5

Tartan Treachery

In 1938, Tintin and his faithful companion Snowy landed on the Black Island off Kiltoch. There they discovered two terrifying secrets: a deadly gorilla called Ranko and a counterfeiting operation masterminded by the sinister Dr Müller, who would be Tintin’s nemesis in future adventures. The inspiration for this story had come in February 1934, when Hergé read an article in the sensationalist newspaper Le Crapouillot. It revealed the activities of one Dr Georg Bell, a Scot settled in Germany, who had worked with the Nazis to flood the Soviet economy with fake roubles. According to the newspaper, Bell had been liquidated by the Nazis when it seemed that he was going to tell all. In The Black Island, the political aims of the activities of Müller and his accomplices – which extend across Europe, as the notebook discovered by Tintin shows – are not made explicit. However, it is not insignificant that the doctor’s chauffeur is called Ivan or that the leader of the gang is called Wronzoff. If the ape is an allusion to King Kong, Tintin’s adventure also carries the influence of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 adaptation of John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), in which Richard Hannay is pursued across the Highlands by Nazi spies. In the imagination of Hergé and others, Scotland therefore seemed rife with tartan treachery on behalf of Nazi Germany. That said, if, as we have already seen, the ‘Nazi Laird’ had some basis in reality, Scots of different walks of life, and differing motives, were prepared to turn, or appear to turn, traitor for the Fascist cause.

Hitler’s Hairdresser

On 16 May 1938 at Edinburgh Sheriff Court, Jessie Wallace Jordan, ‘Hairdresser, Masseuse and Beauty Specialist’ of 1 Kinloch Street, Dundee, was sentenced to four years’ penal servitude for espionage. Jordan had pleaded guilty to a modified indictment, according to which she had been in communication with foreign agents between 1 June 1937 and 2 March 1938 ‘for purposes prejudicial to the safety and interests of the State’. ‘At a place in Fife, being a prohibited place’, she ‘did make a sketch thereof . . . calculated to be directly or indirectly useful to an enemy’. She had obtained information concerning coast guard stations and coastal defence ‘at various places on the East Coast of Scotland between Montrose and Kirkcaldy . . . or elsewhere in Scotland to the prosecutor unknown . . . and to have recorded part of this information on a map’. The Scotsman reported:

A woman of 51 years of age, and of below average height, turning grey, maintained a calm demeanour throughout the proceedings, which were of brief duration. She wore a black coat with grey fur collar, and a green suede hat having a small fur plume. She heard the sentence unmoved. As she left the dock accompanied by two policemen and a policewoman, her daughter, who had been seated at the back of the courtroom, burst into tears.1

It was soon revealed that the Dundee hairdresser was part of a spy network which extended as far as Havana and Prague. Her case would briefly generate a media frenzy in which she herself took part. The guilty woman had been born illegitimate on 23 December 1887 to Elizabeth Wallace, a domestic servant from near Coatbridge. At the age of 16 she ran away from home and obtained employment in domestic service herself. In 1907 she met a young German ‘in distress’ and accompanied him back to Hamburg, where they married. According to the defence counsel, that was ‘the only comfortable and happy period of her life’. Her husband fought on the German side in the war, and died of injuries and disease contracted during service. In ‘My Amazing Life’, serialised in the Sunday Mail in June 1938, Jordan recounted how, after the death of her ‘unfaithful’ first husband, she had soon built up ‘one of the finest beautifying businesses in Hamburg’. That said, because of her origins, it was ‘suspected I might be a British spy’.² In 1920, she married her husband’s cousin, who soon began an affair with her young assistant in the salon. They would divorce in 1936.

According to Jordan’s version of events, her difficulties in Hamburg increased when the Nazis seized power. Many of her clients were Jewish women, and her insecurity was increased by the Jewish sound of her married name. This racial taint thwarted the ambitions of her pretty blonde daughter, Marga, an aspiring soprano. She could have no stage career because of her ‘Jewish blood’, at least so long as her mother was unable to prove the nationality and creed of her grandfather James Ferguson, who had fled to America after the scandal of her mother’s birth.

It was therefore a desire to prove the Aryan blood of her daughter that made her leave Hamburg for Leith in February 1937. While staying with a brother in Perth, she acquired a hairdressing salon on Kinloch Street, Dundee, ‘with a fine view of Firth of Tay and Tay Rail Bridge’. She did, however, have a secret mission. On her way to catch the boat to Leith, she had, the story went, run into a German friend whose husband was an official in the Gestapo. She received instructions from the secret service organisation at Hamburg to the effect that she was to expect letters from the USA. Jordan had known a woman named Dora and had been in partnership with her in Hamburg in a hairdressing salon. Dora left for the USA, from where she would forward letters to Dundee that would in turn be taken to ‘Otto Moser’ in Hamburg. Jordan was also asked to make sketches and provide other information on coastal defences.

She told the Sunday Mail: ‘I only did it to oblige friends in Germany, and because I felt it would afford some excitement . . . Nationality meant nothing to me. My eyes were open all through, and I simply took what was coming to me.’3 On 19 March 1938, in a letter to the Governor of Perth Prison asking for permission to ‘write my life’, she had declared: ‘I may say that my life has had nothing what ever to do with Politicks although I lived thirty years in Germany, and my position is as such today.’⁴ On 30 April 1938 it was judged that ‘the narration of Mrs Jordan’s nefarious activities for the German Secret Services could easily disclose information prejudicial to the State’. But such reservations were nothing in the face of press curiosity and Jordan’s own desire for fame and fortune.

On her arrival from Hamburg, she turned out to be a much better hairdresser than spy. Frederick Fraser, who worked for her, said she was ‘a woman of moods’, but that, although the business did not bring her large profits, ‘she managed to make it pay its way. She was a good hairdresser and particularly quick’. She made, however, no particular effort to conceal her mail, and she often left maps of different parts of Scotland lying about the shop.

Concerning her role as post box for German espionage, Jordan claimed to the Sunday Mail that she ‘thought they were love letters’. She was more honest about her trips down the coast: ‘With my map in hand, I might have been a tourist. But once I was in a quiet spot, my innocent map turned into something to be hidden and kept secret. On it I had marked what I saw during my walk.’5 In the Argus, C.C. Nielens recounted how this ‘plump pleasant-looking German Scot’, who had already carved herself a local reputation for her special ‘Viennese wave’, would leave her shop in charge of assistants and, ‘dressed in old clothes, went off to mark positions of defence stations, on ordnance maps she had bought’.⁶

This hairdressing salon in a poor quarter of Dundee aroused suspicions. The previous owner, Mrs Curran, later claimed to have seen Mrs Jordan’s handbag lying on a table in the back of the shop. It contained an AA map marked in black lead with Montrose Barracks, Auchmithie, Carnoustie, Broughty Ferry, St Andrews, Fife Ness, Crail, Anstruther and Kirkcaldy, among other sensitive coastal positions. Mrs Curran and her husband also claimed that, from the beginning, Jordan had ‘appeared unusually keen to buy the shop’. She then had it redecorated and the latest hairdressing appliances installed. When asked about the opulence of her equipment, she told Mrs Curran that she got the latest pomades from Germany, and when asked how she was able to get them past the customs officials remarked that things ‘were easily done if one had a head’. The Currans had also found a piece of paper bearing the word ‘Zeppelin’, which they took to be a rude word. In November 1937, the Currans alerted Tayside police, and one Inspector Carstairs sent a policewoman to Kinloch Street to get a ‘perm’. Jordan’s regular trips back to Germany had also aroused the suspicions of a shipping manager at Camperdown docks, who noticed that – though poorly dressed – she went eight times from Dundee to Hamburg in eight months, travelling in small cargo steamers carrying few passengers.

In fact, British intelligence had become aware of Jessie Jordan’s activities as far back as July 1937. The mail she received from the USA was being intercepted, and her trips to Hamburg shadowed. It was finally on 2 March 1938, as recounted by the Daily Express, that Colonel Hinchley Cook of MI5 paid a visit to her salon.

‘I’m sorry but I am afraid you’ll have to come with us.’

‘What for?’ asked Mrs Jordan, smiling at him.

‘Espionage’, he replied. ‘You are being arrested on a charge of spying for Germany.’

Mrs Jordan laughed incredulously but began to put on her coat and hat.

‘I really don’t know what you are talking about,’ she said.

But she knew alright.

And so was arrested ‘no Greta Garbo, but a charwoman complete with cracked boots, rough hands, and straggled hair!’7 Jordan would plead guilty to the lesser charge of entering a prohibited area of Fife, while intelligence cracked a rather hapless espionage network which included one Gustav Rumrich, student at Prague University, recruited by Johanna Hoffmann, a beautiful red-headed hairdresser on board the ss Europa. At Jordan’s trial, defence counsel A.P. Duffes’s appeals for leniency for the ‘unwanted woman’ were rejected, but the British authorities refused an American request to interrogate her: ‘If Mrs Jordan is deported on expiry of her sentence her position in Germany will be very difficult if she has given evidence against her American associates.’⁸

The triumph of British intelligence was little appreciated by the Currans of Dundee. The couple demanded that Tayside Constabulary reimburse them for phone calls, bus and tram fares, and unpaid wages. They also sold their story to the Daily Record. On 21 May 1937, Mrs Curran told how they had unmasked a spy. ‘I want to get my name cleared. People are saying I was a German spy because I was friendly with Mrs Jordan. They don’t know I found her out. They never suspected it.’⁹ Such claims were dismissed by the police. On 1 December 1938, the chief constable wrote to Hinchley Cook: ‘All along they seem to have been out for notoriety and money.’¹⁰ In fact, it was known that Mrs Curran had, as cleaning lady at the local cinema, pinched items from coats and bags.

Jessie Jordan was visited in Saughton Prison by her daughter Marga, who soon after arriving in Scotland had married one Thomas Reid. This union appears to have been as unhappy as those of her mother. Already on 21 October 1938, Sir Vernon Kell had written to J. Fulton of the Prisons Department:

One cannot help feeling very sorry for Mrs Jordan’s unfortunate daughter, although I anticipated from the very beginning that her second marriage to T. Reid (who was actually unemployed when the marriage took place) would turn out a failure. In my opinion it was never more than a marriage of convenience, so as to enable her to acquire British nationality and prevent deportation at the time of Mrs Jordan’s arrest.11

The Bulletin of 14 November 1938 reported the departure of the ss Gothland from Leith, carrying Marga Reid. Although a British subject by her marriage early that year, she was travelling as a German subject with a German passport. She gave no answer to the immigration officer when asked why she did not travel with a British passport. The Bulletin remarked that her cabin – No. 1 – was the same one used by her mother on her various journeys between Germany and Scotland. Mrs Reid had bought two single tickets, for her and her daughter. She told journalists: ‘The reason for my return to Germany is that I feel the need of a holiday after the strain of recent events. After that my husband and I may return to Germany together. I shall not go back to the stage as I intended at first.’ Standing on the quayside, ‘Mr Reid was able to talk to his German wife, who leaned against the handrail. She chatted freely, smiling now and then, but obviously moved at the prospect of leaving her husband and Scotland.’¹²

In ‘My Amazing Life’, Jessie Jordan had told the Sunday Mail: ‘I can say that one good thing did come out of our stay in Scotland. As a result of our persistent inquiries, we were able to gather some facts about Marga’s grandfather and she hopes that the German authorities will now allow her to go on the stage there.’¹³ But in fact, there was no future for Marga, who died on 20 January 1939 in Hamburg. On 8 February 1939, Thomas Reid wrote to ‘Mutti’:

I will always look upon you as my mother and if [Marga’s daughter] Jessie comes home it will be my endeavour to work hard so that when you come out it will be to a home of your own where your granddaughter will be a comfort to you. Even if it is true about my dear Marga, I forgive her for in our short life together she proved herself a wife even under the handicap of my foolishness.

The ending of his letter was utterly bleak: ‘The friends I think are good friends are not what they seem and . . . as soon as the Police releases Marga’s luggage they will all be fighting over it’. On 14 March 1939, Kell was himself moved to write: ‘One cannot help feeling sorry for the convict in her additional predicament.’14

There was little peace for this ‘unwanted woman’. The Daily Mail of 1 August 1938 headlined: ‘Woman spy enjoying life in Saughton Prison’. Mrs Jordan had shown herself to be an ‘expert needlewoman’.¹⁵ But that month she underwent a hysterectomy. She was then transferred to Perth, then Aberdeen prisons. On 15 December 1939, she requested to have ‘the Bulletin in her cell, Brabazon work in her cell and also a strong light in her cell’. On 23 December 1939, she pleaded to the authorities:

I beg of you to send me back to Edinburgh as my health won’t stand this prison. I have been here ten days, and the whole place has never been without wet clothes, from top to bottom outside clothes men’s heavy moleskins heavy sheets und so weiter. When we Prisoners go to bed it is damp and cold that we can’t sleep for pains, I asked if the men’s place was also hung with clothes. The answer was no, why we women?? Please let me go back.

