Shortly after the outbreak of World War Two, the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police was saddled with the time-consuming task of vetting over 70,000 alien refugees registered with the police and of supervising the Home Office programme of mass internment. To assist in this mammoth assignment, a number of CID officers was temporarily attached to the Branch. More spacious accommodation was required to cater for the newcomers and the whole Branch was moved into the ‘North Extension’, a most unattractive concrete construction adjacent to its previous home in the elegant turreted Norman Shaw building on the Victoria Embankment. Another raid on the ranks of the regular CID was carried out when, in the face of persistent demands by the Security Service to be given powers of arrest, and despite opposition from some of his senior officers, the Commissioner, Sir Philip Game, agreed to the temporary transfer of a few CID officers to MI5. This small detachment, headed by DCI Leonard Burt, who was later to become head of Special Branch, was commissioned into the Intelligence Corps but the members retained their status as police officers with powers of arrest. Among the group accompanying Burt were Chief Inspector Reg Spooner, who later achieved fame as an outstanding detective, and DS Jim Skardon, who stayed on in the Security Service to become their ‘ace’ interrogator.1
More changes in the Branch’s establishment were soon to follow. In the early days of the war, police officers were forbidden to enlist in the armed forces but by 1941 this embargo on Special Branch officers was lifted and a number volunteered for active service, with the majority opting for the Royal Air Force. A dramatic easing of the Special Branch workload had led to this change in policy, for by now the suspect alien population was either interned or detained under the defence regulations; the leading British fascists had been detained and their organisations proscribed; and naturalisation had been suspended for the duration of the war. Regrettably, of the number who had temporarily left the Branch to serve in the armed forces, fourteen failed to return; a plaque bearing their names was at one time proudly displayed in the head of Special Branch’s office but its whereabouts since the dissolution of Special Branch remains a mystery.
Despite the Branch’s reduced workload, however, its officers were heavily committed to dealing with fresh problems arising from the war.
The Daily Worker, the official organ of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), had, almost from the outbreak of hostilities, been filling its pages with ‘matter calculated to foment opposition to the prosecution of the war to a successful issue’. In July 1940 the Home Secretary, Sir John Anderson, had written to the editor of the paper expressing his disquiet at the tone of the articles; for some time there was some improvement but, by January 1941, the newspaper was again carrying anti-war articles, prompting Anderson to resort to more extreme measures. The head of Special Branch, Albert Canning, was directed to bring the printing presses to a halt and ensure that the Daily Worker would not be published until further notice (the ban would not be lifted until August 1942).
Accordingly, early on 21 January 1941, a team of Special Branch officers led by DI Whitehead raided the Daily Worker premises in Clerkenwell, stopped all preparation of the paper, put a guard on the presses and confiscated the newsprint that had already been prepared for the next edition. Members of the management staff and other employees were interviewed but no arrests were made since, as explained in The Times, proceeding under Section 2D of the Defence Regulations (as had been done) effectively and immediately prevented further publications without the consent of the Court. After the premises had been secured, the Special Branch officers withdrew, leaving a uniformed presence to guard the building. Similar measures were taken against a second communist publication, The Week.2
The Branch was fully occupied in another field. As fans of the television programme Dad’s Army well know, the English Channel presented the main barrier between the enemy and English soil; consequently security at the channel ports assumed an increasingly important role in the country’s determination to exclude potential enemy agents. Extra Special Branch officers were posted to the principal south-coast ports and these were reinforced with men from the resurrected Intelligence Corps. British subjects returning from the Continent were closely questioned about conditions in Europe, while the large numbers of foreign nationals arriving at ports, particularly on the south coast, were directed to various ‘reception centres’ for intensive interrogation. Principal of these was the Royal Victorian Patriotic School situated on Wandsworth Common, where it is estimated that some 30,000 immigrants were ‘grilled’ before being allowed to proceed, passed on for further interrogation or interned.3 Special Branch officers were heavily involved in these operations. They also played a major part in the government’s plans to have the 71,553 German and Austrian nationals resident here personally examined before special tribunals, which divided them into three categories:
Category A – 572 considered to be the most dangerous or unreliable were interned. The task of serving the internment orders at the outbreak of war fell to DI Gagen, a single man who often used to spend evenings in his office playing the violin (much to the alarm of younger officers working late who were unaware that Sherlock Holmes had risen from the grave!).
Category B – 6,690, posing no immediate threat, but with questionable backgrounds. They were permitted limited freedom, but their movements were strictly regulated.
