellow fascists were on permanent watch for the police. There was something funny about Wells, he reckoned, and that was reason enough to suspect the man he’d brought along. If Roberts was a police spy, Charnley would sniff him out soon enough. Charnley had marched with Mosley, had fought in his black shirt in cities the length of the land. He’d know what to ask Roberts.

  After three days of being treated as an honoured guest, Roberts now found the tables were turned, as Charnley began asking him question after question about his past in the BU. Which branch had he been a member of, and for how long? Who did he know there? Who else had he met inside the movement? Any of the questions could have been a trap, and only the senior BU member that Roberts claimed to be would have known which.

  Roberts had been with MI5 for less than two months and already he was in danger of exposure. Should he run? How far would he get? Even if he made it out of the room, he would be in a lonely street on the outskirts of a city he barely knew. It wouldn’t take long for the gang to hunt him down.

  Should he fight? Roberts was a judo black belt, and knew karate as well. He could certainly handle Windsor, and probably Gannon at the same time, but Charnley looked like he could be dangerous. And in the small room the likelihood was that the group would be able to overpower him by sheer weight of numbers.

  In any case, to flee or to fight would have blown the operation.

  He knew he had only one choice. As the interrogation began, Roberts turned his friendly face to Charnley, and prepared to tell the truth.

  Well, some of it.

  * Almost a British record, but beaten two months later by the 98.7 per cent of the vote that the Conservative candidate won over the BU in the Middleton and Prestwich by-election.

  2

  ‘Thoroughly familiar’

  Eric Roberts grew up on the edge of Britain, and moved to its centre at the first chance he got.

  Cornwall is the westernmost, southernmost county in England, sufficiently separated from the rest of the country by geography, history and culture that some natives deny they’re English at all. It’s shaped like a long, thin triangle, stretching away from the rest of the country into the Atlantic. Just at the point where this wedge has narrowed almost to nothing there is the town of Penzance, the last significant outpost of humanity for two thousand miles west. In the early 1920s, the town’s population was barely more than a couple of thousand. For those seeking isolation and escape from the world’s pressures, it was the perfect refuge. For the teenage Eric, it was a place to escape from. And at the age of seventeen, he set out for London. The city was still then the central point of an empire that stretched around the globe, taking in Canada, India, Australia, parts of Africa and more besides. America’s economy had just outgrown Britain’s, and the former colony had confirmed its emergence as a global power with its intervention in the Great War, but Britain was not yet eclipsed, and its capital was a good place to go in search of adventure.

  What Roberts found, in early 1925, was a job as a clerk at the Westminster Bank, working in the Threadneedle Street branch, in the City. The work was hardly exciting, but it paid ninety-five pounds a year, and there were diversions: Roberts’s supervisor at the bank, Audrey Sprague, soon took a shine to her charming new trainee.

  They made an odd couple. The teenage Roberts had barely finishing growing to his six feet, his dark eyes matching his dark hair that resisted attempts to slick it into a parting. Audrey on the other hand was tiny, barely over five feet tall, with hair that had turned completely white with shock during childhood when she had been attacked by a dog.

  Eric Roberts in the early 1930s

  Audrey Sprague in the early 1930s

  She was also seven years Eric’s senior. In her mid-twenties, she should really have been married by now. But too many of the men of her generation had died in the mud of Flanders. Besides, Audrey Sprague was a young woman who knew her own mind. She was clever, and not embarrassed by it, proud to show off her ability to swiftly add multiple columns of figures in her head.

  Eric was delighted to explore London. In Leadenhall Market, near the bank, he found a pub where he could get a ‘substantial’ beef sandwich, and half a pint of ale, for sixpence. When he was feeling flush, there was a basement restaurant offering a roast mutton dinner for three times that. Or if he was running short, he would live off bananas. ‘I was perpetually hungry, tall and thin,’ he recalled.

  The main reason for Eric’s occasional periods of poverty was the difficulty of making the rent. When Audrey learned he was struggling to find somewhere he could afford to live, she told her widowed mother that they should take the young man into their home in Wembley, north-west London. It was an unconventional arrangement at the time, but if anyone passed comment, Audrey didn’t let it trouble her. Roberts seemed to have landed on his feet. But he wanted more than just a steady job and a steady girl.

  Eric came from a line of frustrated free spirits. His grandfather William had trained as a lawyer but had swiftly tired of the work, and followed his forebears into farming. William’s son Arthur had moved to Canada as a young man, working with survey parties in northern Ontario. He returned to England in 1906, but still hadn’t settled, and caused a family scandal by getting a girl into trouble. In 1907, months after his wedding and slightly fewer months after Eric’s birth, Arthur took his new family back to Canada, where he worked as a telegraphist for four years before deciding it was time to return home to Cornwall. There he got a job on the other end of the Western Union telegraph line where it emerged from the Atlantic.