She was shown little sympathy. On 9 January 1940, the governor of Aberdeen prison described her as ‘a discontented person, and has been so, since her arrival here’. She was, however, ‘quite a good worker’. A request for naturalisation was refused. On 11 December 1940, the governor wrote: ‘I will be glad when orders come for her to be removed from here, as she gets depressed at times seeing she is checkmated about getting free, and might (she is of such a dour and determined disposition) try to do herself in when the devil takes her.’ He was also concerned about her developing relationship with one Miss Harrison of a charity looking after women convicts: ‘She is a person that would lead Miss Harrison unwittingly to act as a tool for her. The Huns make full use of their kindness or friendship for their own ends.’¹⁶

Suspicions about her subversive potential remained. On her release from prison on 14 January 1941, Jessie Jordan was immediately detained under the royal prerogative and imprisoned at Royal Holloway, alongside interned female Blackshirts. She was repatriated to Germany at the end of July 1945. The last letter in her file is dated 14 January 1952. From her home at 7 Limmer Street, Hanover-Linden, in the British Zone, she asked: ‘would you be so kind and give me an official statement that I was operated on. This statement the Health-Insurance authorities want from me before they allow me my pension’.17 So ended a spy story predicated on blood and identity.

Dundee Spy Fever

The press sensation caused by the affair of Jessie Jordan probably explains the spy fever that briefly gripped Dundee as the phoney war came to an end and France fell. Dundonians denounced by fellow Dundonians figured on the list of aliens detained in Barlinnie Prison on 10 June 1940.¹⁸

First of all, there was hotelier Louis Meotti, a Swiss Italian born in 1900 and naturalised in 1925. It was alleged that, in June 1938, he had attended an exhibition of Italian films at the local cinema. On 6 May 1940, one Cathie Ruxton gave Tayside Constabulary more frightening information:

He even sayd Hitler is a great man . . . To me he is too comfortably near our docks someway I’ve a strange presentment that his Pine Grove hotel has been built by the Nazis and may be their quarters for a puppet government if they ever get here. He is supposed to be Swiss, but many say he is a German . . . Please destroy this as I’m putting my full name and address. If the Gestapo were to walk in Bell St and find this filed I would lose my head.

As a post-scriptum, she added: ‘You see I was in the Holloway Prison staff 13 years.’

Another internee was Mrs Elly Robertson (née Joosten), aged 39, formerly of Dutch nationality and who became British by marriage. Her husband was a wireless operator who had been in Calcutta for the last two or three years. In April 1939, CID had noted: ‘the woman lives very expensively and during the past winter she has acquired three very expensive fur coats’. According to an informer, ‘it is a usual course to see men of different ages leaving her house at all hours of the day and night’. Suspicions were increased when, in early 1939, she received a visit from her mother, who lived in Germany. What’s more, ‘a bus conductor on whose bus Mrs Robertson frequently travels says she is very talkative, and that one day she pointed out a building and asked what it was. When I told her it was the Orphanage, she said “Yes, it was an orphanage, but it is not that now, are there not soldiers in it?” ’

Robertson and Meotti were joined in Barlinnie by Charles Frenz, a linotype operator at the Courier. Born in Edinburgh in 1903, son of a German pork butcher, he aroused suspicions among those who came into contact with him. John Crabb, manager of a shoe shop, told the police that ‘while in conversation with Mr Crabb he appeared very confident that Hitler would be victorious and stated that the British people would get all they deserved’. John Johnston, a garage proprietor who had sold an Austin car to the suspect, reported:

At the time Frenz was looking very tanned and I remarked that he was looking fit. He said, ‘Oh yes, I have just returned from Germany where I have spent a nice holiday.’ He then showed me a photo of himself dressed as a Storm Trooper. I did not know the uniform was German and I asked him where he got it. He told me that he had borrowed it from a friend in Germany while on holiday.

Indeed, there was some incriminating evidence. The People’s Journal of 29 June 1935 had run an article entitled ‘Dundee Man’s Holiday in Germany. Lived Quite Near to Hitler’. In this lengthy feature, Charles Frenz told the readers of the difference between life on Tayside and in the Third Reich. ‘We say “Good morning” or “How do you do” . . . but young Germans greet you with “Heil, Hitler”, [and] salute in the Nazi fashion at the same time’. Since 1933, ‘The Hitler regime ha[d] not lost in popularity’. Instead, Frenz said,

Most young Germans to whom I spoke were anxious to learn how we over here regarded the state of modern Germany. When I said that the general opinion was that Hitler was interfering too much with individual freedom they strenuously denied that such was the case. As one young storm-trooper put it, ‘today we have hope. Before the rise of Herr Hitler we had none’.

Evidence of the leader’s popularity, he claimed,

is got everywhere. The news spreads rapidly when he is about, and crowds collect and wait hours in the hope of seeing him. One of my uncles, with whom I stayed in Berchtesgaden, near which is Hitler’s summer residence, has spoken to him, and was greatly impressed. I myself just missed seeing him by a matter of minutes when on a hike near his residence. I saw General Goering, however, and heard him speak.

Frenz revealed that one of his cousins was a storm-trooper: ‘this is entirely a voluntary organisation, for which no payment of any kind is received’.

It was therefore a quite idyllic image of Germany that Frenz conveyed to his Dundonian readers, contrasting painfully with the Depression back home:

During my stay in Germany I saw no beggars or hawkers, and I was told there were none. A few disabled men, however, hold special permits to do door-to-door trading. One of my cousin’s pals is in a labour camp. He earns threepence per day, but seemed quite happy with his lot. The men all live together in barrack-like buildings, and a guard is kept by a member bearing a spade in place of a rifle.

Frenz spent eight days in Bavaria, visited Cologne Cathedral, saw Ulm steeple – the ‘highest in the world’ – and Munich Munster. In Munich, too, he saw ‘the Hitler cell, where the leader once served a term of imprisonment. This cell is now a sort of national monument, and is never occupied by prisoners’. At Friedrichshaven he surveyed a gigantic new zeppelin. Throughout this trip he was struck by the schoolchildren devoting their energies to hard work and hiking. Every village had a football pitch.

This feature helps explain why since 1939 Frenz had been under surveillance. But the garage owner had also said: ‘While in his company I have never heard him say anything against this country.’ As for Meotti, he may have figured on the contribution list from the Italian colony of Dundee District, but on 13 September 1940 it was reported that ‘a Home Office Warrant has failed to reveal anything of interest other than the fact that Meotti was very heavily in debt and that his son, James Meotti, is in the habit of betting’. As for the theory of espionage surrounding the third internee, ‘it is quite clear that there is another explanation of Mrs Robertson’s comparative affluence since the departure of her husband to India’. On 31 October 1940, the detention orders were revoked.

An Officer in the Tower and on the Airwaves

Norman Baillie-Stewart had a career in treachery far longer than that of Jessie Jordan and her fellow Dundonians. Born Norman Baillie on 15 January 1909 in Willesden, to an illustrious line of Highland warriors, he left Sandhurst aged 18 for the Seaforth Highlanders. He changed his name by deed poll to Baillie-Stewart, to continue his mother’s family name of Stewart, which had died with his uncle. His military talents impressed his commanding officers. He was rapidly promoted to captain, but, in August 1932, fatefully contacted Reichswehr HQ in Berlin, offering to sell classified technical information.

The material Baillie-Stewart offered could easily have been gathered from British military journals, while his impromptu approach merely aroused the suspicions of his pre-Nazi German contacts, who tipped off the British authorities. Nevertheless, Baillie-Stewart was allowed to pursue contacts with representatives of the German army in Holland, all of them monitored by the British War Office. The renegade was arrested in January 1933, held in the Tower of London and, in March, court-martialled under the Official Secrets Act. He was sentenced to five years’ penal servitude. Considered naïve and ludicrous by the press, MI5 deemed him ‘tactless, rather obstinate, self-confident, tends to resent advice and correction. This attitude is put down to conceit and excessive self-valuation’.19

On his release from prison, the ‘Officer in the Tower’ gave an exclusive to the Daily Express, recounting and explaining his espionage adventure. His motivations were not strictly selfish. On 6 September 1937, he told the paper that ‘the map of dismembered Germany after the Treaty of Versailles was anathema to me’. Details of all British aircraft, tanks, and armoured cars were familiar to him, and would become useful in the negotiations to come. A catalyst was an encounter with a beautiful blonde German girl on a steamship to South Africa: ‘from her I learned love and sympathy for the German race. My exchange of ideas with her and her compatriots made me want to be one of that race’.

Under the influence of this Marlene Dietrich figure, he drifted inexorably into espionage. In August 1932, he left for Berlin, ‘furthering my self-annihilating scheme’. Again, his motivations were not simply narcissistic: ‘Germany was defenceless in the centre of Europe, and could only rebuild her strength by copying the methods of surrounding Powers.’

Things started well: ‘I lied to perfection, wasn’t caught once’. He gave information on British tanks to one Herr Obst in Holland. But his downfall came very soon after. And yet, he still strutted his difference: ‘My court-martial opened at the Duke of York’s HQ, Chelsea, on March 20 1933, with a flourish. Grand was the military panoply. Brass hats, field boots, spurs and swords abounded everywhere. My solitary kilt was in queer contrast to it all.’ Once consigned to the dreaded Tower, ‘I could have escaped any night I liked. I exercised on Raleigh’s Walk between the Bloody Tower and the governor’s lodgings.’ Like the doomed Lady Jane Grey, he left a mark on his door. He was regaled with stories of how spies were shot in the Tower, but was not afraid.20

On his release in 1937, Baillie-Stewart settled in Vienna, where he came under the wing of a Nazi agent, a woman calling herself Edith Shackleton and claiming to be a sister of the explorer. In February 1938, Baillie-Stewart was interrogated for five hours by the still-independent Austrian police and accused of engaging in Nazi activities. He received no sympathy from the British consular service. He would return to Vienna in March 1938, immediately after the Anschluss, and in September applied for German citizenship, gaining it in July 1940. Six months later, Baillie-Stewart contacted the Vienna branch of the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda, criticising the poor quality of Berlin’s English-language broadcasts. He was invited for a voice test and, in August 1939, was asked to Berlin for a three-week trial as an announcer.

The former Seaforth Highlander was viewed with suspicion. He adopted the name ‘Manfred von Krause’, apparently that of a German forebear. But his relationship with the German Broadcasting Corporation did not last: during September 1939, William Joyce gradually usurped the position of Germany’s number one English-language mouthpiece.

In Joyce, Baillie-Stewart seems to have found his Celtic nemesis. On 21 September 1934, an informant had offered this appreciation of the future Lord Haw-Haw:

As an Irishman he is naturally a person of very definite opinions and these opinions always tend towards extremes. He is, for instance, a rabid anti-Catholic, and a fanatical anti-Semite. He has decided tendencies towards absolute monarchy, absolute sovereignty, dictatorship, etc, and underlying it all is that romantic streak common to all Celts which makes them doubly effective and doubly dangerous.

Good: Boundless physical and moral courage; considerable brain power; tremendous energy and application; well read politically and historically; very loyal to his friends; a sense of humour; patriotic.

Bad: Little stability due to over-developed intellect and Celtic temperament; very violent temper at times, at others extremely quiet and calculating; a tendency towards theatricality; marked conspiratorial complex. Celtic prejudices very deeply rooted; not to be swayed by arguments where his inherent instincts are touched.21

In December 1939, after incautious remarks about the scuttling of the German pocket battleship Graf Spee off Montevideo, Baillie-Stewart was temporarily replaced as newsreader by a 16-year-old, Jim Clark. In an article for the Sunday Chronicle on 31 July 1940, ‘I meet Lord Haw-Haw’, the American journalist William Shirer elaborated on this peculiarly dangerous and fractious expat community:

There is another British traitor to note here in Berlin. He is Baillie-Stewart, a former s/o of the Seaforth Highlanders, who a few years ago was sentenced to imprisonment in the Tower for betraying military secrets to a foreign power . . . The girl who led him to this was a German siren and after his release he followed her here . . . He did some broadcasts at first, but his Scottish nature was too unbending for the Nazi officials of the Propaganda Ministry and the German Broadcasting Corporation. He is now off the air and working as a translator in the Foreign Office.²²

In the face of such career frustration, Baillie-Stewart indicated that he wished to return to Vienna, but the Foreign Ministry offered him a place in its own English-language broadcasting team. He would produce and present radio programmes as well as giving lectures at Berlin University and writing for The Camp, a German-sponsored tabloid distributed to British POWs. From February 1942, he began his own broadcasts to Britain, under the name ‘Lancer’.

