Shortly before the Second World War, MI5 investigated the progressive co-educational school at Dartington Hall, in Devon. Famous for its music and its liberal discipline, Dartington Hall had begun as an experimental arts community, on the lines of the Bauhaus, founded by Leonard Elmhirst and Dorothy Whitney. By the late Thirties M15 had become worried that it might be a place of Communist indoctrination, and also that its emigré staff might unwittingly harbour Nazis in reach of the South West Coast. It gave refuge to the dance innovator Laban, for example, who had mounted Nazi dance shows (before falling foul of the regime, supposedly because he was a Mason). The idea of MI5 investigating Dartington now seems ridiculous, although in fact Dorothy Whitney’s son Michael Straight did spy for Russia after being recruited by Anthony Blunt.
In 1938 Maxwell Knight had written to Wheatley, in order to put Bill Younger on the Dartington case. (MI5’s findings are preserved at the Public Records Office as HO144/21511, ‘Allegations of teachings of communist doctrines at Dartington Hall Co-Ed School 1932–41’: they remain closed until 2042).
“I had heard about a school in Devonshire,” says Wheatley, where “pupils were allowed complete licence to attend classes or not as they liked, lie in bed all day if they wished and even abuse teachers that they disliked.” Wheatley claims there were rumours of pupils being encouraged to attend Satanic gatherings in a nearby ruined church, which is surely a little flourish of Wheatley’s own, unless Uncle Max was pulling his leg again.
This inspired Wheatley to put Gregory Sallust on the case in 1939, but it was shelved with the war. Picking the idea up again afterwards, Wheatley left Sallust out and built it around a new hero with new, topical concerns.
Bedridden and partially paralysed from a wartime spinal injury, ex-RAF pilot Albert “Toby” Jugg slowly realises he is being held captive in his family castle by his apparently benign but increasingly sinister guardian Helmuth, who was a teacher at the school Toby attended. Toby is unable to tell anyone about the enormous, half-spectral spider which fingers the window of his room every night with its legs, casting a horrible shadow in the moonlight as it tries to get in. Ordinary spiders from all over the building also converge on Toby’s room, somehow directed by Helmuth, and Toby’s letters are intercepted before they can reach the outside world. It transpires that Helmuth wants Toby’s inheritance, as heir to the Juggernaut engineering fortune, and if Toby refuses to sign it over, Helmuth will have him certified as insane and gain control by default.
One of the strangest aspects of Jugg is the nature of the ideas that run through Toby’s mind as he lies bedridden. You might think that the state of British democracy, and the fact that it is too easy for extremist foreigners to be elected to Parliament, would be the last things a man being menaced by a giant spider would worry about. But that would be to overlook the book’s allegorical dimension and political message, in which the spider and the foreign Communist menace are bound up together.
After all, thinks Toby, it is not that we want to prevent all foreigners from settling in Britain; and “neither, shades of Disraeli, do we want to discriminate against our own Jews.” But then Disraeli was all right; “his family had been resident in London for nearly a hundred years before he first sat at Westminster”. The book plays out a drama of Englishness versus foreignness, the latter exemplified by the evil Dr Helmuth Lisicky.
All the indications are that Helmuth is a thoroughly bad egg, right from the fact that he despises stamp collecting (Wheatley, of course, was a keen collector). “Wasting your time with those silly little bits of coloured paper?”, he asks Toby. But Toby is not wasting his time; he is using his stamp albums to hide the diary of his ordeal, which becomes the novel itself.
Helmuth is a very bad egg indeed: he is a Communist-Satanist. Unfortunately, it is sinister on a less amusing level when, on top of everything else, Toby suspects him of being Jewish: “the fact that his ears are set low on his skull suggests that he may have a dash of Jewish blood.”
Toby, in contrast, is a distinctly Aryan type, blond and formerly nicknamed “The Viking”, but the real issue is less Jewishness than xenophobia. The problem is not that foreign Jews are Jewish but that they’re foreign, and therefore prone to political extremism, which in Britain was associated with Continental emigrés.
Throughout Wheatley’s lifetime, extremist politics of a kind supposedly ‘alien’ to the British way of life tended to come from abroad, with East End Russian anarchists before the First War, Italian Fascism and German National Socialism, and – the Continental far-Right having been defeated – the foreign Left making post-war emigré inroads into higher education, the media and the Labour Party. This was a concern of Orwell’s at the end of his life, and his controversial denunciation of a number of individuals to MI5 was handled by Wheatley’s friend Colonel “Sherry” Sheridan. More about Sheridan later.
