Rather than push himself on to the BF leadership, Knight hung back, and let them notice him. He was bright and able, and completed the small jobs he was given with ease. Lintorn-Orman identified Knight as someone she thought she could use and, just as Makgill had done, decided that he could have an aptitude for espionage. Within a year of his joining the BF, Knight was appointed its director of intelligence.
This new role allowed him to start running his own agents. The BF’s prime target was the same as Makgill’s: the Communist Party. Knight hadn’t been trained as an agent himself, but he was now in the position of recruiting others. He set about the task with enthusiasm.
From the BF’s headquarters in a house in Elm Park Gardens, Chelsea, where the décor was heavy with large union flags and portraits of the King, Knight approached at least fifty potential recruits in his first year. To make so many attempts suggests a scattergun approach, but one of Knight’s gifts was to make each of his recruits feel special.
He certainly succeeded with Roberts. A year earlier, he had been an unhappy mining student in Penzance. Now he was being asked to become a spy. It was his childhood fantasy come true.
‘I read Kipling’s infernal Kim at a very early age and read it again several times,’ he recalled later. ‘Which was the original stimulation that set my mind working in the direction of intelligence.’ In the book, Kimball O’Hara is the orphan son of an Irish soldier. He lives on the streets of Lahore where few suspect he isn’t just another Indian beggar. His mentor is Mahbub Ali, a Pashtun horse-trader who is also a talent-spotter for British intelligence.
If Roberts was happy to find himself cast as a real-life Kim, Knight excelled in the role of Ali. At the end of the Second World War, he set down what he’d learned about agent-running. Beginning with a defence of the business of espionage, he attacked those who were ‘prone to regard an “agent” as an unscrupulous and dishonest person actuated by unworthy motives’. In fact, Knight argued, the opposite was the case. ‘An honest and loyal agent, whether he is working for his country in foreign lands, or at home, has often to exhibit some of the highest human qualities.’ Knight stated that he preferred to use ‘persons whose personal honesty and motives were above reproach’, if for no other reason than that such people’s reports were more likely to be trustworthy.
This was a little rich coming from Knight. Doubtless he thought of himself as a trustworthy man, but in 1925, he was lying about his family circumstances, and lying about his reason for working for the BF. He was also about to embark on a new, more personal, lie. At the end of the year, Knight married one of the most senior women in the BF, Gwladys Poole. Superficially, they had much in common: she, too, was a Bright Young Thing, and an enthusiastic fascist. But whereas Gwladys was the real thing, on both these matters Knight was something of a fake. As a foundation for a marriage, lying about his personal circumstances and political beliefs was quite bad enough, but a third far more serious lie was quickly added: to Gwladys’s growing sadness and frustration, the marriage remained unconsummated. The cause of Knight’s difficulty in this area is unclear, but is likely to have been either psychological or medical – the suggestion by one spurned female colleague that he was gay is unsupported by evidence, and he was an enthusiastic flirt with women.
If he was failing as a husband, Knight was at least succeeding as an agent. On behalf of the BF he sent out a series of agents into the Communist Party. One of these was Roberts.
Any political enthusiasm Roberts may have felt for the BF was quickly cast aside once he had met Knight. What were rallies and flag-waving next to espionage? Knight took a long-term attitude to the penetration of suspect organisations. ‘It is of little value to employ highly trained agents for the primary purpose of gathering day-to-day information,’ he wrote. ‘The object of such an agent should always be to penetrate as far into the organisation as possible, with a view to getting himself eventually into a position of responsibility which will enable him to obtain reliable information about the more sinister plans of the organisation.’
This put Knight in the position of defending his operatives from the demands of the bureaucracy that employed them. He rejected the idea that his team should concern itself with ‘producing lists of names and addresses, casual movements of individuals, etc’. An intelligence agency, he argued, had other means of collecting that kind of low-level information.