  Two daughters followed, but it wasn’t an easy marriage: Arthur was still a little wild, especially about money, and Maud, Eric’s mother, was forced to run a tight ship to keep the family finances together. But t
hey could afford to send Eric to local private schools, where he was ‘an excellent worker, a good student and most intelligent’.

  Though he did well enough to win a scholarship at sixteen to the local school of mining, Eric was already dreaming of life beyond Cornwall. He had grown up in the first great era of the spy novel. Rudyard Kipling published Kim in 1901. Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands appeared in 1903. Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent came out in the year of Eric’s birth, 1907. Sherlock Holmes, brought back from the dead in 1903, also got in on the act, hunting spies in The Second Stain and The Bruce-Partington Plans. The young Eric devoured these tales of stolen secrets, of police agents hunting revolutionaries, often on the streets of Britain, where it seemed that your apparently ordinary next-door neighbour could be hiding a terrible truth. He began to fantasise about whether he, too, could become such a spy.

  A year in mining college was enough to assure Eric, who was never comfortable with machinery, that he had neither aptitude for the work, nor a desire to spend his life mining tin in Cornwall. He quit the course and set off for London, ‘full of hope and enthusiasm, and ambition’.

  But working in a bank wasn’t for Roberts either. His mind found other diversions, largely pranks, played largely on his superiors. He noticed that one manager was regular in his habits, visiting the toilet at the same time each day. So he made the room appear occupied, propping a jacket up on a broomstick against the opaque window in the door, and enjoyed the spectacle of his boss’s increasing discomfort. Or there was the visiting bank dignitary who discovered his car had been filled with toilet rolls. Or the Japanese client whose umbrella was loaded with hole-punch confetti. Or the time Roberts hid a dead fish in a drawer, and enjoyed the bafflement of his colleagues as they sought out the source of the smell.

  These were all good entertainments, which endeared him to Audrey at least. But they were less popular with his bosses, who saw no reason to promote him. He, in return, couldn’t bring himself to dream of the day he would be deputy manager of a suburban branch of the Westminster Bank.

  So what did he want to be, this teenager who had moved so far from home? A man of action, perhaps, or a patriot. But in 1925, it wasn’t clear what patriotism meant any more. Was it loyalty to King and Empire, the sort of ideas that had just seen millions sent to their deaths in the Great War? Or was it more patriotic to dream of a world in which all men were equal, in which a teenager wasn’t doomed to be a bank clerk because his father was a telegraphist? For the first time, such a world seemed possible.

  The devastation of the Great War had given fresh urgency to questions that had long existed about the traditional order of things. The men who had fought together in the trenches asked why some were born to rule and others to serve. In Parliament, it was recognised that it was unacceptable to deny the vote to millions of men who had fought in the war simply because they couldn’t afford to own property, and in 1918 all men over twenty-one were awarded the vote. Women, too, gained victories in their fight for democratic rights, and were finally given parity with men in 1928.

  These new voters had changed the make-up of Parliament. The working classes now had a chance to vote for the party that represented them, Labour. Outside Parliament, trades unions were flexing their muscles on behalf of those same working men. Meanwhile, although the acquisition of German territories at the end of the war had left Britain’s empire larger than ever, there was weakness within, as Ireland’s war of independence had just demonstrated.

  If things had stopped there, it might have been unwelcome enough to the ruling classes, but for those who looked abroad there were more worrying precedents. Russia’s still-fresh revolution had resulted in millions of deaths, and the stated intention of the Soviet Union’s new leaders was to export communism around the world. Who was to say they wouldn’t succeed? In 1913, the Tsar had been on his throne, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire had stretched across Eastern and Central Europe. Now, just a decade later, both were gone. This was not a time to trust to old certainties.

  One woman who wasn’t prepared to sit on the sidelines was Rotha Lintorn-Orman. Born in 1895 to a wealthy military family, she had been one of the first Girl Guides, and then volunteered as an ambulance driver during the war, winning decorations for gallantry before being invalided home in 1917. There she ran the British Red Cross motor school, training drivers for the battlefield. But with the war over, she struggled to go back to the place allotted to a young gentlewoman. She drank heavily, cut her dark hair short and wore a shirt and tie, leading others to describe her pejoratively as a ‘mannish woman’. As she dug her garden and contemplated the socialist menace that threatened her country, she realised that her calling was to fight it. Financed by her mother, Lintorn-Orman found her model in Benito Mussolini, the new prime minister of Italy, and in 1923 she named her new organisation the British Fascisti in tribute to him.