On 31 July 1942, in the Sunday Pictorial, nine traitors were ‘unmasked’, with Anthony Hern tearing ‘the veil from the faces of the rats of radio’. Traitor number three was Baillie-Stewart, who promised that ‘utter defeat is in store for the British and defeat combined with the Red Plague of Communism is a ghastly combination indeed’. Hern poured vitriol on someone who had passed from being an unsuccessful actor to an unsuccessful spy, who was once ‘the Officer in the Tower’ and was now ‘the Scotsman of Unter den Linden’:

Baillie-Stewart, an officer in a famous Regiment, was cashiered from the Army and sent to gaol for five years for selling military secrets to a foreign power. Baillie-Stewart was supposed to have betrayed his country because he was infatuated with a German dancer. Only since the war has the truth come out. He didn’t betray his country in a moment of infatuation. He betrayed his country deliberately and of malice aforethought – because he preferred the Nazi system of government to the British. Until he was released from Maidstone Gaol a year or so before the war – he spent most of his spare time writing bad poetry – he went almost at once to Germany. The servant went crawling to his masters. He began in the early days of the war to broadcast anti-English fake Scottish Nationalist stuff. But Goebbels didn’t think much of this Scottish braggart. He was taken off the regular strength of the German quisling broadcasters. Now he does translations in the Wilhelmstrasse (the Berlin Whitehall). But occasionally his voice comes over the air on the ‘Caledonia’ programme to remind his handful of listeners that this young ex-officer has not changed his ugly spots.23

Between February 1942 and November 1944, ‘Lancer’ gave three talks a week. Titles included ‘Calais Magazine’, ‘After Five Years’, ‘Allied Methods’ and ‘Russian Rule’.²⁴ Initially, Baillie-Stewart had alternated in reading news announcements with William Joyce. There followed humorous soldier stories; a broadcast on the ‘Battle of Berlin’, in which he accused Britain of ‘attacking women and children, just as you did in the last war’; the Japanese war and wishful thinking – ‘Your boys will never return’; and attacks on Jews’ military service, and English ignorance of Europe. Across the airwaves, Baillie-Stewart warned that ‘Italy is between the devil (Bolshevist-Russia) and the deep blue sea (Anglo-America)’. He also attacked racial discrimination against Negroes and Mexicans in the USA, and sang the praises of the train service in Germany. During this time, he managed to try his hand as a librettist, adapting German hits for the singer Lale Anderson. In May or June 1944 he was transferred to Vienna, where he was to produce propaganda programmes for the local Reichssender. As the war situation worsened, he was called up for the Volksturm – Nazism’s ‘Dad’s Army’ – and it is at this point that he seems to have made an escape.

In May 1944, Baillie-Stewart’s doctor had diagnosed incipient cirrhosis of the liver, gastritis and a duodenal ulcer: ‘We recommend a KARLSBAD CURE. A LENGTHY STAY AT MEDIUM ALTITUDE IN FOREST region necessary, where a diet rich in carbo-hydrates will be possible.’25 Baillie-Stewart followed this advice and rushed southwards, along with others aware that the ship was sinking.

On 21 May 1945, Norman Clark, correspondent for the News Chronicle, announced that Baillie-Stewart had been captured at Alt Aussee, a lake-side Austrian village:

In Tyrolean chamois leather shorts, heavily embroidered braces, forester’s jacket of green with finely sculptured deer’s teeth on each lapel, and thick white woollen stockings, Norman Baillie-Stewart – the ‘officer in the Tower’ of 1932 – languishes tonight in the gaol here. He might have been at liberty, mixing among the Austrian aristocracy that now overcrowds this Alpine village of musical comedy, ignoring the tragedy in its midst.

Baillie-Stewart had posed as a member of the Free Austrian Movement, and even acted as interpreter to the military governor. But he had been trapped mistranslating the statement of a suspected Dutch Nazi. His identity had been confirmed by a friend, Countess Platen von Hindenburg, cousin of the field-marshal. The renegade told the paper:

I am completely disillusioned about everything, and don’t care what happens to me. But I want it understood that at no time was I ever a member of the Nazi Party or the Labour Front. But despite that I shouldn’t be surprised if some sort of case can be trumped up to place me once again behind bars, as the British secret service which ruined my life long ago will always try to do something.

He then laid in to William Joyce, ‘a thug of the first order. Gradually he took over my job. He was a great friend of Goebbels, wore a uniform and carried a gun’. He went on to criticise German propaganda and recounted how he had been threatened with being sent to a concentration camp. But he had not rallied to the Union Jack: ‘I do not want to return to England; I want to become an Austrian.’26

He was taken into military custody in Brussels, but there remained the thorny question of his German citizenship. On 6 June 1945, he told his interrogator, Captain Spooner:

I am not the same Baillie-Stewart of the period 1933 to 1937, whose object was to seek sensation in return for the sensation thrust upon him under circumstances which could have been avoided. I have become a German by force of circumstances, and will not disown Germany.²⁷

On 1 October 1945, MI5 also took a statement by Countess Platen, whose daughter Baillie-Stewart had met at the Foreign Office in Berlin:

The Countess’s first reaction was to think that here was a traitor to his country, but then she decided that he was the type of Scot who was ‘a considerable egoist, a material optimist and a believer in some fantastic ideal’ and she felt a certain pity for him as even then he realised that Nazism was not so full of ideals as he had thought.

She also thought that he ‘was wasting his abilities’ and ‘always drank too much’.²⁸

Baillie-Stewart was put on trial in the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey. The capital charge of treason was dropped on condition that he plead guilty to having ‘aided the enemy’ under the Emergency Defence Regulations of 1939. In comparison with William Joyce and John Amery, he was considered to be politically harmless and to have done little real damage. In his defence, he gave his affection for a German woman as the deeper cause for his actions. The judge declared that ‘the sooner this man is got away from this country the better’. When the attorney-general pointed out that the Allied Control Commission was legally bound to penalise Nazi collaborators, Baillie-Stewart was sentenced, on 10 January 1946, to five years’ imprisonment. The judge recorded that he was ‘one of the worst citizens that any country has ever produced’.

After a short time in prison in Brixton, Baillie-Stewart was transferred to Wakefield in Yorkshire and, after an escape bid, removed to the high security centre at Pankhurst, on the Isle of Wight. On his release he was still barred from Germany, and lived in Quaker guest houses under the name ‘James Scott’. In October 1949, he entered Ireland, on false papers provided by the Quakers, and settled in Dublin. In November 1950, he married a Dublin shop assistant. He died on 7 June 1966.

Radio Caledonia

Baillie-Stewart was joined on Hitler’s airwaves by another Scottish renegade, Donald ‘Derrick’ Grant, the voice of ‘Radio Caledonia’. Grant was born in 1907 at Alness in the Black Isle, where his father was a grocer. He was educated at Alness Public School and Dingwall Academy. On leaving school, he enjoyed mixed success as a commercial traveller in England and Ireland. Following that, he went to Bradford, where he had an uncle, for a short holiday. He then proceeded to London and worked for the radio multiple firm of Lloyd Radio and also for the Hoover Cleaning Company.

A man who briefly knew Grant in Alness is Farquhar Ewen, who helps run the heritage centre of the village. Ewen remembers Grant as ‘a loner, who became fascinated with dangerous ideas’, ideas which would lead to his father banning him from the family home. Both Ewen’s and Grant’s mothers did cleaning work at the Gledfield estate owned by the Bainbridges of Ardgay, who regularly held fascist seminars during the thirties. Ewen remembers his own encounter with William Joyce – ‘a very courteous and smartly-dressed man’ – who gave him a brand new 1938 penny coin for his birthday. It may be surmised that contact with the glamorous world of thirties fascism in Easter Ross could have seduced the young Grant.29

However, Grant did not mention this to his interrogators. According to his October 1946 account, it was while in England in 1934 that he moved towards Fascism.

I had taken the average interest in politics and was particularly interested in social welfare. I had the desire to see England a still better place for her people to live in and, being not entirely satisfied with the achievements of the political parties at that time, I became attracted to the Fascist movement. About July 1938, I became an ordinary subscribing member of the South Kensington branch of the Mosley Party. I undertook no activities in that Party apart from taking an interest in and giving some assistance to the Film Unit. I was interested in film technique and had studied this subject to some extent. I was thoroughly disappointed with the general conditions prevailing in the party and also with the majority of the type of people who were in it. Certain leaflets on agricultural and financial matters issued by the Imperial Fascist League attracted my attention and led me to become a member of this organisation about the month of September 1938. I undertook the work of trying to form a small group in the Earls Court district. We did not have more than about six members.³⁰

Grant also began to receive propaganda literature from Nazi Germany. In 1938, he wrote to Rolf Hoffmann of the Propaganda Department in Munich:

An instructress of the ‘Women’s League of Health and Beauty’ has asked me about the physical training of women in the new Germany. Any literature on this subject will be much appreciated and passed on. By the way I should like to correspond with either a member of the Party, the Hitler Youth or BDM. I am Scotch, 31 years of age and a member of the Imperial Fascist League (which has no connection with the British Union of Oswald Mosley) . . . I would like to go to Germany for the first time to see the miracles which Fascism has accomplished there. Best wishes from a British Fascist.

Hoffmann replied: ‘I am delighted to hear that the literature you received was of interest; News from Germany will be sent to you regularly.’31 In March 1939, and now referring to himself as ‘Derrick F. Grant’, he received literature in Earls Court, including the pamphlets, Who wants war? By Dr Goebbels; Adolf Hitler offers France 25 years of Peace; and Jewry and Penal Punishment. Under this influence, Grant’s connection with the Third Reich deepened:

As, in the interests of world peace, I was in favour of promoting an Anglo-German understanding, I joined the Anglo-German Link, probably in spring of 1938. I did not occupy any position in this organisation other than that of a subscribing member. As a result of my desire for world peace and an understanding between the nations, I became a member of the ‘Weltklub Union’, probably sometime at the beginning of 1938. This club had centres in various countries in the world. The meeting place in London was at the Linguists Club in Holborn . . . Through the medium of this club, I got into contact with the daughter of a German family in Magdeburg. I forget the actual address but the name of the family was Dietrich and they owned a small champagne factory. The daughter desired to come to England for a few weeks to improve her knowledge of English and we agreed on a holiday exchange. She came to London a week or two after the Munich affair in 1938 and I paid the cost of some four weeks’ stay. Under the usual conditions of such a holiday exchange it was agreed that I should go to Magdeburg the following year and stay for four weeks with her family. I was glad to do this, having heard conflicting accounts about the conditions prevailing in Germany I was interested to see for myself. In the Spring of 1939 my parents begged me to go home and help them with their business. I agreed to do this after I had had my part of the holiday exchange. I secured a British passport and left for Germany on July 7 1939. For some time I had been receiving literature about Germany from an office in Hannover. Informing these people of my intended visit to Magdeburg, they asked me to break the journey in Hannover for a couple of days. This office turned out to be the Nordische Gesellschaft [a Nazi propaganda outfit aimed at Scandinavia] which had its rooms in the building of the Gauleitung in Hanover. After two days’ stay in Hannover I proceeded to Magdeburg and stayed there for the agreed period.³²

This was quite a time for a British subject to holiday in the Third Reich. MI5 were sceptical about his motives. He was ‘alleged to be a member of the Imperial Fascist League and ADC to its leader Arnold Leese . . . in charge of incriminating documents belonging to the IFL which were subsequently destroyed. Source said that Grant was believed to have been on some Fascist-Nazi mission just before the war, have been engaged in activities on behalf of the Germans’.33

Anyway, Grant could later claim:

Despite the threats of war, the actual declaration came as a surprise to me and I could hardly credit that we had gone to war over the question of Danzig and the Polish Corridor especially in view of the fact that prominent Allied men had declared the existence of the Corridor to be a menace to World Peace. I held the fairly common view that the whole thing would just fizzle out. As the German authorities did not take any immediate steps against me and as I had money enough for a further 10 days’ stay I decided to wait for that period. Five days after the outbreak of war it was announced that no foreigner was to leave the town where he lived.³⁴

On 11 September 1939, he was arrested and imprisoned. On release, he was sent to work on the construction of a sports ground near Hanover. Later he did the messy job of colouring typewriter ribbons. Helena Jirka, secretary of the local Nazi party Gauleiter, recommended Grant as a lodger to one Frau Beyer. In 1945, Grant’s landlady recalled that ‘he came to her in August 1939 and stayed with her for about six months. He started on the outbreak of war to work at cleaning the streets and later worked in a carbon paper factory, from which he used to return with his head and hands bright blue. She objected to this, but otherwise found him a pleasant and well-behaved lodger’.³⁵ In June 1940, Grant received a letter from the Rundfunk radio service in Berlin, inviting him to interview with one Dr Erich Hetzler, head of the English section. According to Norman Baillie-Stewart, Hetzler was ‘a fanatical Nazi who . . . strutted around the station not merely in his impressive uniform but wearing his sword as well’.³⁶ Grant recalled:

The interview took place on the day that Marshall Pétain declared that France must lay down arms. It was explained to me in Berlin by Dr Erich Hetzler that the work concerned the effort to secure a mutual peace between Britain and Germany and the promotion of an understanding between the two countries. I declared frankly that I was always prepared to help in the work of stopping any war and promoting understanding between my own country and any other and particularly Germany because I believed that understanding between that country and my own was absolutely essential to world peace.