Category C – 64,290, including 35,000 refugees from Nazi oppression, were considered to represent no threat and had no restrictions placed on them.4
However, Special Branch took little part, as it had done in World War One, in the arrest and interrogation of enemy agents. The Security Service, with its newly acquired team of CID officers, complete with power of arrest and expertise in interrogation, was now competent to deal with espionage cases unaided. Special Branch was merely required to play a subsidiary role, such as providing escorts for prisoners and executing warrants of arrest; the Security Service even had its own interrogation centre at Latchmere House on Ham Common in Surrey. They were successful in securing convictions against seventeen persons tried under the Treachery Act 1940, who were all executed, sixteen by hanging and one by the firing squad at the Tower of London. Of this total, three were British subjects.5
Special Branch also had little involvement in MI5’s highly successful ‘Double-Cross System’, which involved the turning of German agents into double agents and using them to send back false information to their controllers in Germany. By these means the German High Command was deceived by a constant supply of disinformation and our own codebreakers were enabled to break Abwehr ciphers. However, SB was able to render a little assistance; they provided the handcuffs when some of the more reluctant double agents were transported to a new base.6
Throughout the war, the task of VIP protection, whether of vulnerable resident or visiting dignitaries, remained at a high level and one of the most vulnerable of our own politicians was unquestionably the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. His principal protection officer throughout the period of hostilities was Walter Thompson, whose account of his service with the country’s leader gives some indication of how Special Branch protection duty had changed since the days of Sweeney, Brust and Fitch who, like him, committed to paper their recollections of protecting VIPs.7 By the beginning of World War Two it had been accepted that personal protection as practised by these earlier members of the Branch could not be effectively carried out at long range. In his narrative, Thompson clearly illustrates that he, at least, and, one presumes, his colleagues, saw the job of protection as securing the personal safety of his protégé, and not as a general factotum to open doors, look after luggage and perform the duties of a lackey. He is the first Special Branch officer to talk openly, and lovingly, about his firearm,8 for which he had a special holster designed to fit snugly inside his jacket; unlike his predecessors, Thompson used to travel in the passenger seat beside the driver, something that became established practice for subsequent protection officers. Another innovation, retained after the war, was the provision of a back-up police car as part of the Prime Minister’s protection team.
In 1921 he became a permanent protection officer with Winston Churchill, the Secretary of State for War and the Air, and remained in this post until 1931 after the Conservative government had been defeated in 1929 and Churchill no longer held a ministerial post. Thompson retired from the police in 1936 and that would normally have been the end of his connection with Special Branch, but on 22 August 1939, now running a grocery business in Norwood, he received a brief telegram from Churchill: ‘Meet me Croydon aerodrome 4.30 p.m. Wednesday.’ In the final paragraph of The Gathering Storm: The Second World War, Vol. 1, Churchill explains the reason that prompted him to send this cryptic message:
There were known to be 20,000 organised Nazis in England at this time, and it would have been only in accord with their procedure in other friendly countries that the outbreak of war should be preceded by a sharp prelude of sabotage and murder. I had at that time no official protection, and I did not wish to ask for any; but I thought myself sufficiently prominent to take precautions. I had enough information to convince me that Hitler recognised me as a foe. My former Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Thompson, was in retirement. I told him to come along and bring his pistol with him. I got out my own weapons which were good. While one slept the other watched. Thus nobody would have had a walkover.9
Thompson agreed to act in a private capacity as his personal protection officer for £4 a week, but Churchill soon persuaded Sir Philip Game, the Commissioner, to reinstate him as a Special Branch officer, a position he filled to the end of the war. During his career Thompson had the dubious distinction of meeting Benito Mussolini, but DS Lobb, bodyguard of the former Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, bettered this, having met Adolf Hitler during Chamberlain’s ill-fated attempts to avert the war.
The subject of personal protection has always presented the police with special problems, and none more so than the complex situation arising from the relationship between HRH King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, a divorcée, to whom he was married in June 1937 following her second divorce and his abdication on 10 December 1936. According to normal practice, the reigning monarch had been protected by an ‘A’ Division officer, Chief Inspector Storrier, but the decision to relinquish the throne resulted in a change to the composition of his protection unit; by 1938, Storrier, promoted to superintendent in January, now had a Special Branch officer, DS Attfield, in his team, at the request of the Prime Minister. The marriage put a strain on the security arrangements for the couple, who made little secret of their admiration for the Nazi regime; indeed, during a holiday in Germany in 1937 they met Adolf Hitler, which endeared them to the fascists in the UK, but at the same time alienated the communists and Jews, raising the prospect of clashes between the two factions. The Duke’s marriage to a twice-divorced woman also enraged religious factions in Britain and there were fears of religious zealots venting their feelings in attempts on the personal wellbeing of the couple.10
It must have been with considerable relief that those responsible for the couple’s protection in Britain were informed in 1940 that the Duke had been appointed as the Governor of the Bahamas, a post he filled, apparently with success, until after the war. It was again a Special Branch officer, DI Harry Holder, who was entrusted with responsibility for the Duke’s continued protection on the island.
The six years of the war represented a comparatively uneventful period for the Branch – no suffragettes, no IRA, no naturalisation, and espionage cases were dealt with almost exclusively by the Security Service, assisted by their small team of CID officers. This is not to say that Special Branch officers were idle; as previously mentioned, a considerable number enlisted in the armed forces and those remaining were fully occupied with less exciting work at ports, with protection and with the more mundane aspects of counter-espionage such as arrests, serving warrants and escort duty.
1 Rupert Allason, The Branch, p. 116
2 The Times, 22 January 1941
3 Allason, The Branch, p. 121
4 Barnes and Barnes, Nazis in Pre-War London 1930–1939, p. 252
5 Stephen Stratford, British Criminal and Military History 1939–1949, www.stephen-stratford.co.uk/treachery, accessed on 11 January 2014
6 TNA KV 4/211, s.19a.
7 W. H. Thompson, I Was Churchill’s Shadow (London: C. Johnson, 1951)
8 A .32 Webley & Scott self-loading pistol, adopted by the Metropolitan Police after the Sidney Street siege
9 Winston Churchill, The Gathering Storm: The Second World War, Vol. 1 (London: Cassell, 1948), p. 356
10 TNA MEPO 10/35 deals with personal protection of HRH King Edward VIII