The best way of training an agent, in Knight’s view, was ‘actual and immediate work in the field’. There was a place for briefing them on the best moments and methods for taking notes, in the memory games that formed such an important part of the instruction of Kipling’s Kim, ‘but in the main, the real training ground lies in the day-to-day work of the agent’.
This confident assertion of theory hid a more basic reason for Knight’s approach: he had very little training to offer his recruits. He knew barely more about espionage than they did, and there was no spy school for these unofficial infiltrators to attend. He and his agents would have to work out their tradecraft for themselves.
For Roberts, this meant being sent along to communist meetings. This was partly to educate him in the movement he was supposed to be studying, and partly in order to set up the next phase of penetration. ‘Having spent some time in attending meetings as an ordinary interested individual, it is possible that [an agent] will obtain some casual personal contact with some adherent or official of the organisation in question,’ Knight wrote. What he wanted was for the communists to recruit Roberts, not for Roberts to ask to sign up.
‘“Approaches” in connection with joining any particular body should if humanly possible always be made by the body to the agent, not the agent to the body,’ wrote Knight. ‘The importance of this lies in the future, in that if at any time some query is raised regarding the bona fides of the agent, it will nearly always be remembered by the officials of the Movement that the agent did not in any way thrust himself forward.’
More than that, Knight urged his agents to refuse their first invitation: ‘A becoming reluctance to join a movement, which is subsequently overcome by the persuasion of the Movement’s propagandists, will stand the agent in very good stead.’
Knight set out to flatter the teenage Eric with attention. ‘The officer must always adapt himself to the agent, and not the agent to the officer,’ Knight wrote. ‘Every good agent likes to think that his officer is almost exclusively concerned with him, and with him alone, even though the agent may know perfectly well that the officer has others with whom he deals.’
Knight wasn’t an advocate of professional distance. ‘The officer running an agent should set himself the task of getting to know his agent most thoroughly. He must at all costs make a friend of his agent: the agent must trust the officer as much as – if not more than – the officer trusts the agent.’
Roberts showed promise with his first report. The Soviet deputy foreign minister was addressing a meeting at a school in north London. It was strictly for Communist Party members only, but Eric managed to gatecrash it. His fountain pen had leaked as he had scrawled his report, but Knight expressed his delight with it.
Spying must have appealed to Roberts’s mischievous side: the challenge of talking his way into a place where he didn’t belong, the thrill of being the person in the room with a secret. It’s unlikely he gave much thought to the potential danger of his work, but it was real. If political activism could turn rough in the 1920s, infiltrators were likely to be on the roughest end of it.
And Knight’s agents had no protection except their own wits: no friends waiting within earshot, not even the veil of a false identity. Working under their own names meant they were less likely to be uncovered as an infiltrator, but they also had few places to hide if they were exposed.
Some of those sent into the Communist Party by Knight in those years would go deep: one even followed Knight’s path of marrying into the cause while continuing to report on his colleagues and, apparently, his own wife.
; Roberts had less success at penetration. Though he did manage to become a Communist Party member, by 1926 Knight just had him doing surveillance work. He was worried about Ivor Montagu, an aristocratic youth who had abandoned his family position for communism.* This was the year of the General Strike, when more than a million and a half men refused to work, something that many feared – and others hoped – was the start of a more widespread revolution. Roberts would finish his day at the bank and then go and tail Montagu and ‘Silvio’, one of his communist contacts.
Knight was now in the position of running the spies of the group on which he was supposed to be spying. But that was only the start of the complications. His covert employer, Sir George Makgill, was passing his reports to Vernon Kell. Before the Great War, Kell had been asked to help establish what would become MI5, of which he would become the first director. In those days, there had been plenty of interest in counter-espionage, but in peacetime, the government could see little point in Kell’s work, and he was running a skeleton service. He saw Makgill’s organisation as a way to bring in intelligence off the books. And Knight, with Makgill’s permission, was also reporting to MI6. Finally, he was also selling information to Special Branch, the police’s intelligence arm.