On taking on this work, he surrendered his British passport, in return for which he received a Fremden/Freedom Pass under another name, that of Donald Palmer.

[Hetzler] suggested that we should start a small short wave radio transmitter to be addressed to Scotland with the aim of advocating a peace and development of understanding between the two people. I agreed for the following reasons: 1) I sincerely wanted to see the Scottish people at peace and devoting their energy to their future welfare. 2) Taking a purely objective view as a Scot, I could not see that the war really concerned Scotland. Firstly, no threat was involved to Scottish interests and secondly, because of the cause of the declaration of war, namely Danzig and the Polish Corridor. I was further influenced by the fact that France was heavily defeated and I feared for the fate of my country. I declare frankly that I went into this business with open eyes but without the idea of working for the interests of Germany or securing any personal gain.37

Since the fall of France, Britain had become Germany’s main target. Preparations for a landing in the British Isles were accompanied by the stepping up of clandestine broadcasts in English. The Büro Concordia set up a series of secret stations which gave the impression of broadcasting from within the enemy country. On 5 July 1940, Rudolf Stache, head of Radio Intelligence, presented Goebbels with a survey of all existing and projected secret stations directed against Britain: ‘Concordia North West is now operating as Caledonia, which is ostensibly an amateur station dedicated to the ideal of Scottish independence.’³⁸

It was on 27 June 1940 that the transmitter ‘Radio Caledonia – The Voice of Scotland’ went on the air for half an hour daily. Its programmes were aimed at the dockyards on Clydeside, appealing largely to Scottish nationalist sentiment. Although Foreign Ministry officials were dubious about the likely receptivity of the Scots, they approved of the Propaganda Ministry’s plan. Grant later told his interrogators:

My own idea of the line this station should adopt will be clear from my previous statements. This course however, could not be definitive because of the interference of the German authorities and particularly Dr Erich Hetzler, chief of our department. On those occasions when I was given a free hand to write and talk, I chiefly devoted talks to the economic betterment of Scotland and a better future for her people.

The exact content of these broadcasts, which Grant initially wrote with a Scottish POW, Sergeant Macdonald, remains elusive. There are no surviving recordings or transcriptions, nor are there recollections by Scottish listeners. In October 1945, Herbert Krumbiegel, an electrical engineer, tantalisingly told interrogators:

One of the English speakers with whom I came into contact in the normal course of work was a civilian internee named Palmer, who came to Büro Concordia in the summer or autumn of 1940 and remained there until the Büro closed down at Helmstedt. I believe Palmer came to the Büro from the Hanover district, where he had been in business before the war. I think he originally came from Scotland. Büro Concordia was the name of the section dealing with propaganda broadcasts from secret stations; for instance in the case of English broadcasts the pretence was that the broadcasts originated from secret transmitters situated in England. It is obvious that Palmer would know of this pretence. Palmer’s programme was the ‘New Caledonia’ programme, which closed down in about the autumn of 1942. During the time he was employed on the ‘New Caledonia’ programme I and my colleagues used to record his talks daily. I have myself recorded more than 200 of these talks. Recordings were done between 1600 and 1800 hours and the broadcast took place – so far as I can now remember – at about 2000 hours, British time. Whilst Palmer was speaking I could see him in his cubicle and could also hear his voice, as I had a loudspeaker fitted in my room for that purpose. I understood very little English at that time and therefore cannot say what he was speaking about. He was always a willing worker. I think he was paid 605 marks a month. I also think he wrote his own scripts. Palmer always enjoyed complete freedom and lived privately in Berlin. He was always dressed in civilian clothes.39

As the engineer said, Radio Caledonia lasted two years. Grant described thus his subsequent wartime activities:

In August 1942, having been long of the opinion that the station was serving no useful purpose I begged Dr Hetzler that it be discontinued. This was agreed and the last transmission was made a few days later. In the period that followed up to the beginning of April 1945, I remained at the same department and mainly devoted myself to Archive work. This consisted of reading the British papers when received and filing any articles contained in them of interest for the other two stations, the NBBS [New British Broadcasting Service] and Workers’ Challenge. I was occasionally asked to write news items for the NBBS and Workers’ Challenge. Not being in agreement with the line adopted by these stations I did this work most unwillingly and frequently managed to avoid [it] on the excuse that I had too many English language newspapers to read.

In April 1945, after a period of convalescence for bronchitis, he managed to ‘make good my escape. I undertook this work willingly and without any form of coercion. I was paid for this work by the German Government. I had free movement in Berlin and free movement in Germany on the receipt of a pass from my office. In addition to my pay I received Red Cross parcels which had been acquired for me from a nearby Stalag’.⁴⁰

It was by intercepting mail from the Red Cross that the British authorities began to take an interest in Grant. Major Perfect informed Ross and Cromarty police that on 16 August 1941 a letter had been sent by Grant from Hanover to his mother: ‘Keeping very well. Have everything I need. Still Golfing? Would enjoy a game.’ A PC Macdonald of the Ross and Cromarty Constabulary, who was asked to make enquiries about Grant in his home village, called on the local doctor, Farquhar Macrae. Grant’s mother, it transpired, had told the doctor that ‘Derrick was very avid on the German Nazis’.⁴¹ But nothing further was learnt of his activities in Germany until September 1944, when one Corporal Paton, a British POW who had recently escaped from Germany, made a statement concerning a number of British renegades whom he had met there between September 1943 and February 1944, and alongside whom he had worked for the NBBS. In October 1944 another British POW, Lance-Corporal Roy Courlander, who had visited Paris on behalf of the enemy in January 1944 and subsequently escaped, was shown a photograph of Grant. He stated that he recognised it as that of a man who in January 1944 was working in a branch of the German Foreign Office in Paris.

After the fall of the Third Reich, with Grant still in hiding, MI5 gathered statements concerning him and other renegade broadcasters. POWs forced to collaborate on these programmes were particularly useful. On 15 May 1945, Pilot Officer Freeman, a Nazi sympathiser recruited for ‘Germany Calling’ but who had nevertheless been at constant loggerheads with the German Foreign Ministry, declared:

This NBBS had the finest collection of poor type Englishmen one could wish to meet, but in passing I should like to record that one, Palmer, was a sincere man. He was deluded and knew it, but had the courage not to say it, he was sincere in his basic beliefs and managed to avoid becoming a hireling in the sense the other men [were.]42

Two days later, it was the turn of a German employee, Margarete Eberhard:

[Palmer] worked at Concordia writing and broadcasting talks for Caledonia until it closed down. He stayed on doing nothing except read the newspapers and produce the occasional idea until he was sent on leave with bronchitis in Feb 1945. I do not know where to. He was an honest fellow, very Scottish, anti-Jewish, but not anti-British. He tried to leave, but Hetzler would not release him.

William Griffiths, a POW from the Welsh Guards who was recruited for Welsh National Radio, had this to say about Palmer:

At first he had a station of his own solely for Scotch listeners. He ran the station himself, but I do not know the name of it. He wrote and broadcast his own work. Afterwards, in the summer of 1942, when the station closed down, he was employed on reading newspapers, and cutting out pieces for reference and propaganda. He was very anti-Jewish.43

A female renegade, Susan Hilton, alias Ann Tower, who also worked for the department’s Irish station, told interrogators:

I proceeded to write talks for the Scottish sender until January 1942. I wrote three to six talks a week. These were of a varying character, touching upon industry, economics, farming, and every subject to do with Scotland. To assist me I was given by Hetzler extracts from BBC broadcasts and from newspapers, magazines, etc, and the theme of my script was to react against the British point of view as expressed in their propaganda. The idea was to lead the British people to the German point of view . . . I was assisted in my work by a young Scotsman named Donald Palmer. He hated having to do this work . . . His job in Concordia was exactly the same as mine, except that he did the speaking as well, owing to his Scottish accent.⁴⁴

In October 1945, MI5 received an interrogation report concerning Vivian Stranders, Sturmbannführer in the SS. British by birth, but naturalised as a German in 1932, Stranders was behind the abortive British Free Corps, and served also as a radio commentator called ‘Mediator’:

Apart from university work Stranders was fairly busy and worked for Concordia. Palmer struck Stranders as an idealist who wanted to work for an Anglo-German friendship and they met occasionally. Towards the end of the war Stranders told Spaarmann that the Goebbels propaganda was wrong and he wanted to have his own sender called the ‘Nordic Front’ (based on the friendship idea) and, if it had been allowed, he would have had Palmer in charge of it . . . Originally Palmer had wanted to go and fight the Russians but Stranders persuaded him not to do this.⁴⁵

On 26 November 1945, MI5 investigators tracked down Helena Jirka. Her home in Hanover was standing in an almost completely bombed-out street. The name of her recently deceased architect father was still outside the door. She was not very co-operative: ‘She failed to identify the photograph of Donald Grant. It was soon clear that she was lying.’ She finally stated that Donald Grant ‘went to Magdeburg in 1939 to stay with a girl who had visited him in England in 1938. These visits were made under an exchange scheme operated by the Anglo-German Link. She gave no clear account of how she first met Grant, but she herself was secretary to the Gauleiter of the NSDAP’. She said that in 1940 Grant left Frau Beyer and went to Berlin to work for the Rundfunk. During the war, she received a number of Red Cross letters from Grant’s mother, the last in about January or February 1945, which she forwarded to Grant under the name of Palmer. She had burnt all the letters and postcards received from him.

During this conversation, Jirka’s mother appeared. She ‘strongly disapproved of Grant and his treacherous activities and of her daughter’s allowing him to use their address as a post-box’. She accused her daughter of being mitleidig: ‘soft-hearted’. The MI5 officer was unconvinced: ‘A tougher and less pleasant specimen of Nazi humanity could hardly be conceived than Helena Jirka . . . She was clearly keen to protect Grant, probably from mixed political and emotional motives, although she professed to regard him as a traitor to his country.’

Frau Beyer seems to have been much more helpful:

She was away when he left for Berlin, some time in 1940. Shortly afterwards, he wrote her a postcard from Berchtesgaden, without giving any address, but the card was lost in the bombing of Wiesenstrasse. He visited her in the new year, probably of 1941, just to greet her and see how she was, but he never stayed again with her. She did not know what he was doing in Berlin, but Jirka told her that he was working for the radio. It is clear from Beyer’s information that Jirka was lying on one or two points; clearly it was Jirka who got Grant his job at the Rundfunk, through her party connections, when Grant found his employment as a crossing sweeper and in the paper factory intolerable. Equally clearly, Grant must have re-visited Jirka when he revisited Hanover in the new year of 1941.46

Donald Grant managed to avoid capture for more than a year despite being number 22 on a ‘Civilian Renegades Warning List’. Because of an ‘irresistible’ homesickness he eventually surrendered himself to a British liaison officer in Baden Baden, in the French occupied zone, on 31 October 1946. He was carrying the pass of a ‘displaced person’, under the name of Michael Ryan, travellers’ guide, born in Cork in June 1905. One Major Davies ensured he was given a packet of cigarettes and a meal. In return, the badly disillusioned Scot told all. In his report to MI5, Major-General Lochhead, chief of the intelligence division, concluded that Grant was ‘a pathetic figure now reaping the fruits of misguided and illegal actions’.47 This assessment may explain the lightness of his sentence, especially in comparison with that given to William Joyce/Lord Haw Haw, hanged on 3 January 1946. On 6 February 1947, under the title ‘Aiding the Enemy’, The Times reported the end of Grant’s trial:

He pleaded guilty at the Central Criminal Court yesterday to doing acts likely to assist the enemy during the past war by broadcasting, preparing propaganda, and acting as archivist in the German Propaganda Service, and he was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment.

Mr Edward Clarke, pleading in mitigation, urged that Grant’s offence was a small one compared with that of people like Joyce. The Judge then said there was no evidence of what Grant actually broadcast for ‘Radio Caledonia’, and suggested that the jury might possibly have found that he did so with intent to help, not Germany, but Scotland. The absence of evidence as to the nature of Grant’s broadcasts was due to:

1. The fact that it had always hitherto been successfully argued in these cases, that anyone who broadcast for the German broadcasting service in wartime, must know that such broadcasts were intended by the enemy to help Germany, and therefore that he must himself have intended to help the enemy.

2. The difficulty, if not impossibility, of linking a monitor report of an anonymous broadcast with any particular broadcaster.

In Grant’s case, this difficulty was not insuperable, as Grant was apparently the only broadcaster for Radio Caledonia, which broadcast appeals to Scotland to dissociate herself from England’s war.

On his release from prison, Grant returned to his mother’s grocer’s shop at Pretoria House in the high street of Alness. When news got around, an angry crowd descended on the shop and stoned their disgraced son out of the village. Donald Grant emigrated to apartheid South Africa, then returned to London, where he is believed to have died in the mid-1980s.