  In her regard for the Italian leader, Lintorn-Orman was hardly unusual. On the British right at the time, Mussolini was more admired than understood. The common perception was that he had imposed order on a chaotic nation and seen off the communist threat. Churchill called him ‘the saviour of his country’.

  For Lintorn-Orman, the important thing about fascism was less what it stood for than what it stood against: disorder and socialism. Her BF – people joked it stood for ‘Bloody Fools’ – was, at least at first, deeply conservative, with an enthusiasm for marches and uniforms. Its focus was on recruiting people who would fight back in the event of a communist uprising, not attempting to seize power itself.

  Rotha Lintorn-Orman, 1916

  One of those recruits was Eric Roberts, who signed up soon after he arrived in London. In later life, he concealed this from his family, so his motives at the time are unclear. A desire to resist communism must have been part of the appeal. Audrey’s brother-in-law had been one of a small number of British troops stationed in Russia at the end of the war, fighting the Bolsheviks, and he’d told Eric stories of his time there.

  But for a stranger in London, the BF also offered fellowship and community. For a young man who had missed out on the war it offered the chance to wear a smart uniform and to learn military drill. And for a bored bank clerk it offered the possibility of excitement. Across Europe, politics in the 1920s often meant violence. Young men who were struggling to return to normal life after the brutality of the trenches often found a familiarity in the military structure of groups like the BF, and moved easily on to physical attacks on opponents. At the other end of the political spectrum, it was clear that the revolution the communists wanted was likely to involve a lot of killing.

  Public meetings, the basic political event of the time, were frequently rowdy as rival groups tried to infiltrate them and break them up. The communists in particular were notorious for trying to storm platforms at right-wing events. In response, some BF members joined together in a secret squad to go and deal violence back to the reds.

  Eric did find excitement, but not of this kind. It was through the BF that Eric was to meet the man who would change his life.

  Maxwell Knight was seven years older than Eric. This was only the same age gap as that between Eric and Audrey, but with Knight it was enough to make him seem almost of a different generation. Knight had served in the Royal Naval Reserve during the final year of the Great War. As a midshipman in armed merchantmen, he had seen little of the enemy, but he had visited New York on shore leave, giving him the chance to experience the new world. He had fallen in love with jazz, and had realised that the naval career his family planned for him would never do.

  Knight was tall, good-looking, socially confident and upper class, apparently just another member of the Bright Young Things who were scandalising and delighting society with their risqué behaviour. But this was a mask. Although he came from a good family, he had no money. His father, a solicitor, had frittered his earnings away on mistresses. The family fortune was held by an uncle who had no desire to fund his nephew’s high
living. In the years after the war, Knight had worked as a civil servant, a paint salesman, a preparatory school master and a freelance journalist – none of these jobs paying enough to properly fund his social aspirations.

  Then, in 1923, Knight was approached by an acquaintance at a political meeting and asked a strange question: would he be interested in some part-time, paid work of a patriotic nature? Short of money and eager for excitement, he replied that he would. Which was how he came to find himself recruited as a spy in an intelligence organisation run by a right-wing industrialist.

  Like Lintorn-Orman, Sir George Makgill was both worried about socialism and determined to do something about it. A wealthy man, he decided that what capitalism needed was information about its opponents. To supply it, he set up a freelance organisation which he christened the Industrial Intelligence Bureau. Its customers were factory owners and companies that wanted to know about potential strikes. Its method was to recruit like-minded people and send them undercover into suspect groups.

  Maxwell Knight, 1934

  After an interview, Knight was invited to join. But his target wasn’t a socialist group at all. It was Lintorn-Orman’s British Fascisti.

  Why Makgill wanted to keep an eye on the BF isn’t clear. It’s unlikely he viewed them as a threat: his own views were very much in sympathy with theirs, and in some areas even more extreme. It may simply have been that Makgill thought the BF would be a good place for Knight to recruit more agents.

  Knight set off for BF headquarters, offering himself as a volunteer. In the heated atmosphere of 1920s fringe politics, this immediately made him the subject of suspicion: the group believed, correctly, that it was a target for infiltration, though the assumption was that it would be communists, rather than other anti-communists, who would attempt it.

  All his life, Knight had been fascinated by nature. He had an extraordinary affinity for creatures of every size and shape – in his London flat he had assembled a menagerie, ranging from mice to a bear. His family had always thought that he would end up making a living working with animals. Now he discovered that the same skills that made for the successful study of timid creatures also made for successful spying: watchfulness, calm, and above all patience.