How much did Roberts and his fellow agents know about who Knight was really working for? Knight’s general bias was for honesty with his agents, to prevent them feeling betrayed later. And people who had joined the BF in order to protect the nation against communism were unlikely to be greatly troubled at the thought of working for Makgill, or MI5.**
As the 1926 General Strike seemed to be building to a frenzy, Roberts prepared for the possibility that more direct action against the coming revolution might be needed. On 12 May he enrolled as a volunteer policeman, adding three years to his age so as to meet the entry requirements. He was far from alone: the strike saw the number of special constables in London increase from 10,000 to over 60,000. There were troops on the streets of the capital, and on both sides, the idea that an attempted overthrow of the government was imminent seemed likely.
And then, on the day that Roberts signed up with the police, the strike ended. The revolution hadn’t come. In the ensuing relief in government circles, the demand for Knight’s intelligence on communists dried up: they’d had their chance at revolution, and they’d blown it. Other anti-communists seemed to agree, and the British Fascisti began to disintegrate. In a further blow to Knight’s espionage career, Makgill died a few months later. Knight was without a spymaster, and without customers.
This may explain why, although Roberts remained a Communist Party member for some years, he was, by 1928, at a sufficiently loose end that he re-enrolled as a Special Constable. He was old enough now, but he stuck to his previous lie, telling them he was 24.
The drudgery of the Westminster Bank was by now outweighing the excitement of life in London. ‘I grew to hate the life of a clerk,’ he recalled. He began to look for ways to improve his lot. ‘I studied five nights a week and applied time after time for jobs in South America. I took some nineteen examinations in banking, commerce, commercial law, economics, French, Spanish, German, etc, and hoped vaguely for advancement. I produced the certificates and diplomas but was informed that only a degree would help, which I could not afford.’
Roberts suspected the problem was simpler. ‘I lacked that entrée to everything, a public school education.’ In an effort to avoid his superiors’ snobbery, he took elocution lessons to lose the Cornish accent that he feared made him sound like a country bumpkin.
One thing kept Roberts sane: his blossoming relationship with Audrey. But even here, the bank found a way to obstruct his happiness. As was the norm at the time, the staff of the Westminster Bank were forbidden to marry without their employer’s permission. Until Eric’s salary reached a set threshold – usually after around a dozen years of service – the bank deemed him unable to support a family.
Not all of Roberts’s evening courses were aimed at becoming a better banker. He also learned martial arts. And when he got home, he devoured spy thrillers. He longed to be back in the game.
*
On 8 June 1934, Eric Roberts married Audrey Sprague at Willesden Register Office, without religious ceremony. After a decade of service, he had been allowed to ask the directors of the Westminster Bank for permission, and after a month’s consideration, they had graciously consented.
The couple set off on a honeymoon to Germany. It was unusual to honeymoon abroad, and the choice of Hitler’s Germany was more unusual still, but Roberts had a German friend he wanted to visit. He may also have hoped that the trip would give him a way back into espionage.
Eric and Audrey Roberts on their honeymoon
In the run-up to the ceremony, he had written at least twice to Knight, the man who had brought him into the secret world. It’s possible that, like many men before they marry, he was trying to reconnect with an acquaintance, to keep hold of a treasured part of his earlier life. But it seems just as likely he was looking to renew their working relationship as well. He told Knight about his impending nuptials, and asked whether he would be interested in hearing his impressions of Germany under its new Nazi government. Knight replied with a brief, unsigned note, addressed simply to ‘102’ – Roberts’s codename. He would, he said, be delighted to call upon them on their return and hear about their trip.
There had been developments in Knight’s own career. After his spying hiatus, a renewed official interest in communism saw him taken on first by MI6 and then, following a turf war between the services over who should spy where, by MI5. Tasked once again with penetrating the Communist Party, he’d reactivated the agents he already had in place. But there had been no work, until now, for Eric. That was to change thanks to the emergence of a new target, one that was a little awkward for Knight.