‘We have always lived dangerously and there is nothing like it’

In early 1940, the Home Office received a report calling Raven Thomson ‘one of the most extreme members of the party, and probably one of the more dangerous members’.48 Thomson was both editor of Action and director of Sanctuary Press. His wife Lisbeth, of German citizenship, ran the Anglo-German Agency, which organised the domestic employment of young German and Austrian women and the sale of air raid protection equipment of all kinds. Up until July 1939, New Era Tours were conducted by Thomson’s step-daughter Helga.

Raven Thomson was considered to be ‘one of the most ardent pro-Germans’. He had made five visits to Nazi Germany, firstly to Nuremberg, where he was received by Hitler, then to Breslau for the annual Nazi Youth Rally and to meet Goebbels, with whom he agreed a subsidy for the BUF. He also attended the Berlin Olympics in 1936. As the phoney war drew to its end, British intelligence noted that ‘the existence of a particularly subversive and revolutionary section of the BU was reported recently, and it was said that this section, known as the Suicide Squad, was probably not known to Mosley, but was known to Francis-Hawkins and Raven Thomson’. What’s more, Thomson had reportedly told his wife: ‘After all, it’s great fun, even if it is a little dangerous. We’re going to win whatever happens, and the bigger the fight, the greater the satisfaction. We have always lived dangerously, and there is nothing like it.’ Prior to his detention, he ‘was addressing meetings at which he indicated violent anti-Government and pro-Fascist views’.⁴⁹

It was therefore no surprise that Thomson was arrested on 4 April 1940. In his personal effects were found fourteen sheets of paper containing routes between large towns in Great Britain, for example the A2 London–Dover. ‘This may have a sinister significance’, it was noted. However, Thomson protested his patriotic credentials:

I remember a meeting I held at Dumfries many years ago to which some Reds came from Glasgow. They put the question to me directly: ‘If we were at war with a Fascist country would you fight for Britain?’ I said ‘Certainly, we defend our country from any attack by a Fascist country.’ This Red said ‘You are no good. If there was a war with Russia I should not fight for Britain, I should fight for Russia.’ It was a typical internationalist mind.50

Thomson’s only son was a sergeant in the RAF (and would go missing in August 1941).

According to Thomson’s biographer, Peter Pugh, ‘the reasons for detention were insufficient to form a prosecution under conventional law’.⁵¹ Nevertheless, he was incarcerated in Brixton Prison, alongside other suspected traitors. This period of imprisonment inflicted considerable psychological damage on Mosley’s former Director of Policy. On 27 November 1942, Thomson requested in vain to visit his mistress, Olive Burdett, the BUF’s chief women’s organiser, at Royal Holloway. He wrote obsequiously to Home Secretary Morrison:

I deliberately chose South Hackney as the seat I would contend for British Union, because I held you to be an opponent worthy of my steel. I shall be sorry if we permitted political opposition and the conditions of this detention to become the cause of permanent personal embitterment, when we have both this much in common – our love and respect for the magnificent people of East and North London who have already suffered so severely in this unfortunate war.⁵²

On 2 September 1943, he complained that ‘my health and nervous condition are suffering in consequence of the prolonged confinement and inability to find sufficient means of active occasions’. On 22 September 1943, the senior medical officer at the prison reported: ‘he says he occupies most of his time here writing but on occasions plays cricket or rounders. He now says he wants physical occupation eg farm work. He tells me he is very worried over private domestic matters – a love affair, of which the authorities are fully aware, and this is affecting his sleep’. He was suffering from ‘mild nervous and physical debilitations’.⁵³

On 2 December 1943, Thomson was finally transferred to Peel Camp on the Isle of Man. This does not seem to have done him any good. On 15 January 1944, he pleaded again with the authorities:

I must ask you to send me back to Brixton, as I find the prevailing Anti-British sentiment in the camp, which is now largely composed of Anglo-Germans and Anglo-Italians, quite intolerable! . . . As I joined British Union as a patriotic British subject, however critical I may have been of the government of this country, I cannot tolerate the continual attacks I hear on the British people and this country, which are having a most adverse effect on my already shaken nerves.54

On 23 May 1944, a psychiatric report on the Scottish Blackshirt found that he

had great difficulty in distinguishing the borderline between actual happening and these fantasies (as he calls them). He refused to do any farm work and brooded over his condition. Early this month I had a definite reply from the lady in question which stated that she did not wish to correspond with him any further. After I had discussed this with him his condition became worse and he now denies all insight into his system. In fact he professes never to have had such insight . . . His general behaviour has not changed, in his habits he contrives to be dirty and he has not been able to do any real work of any kind. He associates with other people and is quite talkative – mostly on abstract philosophical problems . . . He is very logical in all his conversations with me if they are not concerned with his delusions and in fact at times he is rather cunning. He himself mentions the paranoiac schizophrenia as a possible diagnosis and he wishes to have his memory restored either by hypnosis, narcoanalysis or some other active treatment [sic]. He is in touch with his family and has even asked them to send him money . . . Raven Thomson himself was rather against being sent to a mental home on the grounds that it might create a bad impression.⁵⁵

The malaise afflicting the author of Civilization as Superman seemed, in fact, to be rather banal. On 25 May 1944, another psychiatrist wrote: ‘His real trouble appears to be, that for years he has been living with an unmarried wife by whom he has had three children, and another woman has now appeared on the scene.’ On 13 June 1944, ‘he was found to be suffering from obsession in connection with his past life, and his neighbours . . . He suffers severely from insomnia, and finds that life here is unbearable’.⁵⁶

In September 1944, as the end of the Third Reich began to come clearly into view, Raven Thomson and other British Fascists were released. He certainly did not put the past behind him. By the beginning of 1946 he had rejoined Mosley’s inner circle and was busy organising book clubs, addressing private meetings, and managing the affairs of Mosley Publications Ltd.

Hitler’s Harvester

A smaller fish in this dark little pond was Alexander Proctor, of Blairgowrie, the man behind Tripod Harvesters Ltd.57 Son of a flax spinner, he became a captain in the Black Watch and travelled and worked extensively in Tsarist Russia. He served as a Special Service Officer in Russia from 1914 to 1920, directing the transit of British war materiel. As British Military Representative at Archangel, he was – he later claimed – the first British officer delegated to negotiate with a Bolshevik minister of state. As with the Earl of Glasgow, Proctor was turned by the October Revolution and its aftermath into a rabid enemy of Communism and the ‘Jewish conspiracy’ associated with it.

On 17 November 1936, Proctor wrote to Joachim von Ribbentrop to ‘welcome’ him as new Nazi ambassador to London. Proctor claimed to have been ‘the first Nazi in Britain since 1922’, before turning to current affairs. ‘Today we see Spain ravished and almost destroyed by the Red Dragon of Bolshevism and Anti-Christ!’ Fortunately, there was an archangel to take on this scourge:

The Glorious Leader of the White Nations – Germany’s Führer Adolph Hitler, who with your Great Nation is the Spearhead of resistance to the onslaught of the JEW-controlled BOLSHEVISM all the World over, has appealed to all Nations to unite in over-throwing their barbaric attack on Civilisation.

The harvester from Blairgowrie could be of help in this titanic struggle between good and evil:

Having probably had the widest experience of any living Englishman amongst Russia’s Peasantry in Pre-War days, and also having held the greatest administrative post of any British Officer in Russia during the War and Revolution, I think my services might be of considerable value in the coming conflict to free martyred and enslaved Russia from its ghastly bondage, and the World from the terrific menace of Jew-run Bolshevism. Therefore, I hereby solemnly offer my faithful service to the World’s saviour, A. Hitler and to Germany at any time when required to fight or work with your Great New Army in the swiftly approaching conflict with the vile forces of World Revolution.

There was also more earthy business to attend to:

Another object of this letter is also to place the use of my Tripod All-Weather Harvesting System and its Equipment at the disposal of the German Ministry of Agriculture, together with the benefit of my experience as a specialist in the perfect harvesting of all cut crops by Natural Air-Drying, which has triumphed so notably this past wet summer in England.

At 50, he was ‘still athletic and physically fit’ and concluded thus: ‘I wish to state that it is my keen desire to fight for the White Crusade against Jew-controlled Satanic Soviet Russia and all the foul villainy it stands for, whether Britain is involved or not in the coming Struggle’.

Such correspondence alerted the authorities. Intelligence reported of Proctor:

Uses a good car in which he travels extensively and is apparently able to procure an unlimited supply of petrol. He frequently visits farms in Lincolnshire and Norfolk, ostensibly for the purpose of selling his harvester. He does not, however, make any serious attempt to effect sales but treats his visits to farmers as a convenient opportunity for indulging in Fascist propaganda.

He was also a member of the Nordic League:

Proctor is violently pro-Nazi in sympathy. He has now, and has had for some years, a great admiration for Hitler, and the Nazi regime. After the Munich crisis he was heard to say ‘I wish to God I was in Germany now.’ ‘I hope Hitler will win if we go to war.’ He has written to Hitler and is in possession of a letter signed by Hitler. Proctor is perpetually saying that Hitler is his leader. He has also said that when Hitler takes control in England he, Proctor, will have a good position.

Through the Nordic League, Proctor was in touch with Captain Archibald Maule Ramsay MP during the months immediately preceding the latter’s detention. Conversations intercepted in March and May 1940 referred to their mutual friend, the Duke of Buccleuch, not simply on the use of tripod harvesting, but also a letter from the duke which Proctor ‘would like to show to’ Ramsay. In the light of this intelligence, Proctor was detained under Defence Regulation 18B and sent to the Isle of Man.

On 6 October 1940, Proctor appealed to the Advisory Committee on internment, stressing his patriotic credentials. A brother had been killed at Gallipoli, while another had served in India and South Africa before being ‘blown to bits on the western front’. In the present war, he had a son in the RAF and one on the flagship of the Mediterranean Fleet. He asked: ‘With this big contingent of my own Kith and Kin in the forefront of the present Conflict, is it not LUDICROUS to suppose that I would play the part of a Traitor to them, as well as to my King and Country?’ He offered his services to the Auxiliary Fire Service of Central London, or pleaded for at least ‘a transfer to a Concentration Camp somewhere in England’. His assessors at Peel Camp were unswayed: ‘We are firmly convinced that Proctor would regard the victory of this country as a victory for international Jewry . . . we feel very uneasy about him and hope that the Committee may feel justified in ordering his continued detention.’

But as the years passed, it was reported that whatever threat he posed had diminished. On 15 July 1943, an officer at Peel Camp reported:

I think the real truth is that Proctor is a crank and that before his detention he allowed himself to be carried away by his hatred of Russia and all things Russian. He is, however, in many ways an intelligent man and he has been a little over three years in detention so that he will have learnt his lesson . . . Although he made disloyal utterances over three years ago I do not believe that he would do anything actively subversive or be disloyal to this country if released. He has throughout maintained that he is anxious to do what he can to assist; he is now over 60 years of age and is said to be an expert on the subject of growing flax so that he should have no difficulty in finding employment[.]

Five days later, it was reported:

It seems clear that Proctor is still strongly anti-Russian, and has not really lost his admiration of Hitler, but he apparently purports to have reached the stage where, mentally exhausted, he can no longer afford to allow himself to worry over ideologies. Whether he can keep quiet for long may be open to doubt but the public expression of his views seems more likely to cause damage to himself than to the war effort.

He was therefore free to return to Blairgowrie. In the meantime, however, Tripod Harvesters Ltd had been deemed so inefficient that the Ministry of Supply had taken it over.

The Gauleiter of Peebles

Alexander Proctor was a very minor ‘traitor’ in comparison with his fellow Nordic Leaguer, Captain Archibald Maule Ramsay MP, the only member of the House of Commons to be detained during the Second World War. Born in 1894 to a distinguished Scottish aristocratic family, Ramsay had attended Eton and Sandhurst before serving in the Coldstream Guards and being seriously wounded in France in 1916. He would be made a member of His Majesty’s Bodyguard for Scotland. In 1931, he was elected Conservative MP for South Midlothian and Peeblesshire. As a member of the Potato Marketing Board, Ramsay seemed to be pursuing a solid and undistinguished parliamentary career well suited to his rural constituency.

However, while a member of the Committee for Subversive Activities, he took on a much more dangerous hue. ‘Severe vibrations’ hit Peebles at five minutes to midnight on 21 March 1938, and people in their homes all over the town experienced what proved to be a slight earthquake. Another severe disturbance in the locality was when the local MP began to make virulently anti-Semitic statements. It was around this time that Ramsay came to believe that Bolshevism was Jewish. Ramsay would recall how he decided to ‘oppose and expose the activities of Organized Jewry, in the light of the evidence which came into my possession in 1938 . . . Our hope was to avert war, which we considered to be mainly the work of Jewish intrigue centred in New York’.58 He set his sights on fighting the ‘internal enemy’ that had made of Britain, in the words of his own notorious ditty, a ‘Land of Dope and Jewry’. At the same time in the House of Commons, writes Richard Griffiths, ‘he stressed his patriotism, and attempted to convince people of the distinction between anti-Semitism and pro-Nazism, fearing that the Home Secretary would be stampeded into “identifying the two things by a ramp in our Jew-ridden Press” ’.⁵⁹ One notable success in Ramsay’s campaign to maintain a Christian society against the attacks of the ‘godless’ was in June 1938, when his Aliens Restriction (Blasphemy) Bill was passed on its first reading by 165 votes to 134.

It was at the beginning of 1939 that Ramsay’s utterances, and their consequences, ratcheted up. On 13 January 1939, the Peeblesshire Advertiser reported that Ramsay’s wife, Ismay Ramsay, had told the Arbroath Business Club: ‘There was not the smallest doubt that there was an international group of Jews who were behind world revolution in every single country at the present time.’ This provoked an outraged response from Dr Salis Daiches, Chief Rabbi of Edinburgh. ‘There is not the slightest foundation for this allegation . . . I challenge her to name the International group to which she refers.’⁶⁰ The Presbytery of Peebles also protested against this anti-Semitic outburst.

Ramsay leapt to his wife’s support. On 20 January he explained to the local paper the peril represented by the Third Communist International. Quoting Reverend Denis Fahey’s booklet The Rulers of Russia, he pointed out that of the 59 members of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party in 1935, 56 were Jews and that the remaining three, including Stalin, were married to Jewesses (Ramsay omitted to mention that this very same Central Committee had just been decimated during the Great Terror). Ramsay repeated this point on 13 February, in a speech to the Nordic League deploring the ‘onslaught from a Rabbi with whom the churches had joined issue against him, and from sections of the Jewish-controlled Scottish Press’. His wife, speaking on his behalf at Arbroath, ‘had dared to tell the truth about Red Spain. She also had been maliciously assailed from the same quarter’.⁶¹

There were limits to the outrage caused by such remarks. The Arbroath Herald had even felt flattered by the attention residents of nearby Kellie Castle attracted. Richard Griffiths remarks on the ‘naivety of the local community in Arbroath, prepared to take much of what it was told, provided it came from a member of the aristocracy’.62 Indeed, also in January 1939, the Montrose Standard had praised a lecture given to the local Workers Educational Association by Dr Kenneth Hayens, Reader in German at University College Dundee, in which he had praised the Nazi regime for ‘carrying out, for the benefit of the people, the things which people wanted’.⁶³

Back in Peebles, the local newspaper noted on 10 February 1939 that Unionists were ‘uneasy’ and gave the defeated Duchess of Atholl as an example of how an MP’s dabblings in international politics could lose him or her constituency support: ‘Captain Maule Ramsay will have to learn that the constituent whom he represents, like the customer, is always right . . . He can do much for himself by listening a bit more to the woes of the sheep farmers of the Moorfoots and Peeblesshire hills, and showing he is ready to help them.’⁶⁴

Nevertheless, on the eve of Ramsay’s speech to the Nordic League, the Peebles Conservative Association expressed its ‘solidarity and unanimity’. The paper noted that, in the Association’s statement, there was ‘no mention of Captain Ramsay’s anti-Jewish pronouncements, and thus, in the omission, would seem to condone them’. Indeed, in mid-March, at a well-attended meeting in the Parish Church Hall, the captain received an enthusiastic welcome. He stood by his previous statements on the Jews: ‘He was placed in a curious position. He was faced with withdrawing a statement which he believed to be true . . . He did what he believed everyone else in the same position would have done (cheers).’ The MP then moved on to other things, notably his activity on the committee for agriculture, which had led to his nickname ‘Spud’. He was ‘a humble member of National Government’, concerned about the future of the tweed industry and old-age pensions. And as a proof of loyalty, he expressed his ‘hundred per cent support for Neville Chamberlain’s attempts to avert war (applause)’. Nevertheless, some in the audience pressed him on his links with the shady Militant Christian Patriots, and his sympathies for continental Fascism:

Is it a fact that along with another 60 MPs you sent a letter of congratulation to Mussolini on the success of Fascism? – I am not a Fascist and have no intention of becoming one, and my signature never appeared in any letter of congratulation. – Then someone must have forged it? (Laughter)65

Ramsay had supporters abroad. On 24 March 1939, the Advertiser reported that the Nazi central organ, Völkischer Beobachter, had given its front page to the attacks on Ramsay for ‘telling the truth about the Jews’. In its editorial, the Advertiser remained concerned about their MP’s anti-Semitic stance:

We ourselves, contrary to the belief in certain quarters, have no political opinion on the Jewish controversy; our interest is ethical, and like the bulk of the electors who feel that Captain Ramsay in view of his position on the Committee of Subversive Activities, must have strong reasons for his attitude, we would like him to explain his reason, and so satisfy our British sense of fair play.⁶⁶

Captain Ramsay did nothing of the sort, and as his public anti-Semitic and anti-war activities were reaching their height, he created the conspiratorial Right Club in May 1939. This secret organisation, made up of Wardens, Stewards, Yeomen, Keepers and Freemen, was devoted to fighting the Judeo-Bolshevik menace. The membership was kept in the ‘Red Book’, a private ledger secured by brass fasteners and fitted with an automatic lock. This clandestine creation by a member of the Committee of Subversive Activities was at the limit of legality.

Fifty years after the end of the Second World War, the contents of the ‘Red Book’ were divulged to Richard Griffiths. The membership list includes William Joyce and A.K. Chesterton, significant figures of the far right of the time. It also contains a large number of Scots. Firstly, there are aristocrats: Lord Ronald Graham, second son of the Duke of Montrose; the Earl of Galloway; and Lord Colum Crichton-Stewart, younger brother of the fourth Marquess of Bute and Unionist MP for Norwich. There are other MPs: John MacKie, Conservative member for Galloway; Provost Hunter, member for Perth; and Samuel Chapman, member for South Edinburgh. There are military figures, for example, H.W. Luttmann-Johnson, and the businessman Sir Alexander Walker, former chairman of Johnnie Walker’s. The membership also included a neighbour of Captain Ramsay’s, Lord Carnegie, and Peebles constituents including Alec Cowan.67

Was the Right Club organising a ‘fifth column’? Around this time, it was reported to MI5 that Mosley had offered Ramsay a future role as Scottish Gauleiter:

According to Captain Ramsay, Mosley had promised Scotland as the area for which he would be responsible, but Captain Ramsay had refused the offer. Captain Ramsay’s words were: ‘Mosley said, “We have nothing in Scotland. I wish you would take it over”. I said “I do not approve of Fascism or I would join you”.’⁶⁸

However, Ramsay allegedly promised to Mosley that, in the case of a Communist uprising, he and his associates would be the first in the front line.

Throughout 1939, the captain pursued his campaign against the Anti-Christ in all its forms. After an attempt on the life of Chamberlain by the IRA, which Ramsay typically characterised as a Communist-controlled bombing financed by Jewish gold, he offered his help to the prime minister. His offer was declined. On 8 June 1939, MI5 reported Ramsay’s speech to the Carlton Club, where he elaborated on the ‘gigantic conspiracy’ as laid out in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The IRA, he notably claimed, was directed by the Grand Orient in Dublin. A week later, he addressed a meeting of the Link at the Crofton Hotel. It was ‘a very successful meeting. Ramsay talked all night’, outlining the aims of the Link: ‘the main idea and object of the Groups is to abolish all Jews in England and then get England to become friendly with Germany’. They should ‘hire fleets of small vans with loud-speakers and men who could speak well’. For the captain, Anthony Eden and Philip Sassoon were ‘thugs and bandits’, and Hitler ‘that splendid fellow’. On 21 June 1939, after attending a meeting of the Nordic League, the MI5 agent remarked:

All our observers agree that this man is either a completely honest fanatic or a most dangerous mixture of fanatic and crank. At the meeting which he addressed on behalf of the Nordic League his speeches display[ed] a lack of control beside which the speeches of William Gallacher of the Communist Party appear to be mild. It is certain that if any member of the CP made speeches like many of the speeches recently made by Captain Ramsay . . . he would certainly lay himself open to a charge of incitement to violence.

It was reported that a mass rally in the Albert Hall was planned for December 1939, and that, in the case of war, there would be ‘underground activity’.69

Among the Right Club’s membership were Tyler Kent, a cipher clerk at the US embassy in London, and Anna Wolkoff, daughter of a former Tsarist naval attaché. For Wolkoff, ‘Hitler is a god . . . He is of this century and it would be wonderful if he could govern England.’⁷⁰ Kent, a man of isolationist sympathies, had access to highly sensitive communications between US ambassador Joseph Kennedy, President Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill concerning military co-operation. This information was to be passed on treasonably to Ramsay, who could have used it on the floor of the House of Commons, but also to the Germans. Thanks to an MI5 operation, Wolkoff and Kent were arrested in May 1940. The affair was a catalyst for the authorities to strengthen the Defence of the Realm Act and imprison a far right ‘fifth column’ including the founder of the Right Club. Suspicions inevitably fell on Ramsay – although in 1941, from prison, he would successfully sue the New York Times for libel.

When the phoney war came crashing to an end, Captain Ramsay was detained for ‘actions prejudicial to the public safety or the defence of the realm’. On 23 May 1940, the editorial of the Peeblesshire Advertiser opined: ‘It would be correct to say the news horrified most, but it did not come in the nature of intense surprise’. A stigma ‘could have been averted’, but the ‘failure to face facts’ had ended in the ‘inevitable’. Only a matter of three weeks before, the Advertiser had written that it ‘detected propaganda of a certain vile type’. The paper looked back at the political earthquake which commenced in early 1938, with Ramsay’s letter attacking the co-operative movement as a Communist conspiracy. Then, in August 1938, there had been his signature on a group of MPs’ letter of congratulation to Il Duce. That had been sickeningly followed by the Jewish controversies and pro-Nazi statements of 1939. The editorial concluded: ‘This stain on the constituency should have been and ought to have been averted by Peebles Unionists. In this hour of national trial, we ought to have been saved from such direful calamity.’⁷¹

The detainee saw things slightly differently. On 30 May 1940, MI5 reported:

He said he was the founder of the Right Club which was an organisation to combat Jewish and Communist influence in this country, and he went into a tirade against the British government alleging that it was Jew-ridden and controlled, that the press was in the hands of the Jews and that the war had been engineered by Jews. On 73 occasions, he said, he had risen in his place in the House of Commons to speak on the subject of Jews and Communists and failed to catch the Speaker’s eye. Captain Ramsay said he was the only Member who dared attack the Government on their policy and he was being removed to prison as a menace to that policy.72

At the end of June a search of Kellie Castle was ordered. There was found a letter from William Joyce (a Warden of the Right Club), and a German Nazi badge. The investigators admitted they were ‘rather disappointed with the search, but feel that it would have been very remiss of us not to have taken the choice’.⁷³

Ramsay pointed out to his captors that two of his sons were serving in the war, and that one had been wounded in fighting at Narvik. But this did not sway the Advisory Committee, who were particularly interested in Mosley’s offer of the Gauleitership of Scotland. On 18 July 1940, it noted:

It would appear that this conversation took place some considerable time before the outbreak of war, but indicated that in certain circumstances of public disorder Mosley was suggesting to Ramsay that he should take part in the Government of Scotland, as one of Mosley’s lieutenants. However ridiculous and fanciful this may sound, it indicates that Captain Ramsay was prepared to consider taking action which was quite outside the ordinary work of anti-Jewish propaganda.⁷⁴

So Ramsay remained in Brixton Prison, alongside Raven Thomson and other ‘renegades’. On 9 September 1940, the MP protested to the attorney-general that he was currently subjected to 22.5 hours per day of solitary confinement. By what right, he asked, ‘do MI5 carry out the methods of the Gestapo on British civilians whom Parliament has authorised the Home Secretary only to detain?’