On the day that Eric and Audrey celebrated becoming man and wife, the British government was facing up to a problem it had long ignored. The previous evening, Sir Oswald Mosley, a Great War veteran who had in the previous decade been first a dashing young Conservative MP and then, after switching sides, a dashing young Labour MP, had held a rally at Olympia in west London for the party he now led, the British Union of Fascists.
The nature of fascism had developed and become clearer since the days of Rotha Lintorn-Orman, and Mosley had become convinced that it was the future. He saw the key elements to its appeal, and copied them. The British Union of Fascists had a distinctive black uniform that had earned them a nickname, a nationalistic message, clearly defined enemies, and an enthusiasm for violence.
Mosley also had some influential supporters. Lord Rothermere, proprietor of the Daily Mail, agreed with Mosley’s sentiment that ‘the new age requires new methods and new men’. Under the headline ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’, Rothermere set out the case for fascism in January 1934. ‘Parliamentary government is conducted on the same lines as it was in the eighteenth century,’ he complained, ‘though the conditions with which it deals have altered beyond recognition.’
He pointed to the ‘gigantic revival of national strength and spirit which a similar process of modernisation has brought about in Italy and Germany. These are beyond all doubt the best-governed nations in Europe today.’ What Britain needed if it was to survive, Rothermere said, was a leader ‘with the same directness of purpose and energy of method as Mussolini and Hitler have displayed.
MI5 had been reluctant to examine fascism too closely, perhaps in part because the man whose job it would be to do so, Knight, was in sympathy with many of the BUF’s views. He was hardly the only member of the establishment who felt that way – Donald Makgill, the son of the man who had brought Knight into espionage, was also an enthusiastic member of the BUF. The fascists were the sworn enemy of communism, and communism was the threat that most worried Britain’s ruling class.
That view began to shift in 1934, in large part because of what happened at Olympia on 7 June. The Blackshirts had held other rallies i
n London over the previous two years, but this was the largest. Outside, police tried to keep protesters and ticket-holders apart. Inside, order was kept by the Blackshirts. But this wasn’t simply a case of trying to see off the sort of disruption in which their communist opponents specialised. Mosley understood that the violence wasn’t a distraction from his message: it was part of the appeal. Whenever someone stood to heckle the leader, the spotlights would pick them out, and then Mosley would wait while his uniformed enforcers grabbed the perpetrator and administered swift and public punishment.
But this meeting was different from previous BUF rallies in another way. This time, the audience included members of parliament and churchmen, there to see the character of British fascism for themselves. They were horrified.
‘I am not very sympathetic to Communists who try to break up meetings,’ Geoffrey Lloyd, a Conservative MP, wrote afterwards. ‘But I am bound to say that I was appalled by the brutal conduct of the fascists. I saw with my own eyes case after case of single interrupters being attacked by ten or twenty fascists. Again and again, as five or six fascists carried out an interrupter by arms and legs, several other Blackshirts engaged in hitting and kicking his helpless body. I can only say it was a deeply shocking scene for an Englishman to see in London.’
Others gave similar accounts. ‘A woman who intervened in another scuffle in the body of the hall was manhandled first of all by male Blackshirts and then flung to the “tender mercies” of the fermale Blackshirts,’ recalled a witness. ‘There was tearing and clawing, with the woman screaming. She was stripped naked to the waist . . . A woman behind me rose indignantly and shouted “Disgraceful.” A Blackshirt steward leaned over towards her and said menacingly: “It will be better for you if you sit down.”’ But Lloyd’s words were the ones that mattered. He was not simply an MP, he was also the Parliamentary Private Secretary to the former prime minister, Stanley Baldwin. In 1934 Baldwin was Lord President of the Council in Ramsay MacDonald’s National Coalition, and on his way to returning as prime minister the next year. As Baldwin’s parliamentary bag-carrier, Lloyd had his ear.
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