These constraints would eventually be loosened. In his memoirs, Admiral Sir Barry Domvile offers this description of life in prison with Ramsay and others:

We had many a jolly game of cricket and rounders . . . Captain Ramsay, one of these Etonians, temporarily absolved from attendance at Westminster, coached eager disciples from Soho and Shepherd’s Market, and greatly raised the Brixton standard of cricket. It was a treat to see Captain Gordon Canning, another Etonian, lift a half-volley over Lenin’s tomb (the Recreation ground lavatories) into the Fire tank – quite as good as one over the Pavilion at Lord’s. The ball often sailed over the prison wall, and I should like to pay a tribute to the decency of the people who returned it, in these days of shortage.75

It was a strange fall from grace. The Daily Herald examined the fate of this ‘tall, handsome, eagle-looking man . . . Scion of one of the oldest families in Scotland’. Lest we forget, the author of ‘Land of Dope and Jewry’ had been elected in 1935 under the slogans ‘Fair Play for all Classes’ and ‘No Dictators Wanted Here’. The Herald reached an astonishing conclusion: ‘No fewer than 13,671 hard-working Scots, men and women of Midlothian and Peebles, believed this and voted for Ramsay! Only 12,209 thought it was the bunk! And we are still paying Captain Ramsay MP £600 a year!’⁷⁶

In the eyes of the authorities, their detainee was incorrigible: ‘This man, though he sincerely regards himself as the most loyal and patriotic of British subjects, is led by his morbid obsession with Jewry and international finance to adopt views which in effect are both traitorous and dangerous. He should remain in detention.’⁷⁷ The character of Ramsay’s correspondents confirmed this view. Lady Maxwell-Scott was ‘a woman of French extraction born in Ohio. She has been described as a hysterical woman, very anti-Russian, and anti-Semitic, pro-Pétain’. Her husband was ‘an elderly and rather sick man. He was connected with the Home Guard in the war and had a distinguished career in the last war, he is thought to share to a lesser extent his wife’s views . . . It was reported that he had been at the same military college in France with Franco. Both he and his wife held Fascist sympathies and indulged in defeatist and anti-British talk’.⁷⁸

On 1 October 1943, MI5 remarked that it was ‘quite hopeless to expect any change of heart from Ramsay’. On release, he was likely to form another secret conspiracy, while intelligence personnel worried about the ‘possible effect of Ramsay’s release upon our relations with the Soviet Union’. Indeed it was reported that the captain had told his wife: ‘I would welcome civil war with shots in the streets.’ As for Mrs Ramsay, her first reaction had been to plot her husband’s escape from Brixton:

She hoped that advantage might be taken of the disorganisation resulting from air raids, revolution or invasion, to force the gates of the prison with bombs. She hoped for the help of Fascist sympathisers, and the Army and added: ‘Both Bob and I have taken note of every detail on the way to Jock’s room and of everything we can see on our visits. We shall not fail, and I long to see the Home Office people swinging and hanging from lamp posts.’

It was also reported that, on 17 October 1942, Mrs Ramsay had said that ‘she did not think we could possibly win the war, in fact, she did not think that we should be able to last out for more than a year. There would be a frightful crisis after which her husband and his friends would come into their own and take over the reconstruction of the country’.79

On 1 September 1943, intelligence officer Mary Robertson reported that Ramsay had said ‘how the Jews must be laughing at the idiotic goyim’, but also: ‘One good feature that I see is that U boats do not seem to have sunk much of our shipping lately. I wonder whether we have mastered them at last. It would be nice not to starve, I must say.’ Robertson justly remarked: ‘So far from there being any foundation in fact for Ramsay’s belief that he is the victim of Jewish persecution he would appear to be fortunate indeed in being held as political detainee in Brixton Prison, rather than as a convict sentenced to a long term of penal servitude.’⁸⁰ But Ramsay was not immune to the tragedy of war. On 23 August 1943 it was announced that his eldest son, an officer in the Scots Guards, had died in a military hospital in Johannesburg.

Herbert Morrison ordered the unconditional release of Captain Ramsay on 26 September 1944. He could retake his seat in the House of Commons. The Peeblesshire Advertiser expressed its sadness:

We had come near to the point of forgetting Captain A.M. Ramsay, when on Tuesday, the atmosphere was stirred; the news came over the wireless that he had been released from detention . . . Many moves were made to relieve the constituency of the unfortunate position; very many moves, including a petition signed by all sections of the community, and also the request from the Unionist Association that he resign his seat. Nothing was effective; every move was checkmated . . . It seems we must await a General Election before Captain Ramsay, as an unwanted candidate, as he evidently is, can be deprived of his post as Member of Parliament for Peebles and South Midlothian.

The announcement of Ramsay’s return also caused outrage elsewhere, with the Communist MP for West Fife at the forefront:

Willie Gallacher: ‘Are you aware that this man is a rabid anti-Semitic?’

‘Out of order.’

‘Anti-Semitism is an incitement to murder. Are the mothers of this country, whose lads are being sacrificed, to be informed that this sacrifice has enabled the Home Secretary to release this unspeakable blackguard?’

‘Order . . . withdraw.’

Gallacher was ordered to leave the House. Morrison justified the release of Ramsay and other detainees on the grounds of ‘the success of the arms of the United Nations and the certainty that the forces of evil arrayed against us are doomed to complete overthrow’.81

Mary Robertson noted that the news ‘came as a complete surprise’ to Ramsay: ‘He reached home that evening about nine o’clock and the following morning went straight down to the House of Commons where he appears to have met with a more favourable reception than he had anticipated.’⁸² Indeed, according to the Peeblesshire Advertiser, ‘as several MPs walked into the Chamber they crossed to Captain Ramsay and shook his hand. Captain Ramsay had a smile for them all . . . He sat for a few minutes chatting with Admiral Beamish (Unionist, Lewis) and, as the Admiral rose to take his place on the opposite side of the House, turned to his left and carried on a short conversation with Mr Duckworth (Unionist, Moss-side)’. Ramsay told reporters that his release had been unexpected, that he intended to devote himself to obtaining the release of other detainees, and that he had made no plans for the future.

According to Robertson, Ramsay ‘lost no time in contacting his Fascist friends’, notably A.K. Chesterton. He was also looking for a political future outside Peeblesshire: ‘Ramsay, presumably dented by the general hostility of his own constituency, was thinking of fighting the next election in a London Dock area – possibly Bermondsey, where he had been testing reaction in the local public houses with his son Bob.’ Ramsay had certainly not changed his views on the Jewish conspiracy, although sometimes his motivations were unclear. Robertson noted:

It will be remembered that Ramsay’s original interest in the Hidden Hand is believed to have been encouraged by his wife in an effort to compete with the rival attractions of his secretary, Ruth Erskine. It has been clear, however, that since his release Ramsay has been paying less and less attention to Mrs Ramsay and more to the secretary.

Ramsay believed himself ‘in danger of assassination by the Jews’. To defend himself, he was collecting ‘a mass of information on private lives and activities of members of the Government’. He found a very sympathetic interlocutor in the founder of the Imperial Fascist League:

We learnt in June that Ramsay had recently visited Arnold Leese, with whom he carries on a prolific correspondence about Jews and alleged Jews, and had put forward definite proposals for future underground activity. Leese disagreed with Ramsay’s insane views about an ultimate resort to violence, but agreed to co-operate freely with him in other respects.83

The MP for South Midlothian and Peeblesshire’s last hurrah came in June 1945, when he moved – unsuccessfully – the re-enactment of the Statute of Jewry. Ramsay told the House: ‘The repeal of the Act (in 1846) released the very evils which Magna Carta and the Statute of Jewry recognised and against which there were specially directed Jewish extortion, exploitation and violence.’

Ratcliffe’s War

Another sympathetic ear for Captain Ramsay’s anti-Semitic elucubrations was the Reverend Alexander Ratcliffe who, on the MP’s release, had planned to put out a substantial pamphlet called The Vindication of Captain A.H. Maule Ramsay, MP. This erstwhile enemy of ‘Papist’ fascism and ‘Franco the Baby-Killer’ had, with an implacable logic of sorts, converted to pro-Nazi anti-Semitism.

Already, in the Vanguard of June 1939, he had written: ‘Our correspondent points out that Hitler is killing Catholic Action in Germany and disbanding all Roman Catholic youth organisations. And so, as the Pope cannot fight Hitler, he’s getting Chamberlain to do the fighting for him . . . Britain is preparing for war; war against Germany. And it will not be Britain that will benefit, but the Pope.’ The leader of the Scottish Protestant League’s new attachment to Hitler was confirmed by a visit to Nazi Germany in July and August 1939. In an article of 30 September 1939, on religion in Hitler’s Germany, he told his readers he was ‘agreeably surprised’ during his visit. He noticed on his journey how England had taken in what Germany had thrown out. In London, he had witnessed an ‘actress with her legs pretty well exposed. My readers will pardon me inserting that account of stage immorality and vice in London, but I do so in order to inform them that that is the sort of thing which the Germans threw out of Germany on Hitler procuring control’. There could be no doubting the religious rectitude of the Führer from Linz: ‘Hitler, having been born a Roman Catholic, knows the Roman Catholics, and thus the Romanist priests are specially watched.’84

In October 1939, the Vanguard asked: ‘Is Hitler the Man 666?’ Hitler, it was explained, ‘was not the first personality who has been picked out as the Beast 666. During the last War it was the Kaiser. Previously it was Napoleon. Before that Nero’. The Beast was in fact ‘the Latin Man, the Pope’, leader of the ‘Jesuits’ war drive’. Over the 2,000 miles Ratcliffe had travelled in Germany, he had found the German people ‘happy and contented’.

The Vanguard therefore opposed the distribution in the streets of Glasgow of a pamphlet entitled The Berlin Liar: ‘our simple Scots folks will fall from the net of these Jewish moneybaggers whose sole purpose during this War, as in all Wars, is to “make hay while the sun shines” ’. The same issue attacked ‘Rome’s verminous evacuees!’⁸⁵

On 25 November 1939, under the banner ‘Protestant Unity Now!’, Ratcliffe answered the question of whether he was a pro-German:

What I am concerned about is not whether Hitlerism should be crushed or not. That does not concern me. It does not concern a single true Protestant in this country. What I am concerned about is the Protestants of Europe, and especially the Protestants of Britain; more especially my own country, Scotland. If I believed that this country going to war against Germany were in the interests of Protestant Christianity (for there is no other kind of Christianity) then I might have something to say about it. But emphatically I believe that this War is being run, as all Wars are run, in the interests of Jewish Moneybaggers and the Pope of Rome. I believe that Britain is being used for an ulterior purpose, and that our pact with Poland was a Popish and Jewish plot to get this Protestant country embroiled in War with Protestant Germany.86

On 6 January 1940 Ratcliffe’s readers were offered ‘unique articles’ on ‘The Truth About the Jews’, ‘The Palestine Ramp’, and ‘Why Germans put out the Jews’. The issue of 20 January vilified the ‘pro-Jew menace’: the Jewish Echo was published in ‘Jew-land’, the Gorbals; the press of the country was controlled and influenced by the Jews; the Jews were not God’s chosen people; Jews were the enemies of the Christian faith; Jesus had repudiated Judaism and Jews were responsible for the crucifixion of Christ. On 2 March 1940, Ratcliffe quoted Martin Luther saying Jews were ‘veritable liars and vampires’. Even Finnish resistance to Stalin was denounced as a ‘war ramp’: General Carl Gustav Mannerheim’s daughter was a ‘Papist’.⁸⁷ In May, the Vanguard denounced ‘the pernicious little dictator! No, not Hitler, just Mussolini!’ In June, the paper opined: ‘We are very kind to the Roman Catholics in Scotland, of course, the reason being, seemingly, that we have no Hitler in our midst to eject popery!’⁸⁸

This anti-Catholic logic meant there was no sympathy for fallen France. In July 1940 ‘The Treacherous French!’ were attacked. Britain had committed the cardinal error of an alliance with Catholic countries like Poland and Belgium. As for the French, ‘a more treacherous people are not to be found. Papist and atheistic, that country has been the enemy of Protestantism for centuries’.⁸⁹ The wounds of St Bartholemew’s Day remained fresh: ‘It is not 368 years since that terrible crime took place and the treachery of the French of those days is on a par with the treachery of the French of today.’ A month later, Ratcliffe declared: ‘Let us sever all connections with Papist countries!’⁹⁰

Attention then turned from Papists to Jews. The issue of September 1940 looked approvingly at Hitler’s ‘prophecy’ of 30 January 1939 on the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe:

An ominous prophecy! And so far as the Continent of Europe is concerned, especially that part of the Continent now over-run by the Germans, the prophecy seems about to be fulfilled! Amazing and strange are the times in which we live. But let no-one be downhearted, for God moves in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform!91

In October 1940, readers learned that ‘The Jews are of the Devil!’⁹² The November issue decried ‘The Jews’ nude shows!’, and the December one the sins of ‘God’s Chosen people!’ ‘Our next issue,’ it was announced, ‘will startle you!’⁹³

Over the course of the war, incendiary pamphlets were churned out by Ratcliffe’s press in Bearsden. In January 1941, Commonsense War Pamphlet 1 asked Are you fighting for democracy? Or the Great Illusion!: ‘Let not the simple souls of British Democracy be surprised or shocked if the day comes when they will be told that, after all, we all make mistakes, and that, after all, Hitlerism is not just what we thought it was!’⁹⁴ Mr Churchill had to be put on trial. The day was coming when propaganda smoke-screens would be ‘cleared away by the words of Truth’. Invoking the old saying, ‘Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap’, Ratcliffe wrote: ‘The present war is a mere fulfilment of the laws of God and teaching of Jesus Christ . . . France has been the first to reap what she sowed!’⁹⁵ The Poles and the Czechs had been incapable of governing themselves. The ‘treachery’ of 1918–1919 ‘cried out to high heaven for retribution’.⁹⁶ Germany was robbed of Danzig and the Corridor and over two million of her people handed over to the ‘Papist Poles’, while Transylvanian Protestants had been handed over to ‘Catholic’ Romania. Hitlerism, claimed Ratcliffe, was ‘the illegitimate child of the whorings of Britain and France’.⁹⁷

Ratcliffe caused the most public outrage, and soul-searching by the authorities, with his pamphlet, The Truth about the Jews!, published in early 1943. In this work, the Protestant leader claimed that ‘there is not a single authentic case of a single Jew having been massacred or unlawfully put to death under Hitler’s regime’.⁹⁸ Instead, Ratcliffe trained his fire on the nefarious activities of Jewish traders in Glasgow: they overcharged on cosmetics, overcharged for linoleum and illegally transferred ration coupons. There was a ‘Jewish Monopoly’: ‘If every Jew shop in Argyle Street, from Glasgow Cross to Hope St, and in Jamaica St, Union St and Renfield St, were to be closed, there would hardly be an open shop left!’ The Jews practically owned Glasgow.99 What’s more, they put on ‘obscene and immoral shows’: ‘The “Strip Tease” turns are Jewish; the almost nude women who immediately show their flesh (as much as the Law allows) are mostly Jews.’¹⁰⁰ They owned ‘Bawdy Book Shops and shops where “Birth Control” goods are sold’.¹⁰¹ The Left Book Club was totally Jewish, while such ‘vermin’ preferred boxing, dog-racing and horse-racing to ‘clean sport’. They were even worse than Ratcliffe’s usual adversary: ‘The crimes for which Roman Catholics are guilty are the common offences of pilfering, drunkenness, breach of the peace, etc. But the Jews go in for crime on the wholesale system.’¹⁰² The minister concluded rather ambiguously: ‘To say that the Germans, with Hitler at their head, are out to exterminate the Jews, to massacre them, is both foolish and absurd. For if every Jew were exterminated, the world would still go on with its evil and crimes.’¹⁰³

Were such anti-Semitic outpourings publishable at the height of the war against Nazism? On 8 March 1943, the Home Office reported to the Lord Advocate on a proof of The Truth about the Jews!:

While he claims not to be anti-Semitic, Ratcliffe brings out the stock complaints of anti-Semites against the Jews. He states that they monopolize trade, finance, industry and entertainment, control large sections of the press, and that as a result they have a position of influence and privilege out of proportion to their numbers . . . The pamphlet is a pernicious document . . . We cannot stop its publication however.¹⁰⁴

The Lord Advocate concurred with this tolerant view: ‘It appears from this that the publication of anti-Semitic material, however virulent, is not a crime in Scotland . . . Did they desire to incite the people to violence, to create disorders and disturbances, and generally to offend against public order? NO.’ On 13 March 1943, Herbert Morrison wrote to the Lord Advocate: ‘It is a deplorable document, but I cannot, of course, prevent its publication.’

This judgment was not shared by everyone. On 9 April 1943, the Metropolitan Police wrote that ‘the contents of the booklet are so violently anti-Semitic that it may be considered that the publication is one likely to cause hatred and strife between Jews and non-Jews’. The Jewish Chronicle declared on the same day: ‘This is about the vilest anti-Semitic pamphlet yet produced in Britain, and it is pure – or rather impure – [Julius] Streicher from beginning to end’.105 Three days later, the Daily Worker denounced an ‘outrageously anti-Semitic pamphlet’.¹⁰⁶

On 28 April 1943 it was reported that 2,000 copies of the pamphlet had been printed and were being sold in England by Edward Godfrey of the British National Party. Ratcliffe was still holding well-attended meetings every Sunday in Central Halls, Bath Street, Glasgow, and the Vanguard was selling 2,000 copies monthly. On 29 May, Special Branch reported on Ratcliffe to the Scottish Home Department:

Prior to the outbreak of war he visited Germany and on his return acquired a great admiration for the German nation and its method of Government. Despite this outlook, however, one could not say he was anti-British. His sojourn in Germany only lasted a fortnight and in all probability his tour would have been a conducted one. It appears that from then on he became anti-Semitic and up to the moment, my Special Branch who have been giving him considerable attention are unable to determine whether this attitude is real or assumed for financial purposes.

Special Branch concluded that ‘100,000 copies could easily have been printed and sold. It is obvious that the pamphlet was well read and that there is a decided wave of anti-Semitism spreading throughout the country’.

A second edition of The Truth about the Jews! was printed by the Right Review, based at Half-Moon Cottage, Bookham, Surrey, and owned by Count Potocki, pretender to the throne of Poland. Again, the authorities were unable to prove seditious intentions and public mischief. Ratcliffe’s pamphlet therefore escaped the fate suffered by some of Arnold Leese’s anti-Semitic publications before the war.

In May 1944, the Vanguard was denouncing ‘Jewish massacres in Palestine’. In October, it attacked Papacy and Churchill’s visit to the Vatican. Circulation was reported to have risen to 2,500, up 500 on 1942. Nevertheless, the authorities decided that the Vanguard was still entitled to a certain proportion of paper.

On 17 March 1945, it was noted that ‘the objectionable nature of the articles to which MI5 draw attention is due to pro-German sentiment rather than anti-Semitism. They are the product of Ratcliffe’s peculiar mental attitude’. In the view of the SPL founder, National Socialism was ‘the nearest approach to New Testament Christian Communism that the world will ever see’. He now obsessed about the ‘Bolshevik world drive . . . Our people are being filled with a hatred for Protestant Germany engendered by that Godless limb of Satan, Marshal Stalin. Unless a stop is put to it, Bolshevism will spread to our shores, and Hitler is our only hope.’ But the report concluded again that such opinions were ‘not seditious libel’. The Vanguard would be ‘allowed to remain as a memorial to the latitude of opinion which may safely be tolerated in this country in wartime’.

Ratcliffe continued to the end of the war in this same vein. In February 1945, he declared that ‘Britain’s only hope lies in Hitler’. In March 1945, the preacher appealed to the Houses of Parliament:

The Hounds of Hell are now let loose upon the earth, and the spirit of vengeance and hate becomes more and more bitter as the war-gods demand the sacrifice of more and more human flesh . . . Is it not high time to cease the unnatural whoredom with a Nation that is steeped in the spiritual and moral plague of an atheistical Bolshevism? Gentlemen: heed the words of the Prophet of old!107

Atrocities were ‘not German!’, exclaimed the April issue, which also announced the creation of the Friends of Protestant Germany League. In May 1945, the Vanguard called for ‘equality of sacrifice, homes for heroes, freedom from want’. At the same time it denounced the Pope, ‘Protestant Namby-Pambyism’ and ‘Presbyterian Poltroonery’, while deploring the fact that the Spanish Gospel Mission had been ‘wiped out by Franco the Fascist’.¹⁰⁸

It was recognised in June that an appeal for funds had been responded to by less than 3% of members of the Scottish Protestant League. But Ratcliffe kept the faith. The Vanguard of July 1945 gave ‘The truth about the German atrocities!’ Concentration camp inmates had been ‘starved to death’, victims of the Allied blockade. In August 1945, Ratcliffe mourned ‘The Passing of Hitler’: ‘To-day, with a “Victory” that is a stench in the nostrils of every Protestant Christian man and woman, where Bolshevism has not been enthroned in Europe, Romanism has stepped up back to its place of honour.’ It was a triumph for ‘Moscow mendacity and Vatican venality’. Gone with Hitler were ‘the blessings which Hitler rule brought to the German people, and this the German people never will forget. May Almighty God bless the country and people of Martin Luther!’109

In October 1945, the Vanguard denounced the use of German POWs’ ‘slave labour’ to prepare Glasgow housing sites. In November it attacked ‘Allied Bestiality!’: ‘What an aftermath! Protestant Germany destroyed, and this in the direct interest of the twin-anti-Christs, Jewry and Papacy!’ There were ‘shameful conditions in prisons in Germany!’¹¹⁰ In February 1946, the cover of the Vanguard was emblazoned with Hitler’s coin commemorating Martin Luther. In October 1946, Ratcliffe returned to ‘the futility of Fascism’. Mussolini had courted the Papacy and received its blessing. In this, Il Duce contrasted with the Führer: ‘It is true that Hitler was born a Roman Catholic: and so were Knox, Luther, Wickliffe and Calvin. And Hitler battled against the Papacy, as did Hitler’s Nazism, as stubbornly as did the Reformers, and sometimes more so.’ Italian Fascism had lacked ‘divine spirituality’. It was ‘solely material in aims and objectives’.¹¹¹

Despite failing health and finances, Ratcliffe did not relent. At the height of the disturbances in British-controlled Palestine, the Vanguard of June–July 1946 warned of ‘the menace of Zionism’. His press also produced his ‘Banned speech at Caxton Hall’, where he was to tell his audience: ‘You can no more satisfy the Jews than you could satisfy the blizzard or the tidal wave.’¹¹² In January 1947, the Vanguard declared:

The crime of Nuremberg was vile because it was a violation of Divine Teaching; vile because its purpose was fundamentally an act of envy, spite and vindictiveness, and it was vile because its chief perpetrators were the enemies of God and His Christ . . . Let Popery and Jewry perish, the twin savages of the Civilised World!

But it was admitted that ‘The Vanguard is much smaller’, and that the Scottish Protestant League had suffered much financially in the editor’s absence through illness.113 That very month, Ratcliffe met his Maker.

Slighting the Sassenach

This tableau of tartan treachery is not complete without a renegade who discovered his Scottishness in the course of internment. Born in 1906 of Kiwi parents, Angus ‘Juan’ MacNab studied classics at Oxford. In 1934 he joined the BUF and became a paid employee in its press department, but accompanied William Joyce when he left in 1937 to found the National Socialist League. He was Joyce’s second in command. MacNab was with Joyce in Germany shortly before the outbreak of war, returning to England 15 days before the declaration of hostilities. Along with Joyce’s brother, he was detained from May 1940 to September 1944 under Defence Regulation 18B, at Peveril Camp, Peel, on the Isle of Man.¹¹⁴

A devout Roman Catholic, MacNab also seems to have rediscovered his Scottish roots. In 1943, appealing against his detention, he notably declared to the Advisory Committee examining his case:

I am not an Anglo-Saxon, I have no English blood in me at all.

Q: You are a Scotsman.

A: Yes, I am a Celt and the English have always been a puzzle to me really.

Q: I expect you have some English blood in you.

A: Not a drop.

Q: Some of us have, we cannot help it.

A: A Sassenach is always a Sassenach, but joking apart I have always found the English methods of thought extremely difficult to follow. I am much more at home among Latins. I live in an Italian house in the Camp. I find I can understand them much more than the English, they seem so much more logical.

Q: What an extraordinary thing, your people were born in New Zealand.

A: Yes.

Q: Was your mother Scottish?

A: She came from near John o’Groats.

Q: So you are a Celt.

The committee concluded: ‘MacNab is a traitorous man with every advantage in the way of education. He desires the victory of Germany. He should remain in detention.’ Nothing had changed by October 1943:

Throughout his detention MacNab has shown from his letters that he is that rare species of humanity – a true renegade . . . In repose MacNab’s face is not unpleasing, but in conversation the expression becomes somehow distorted or twisted, and one has the feeling afterwards that there is some lack of moral sense or fibre in the man . . . I mentioned MacNab’s enthusiasm for the Latin races. As he said before, Spain is the country of his choice; Franco the man who best typifies his ideal of political leadership now that Mussolini has gone. And to Spain MacNab will go after the war, all being well, where he says he will be quite happy living on very little – because he will feel at home . . . MacNab now wishes to obtain Spanish nationality and become a member of the Falange.

MacNab escaped the fate of his best friend Joyce. In May 1946, after release from detention, he smuggled himself to Eire via the Isle of Man and settled in Toledo, Spain. He found work broadcasting English lessons on Radio Nacional, while translating the complete works of proto-Fascist dictator Primo de Rivera. According to a report sent to Kim Philby, MacNab was ‘a stubborn and unrepentant national socialist . . . [who] intends to devote his energies to anti-British activities’. British intelligence kept tabs on this renegade. In August 1946, their source ‘made contact with MacNab for his first English lesson, but as he had not money on him to pay, MacNab, true to his Scottish blood, refused to proceed with it’. Later, the source reported that ‘his third lesson was brief as MacNab had visitors. MacNab’s incidental remarks were confined to a few virulent anti-British observations. He stated his parents were New Zealanders and of Celtic blood and that he had no time whatsoever for the English’. Around this time, intelligence personnel intercepted a poem by MacNab in homage to the late war criminal Hermann Göring:

By the same death Benito went before,

And he of all men whom I loved the best,

By equal shame in equal glory dressed.

There they await you through the open door:

Fight on, Kshatriya Herman, evermore

Vertical, like the angels, without rest!

In 1948, it was reported to Philby that MacNab ‘is disliked by his colleagues, who describe him as conceited and prone to give himself the air of being the only genuine fascist in the world’. MacNab would never return to these shores. Instead, true to his love for Spanish and Moorish history and culture, he wrote the highly-regarded Spain Under the Crescent Moon.