This foreign-English theme in Jugg is further played out in the contrast between Jugg’s two nurses. Jewish Deborah is a thin-lipped intellectual, and although she is perfectly decent in a humourless way (and not party to Helmuth’s plan for Toby) Toby is shocked to find that she is a Communist and wants to stand for Parliament. Toby’s other nurse is a strapping English girl named Sally Cardew, and she is much more Wheatley’s cup of tea: she is well bred (“much better born than I am,” and in that respect like Wheatley’s own Joan) and not too brainy (“a nice healthy English hoyden, not over-burdened with brains, of the sort who has been brought up to believe in God and the King”). She is just the sort of girl John Betjeman might have liked, right down to the fact that she is “a hefty wench”; as Betjeman was wont to say, “I wouldn’t mind being pushed round the park in a perambulator by her”.
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Jugg’s main supernatural plank is a sensationalistic treatment of hypnosis, which Toby teaches himself from a book he finds among the books-by-the-yard furnishing the castle library and uses in his attempts to escape (it is J.Milne Bramwell’s Hypnotism, a book which Wheatley owned). Like the two earlier occult books, Jugg also features plenty of argument to suspend disbelief in the supernatural, and Wheatley puts his childhood experience of ‘the Thing on the stairs’ into Toby’s schooldays, brought about by the school staff dabbling with the occult.
“Weyland School” was a Satanic recruiting ground, with Crowley’s old Rabelaisian motto of ‘Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole of the Law’, but Satanism has considerably expanded in Jugg. The Satanists in The Devil Rides Out were an international gang, but they have now become a global conspiracy, The Brotherhood, with a new totalitarian programme in the guise of Communism.
This identification of Satanism and Communism was a major innovation in Wheatley’s propaganda career, and one that would continue in his subsequent occult books. Leaving aside, just for a moment, the fact that it is ludicrous, there is nevertheless an esoteric justification for this equation, pivoting on the idea of materialism versus idealism.
Wheatley believed in idealist ‘light’ and ‘spirit’, whereas Satanism is a materialism, exalting the things of this world. The upright or ‘good’ five-pointed occult pentacle (bearing some resemblance to the human form with outstretched arms) represents among other things mind over matter, in the unity of spirit – the one point – above the division of matter: the two points. The inverted or ‘bad’ Satanic pentacle (bearing some resemblance to a goat’s head, with horns, ears and chin) represents divided matter exalted over spirit, comparable to the way in which Marxism or ‘dialectical materialism’ exalts the economic base over the cultural superstructure.
On a simpler level, if Satanists aim to sow dissent, discord, stupidity, conflict, darkness and ruin, then Wheatley believed that the Left was the modern vehicle for this. Further, Left atheism is anti-Christian and therefore a potentially useful stalking-horse for Satanism; an opinion not unknown among Christians in America. But whatever its niceties or obtusities, Wheatley went to town with the idea in Jugg and never looked back.
As Helmuth explains,
Communism is the perfect vehicle for the introduction of the return of Mankind to its original allegiance [i.e. to the Old One, Satan]. It already denies Christianity and all the other heresies. It denies the right of free-will and the expression of their individuality to all those who live under it. Communism bows down only to material things; and my real master is not Stalin but the Lord of Material Things; Satan the Great, the Deathless, the Indestructible … He has taken the very word Communism as his new name, and he even mocks those who no longer believe in his existence by having them demonstrate in favour of rule by the Proletariat on the first of May. Have you never realised that it is his anniversary, and that it is born of May-day Eve – Walpurgis Nacht – on which we celebrate his festival?
Walpurgis Night, or St.Walburga’s Eve, should be familiar to Wheatley readers from The Devil Rides Out, and May Day, the old pagan festival and more recently workers’ day, was the occasion of a massive military parade of troops, tanks and missile launchers through Moscow, once a familiar annual sight on British television.
Just as the Satanists in The Devil Rides Out were defeated by a woman and the power of love, so the Satanists in Jugg meet their end within a familiar Wheatley scenario: Sally Cardew has been taken prisoner and is going to be ritually ravished by the Satanists at the climax of their Black Mass, before the general orgy begins, and there is nothing that Toby can do about it except pray.
Toby’s old, mad Great-Aunt Sarah, who lives elsewhere in the castle, has been at work for many years on a secret tunnel, leading her – so she believes – towards rescuing the man she once loved. The idea of tunnelling was in the air in 1947, with British prisoners having tunnelled out of German POW camps, and so was the bursting of dams, after the Dam Buster air raids. In a deus ex machina ending that is extraordinary even by Wheatley standards, these ideas are brought together when, just in the nick of time (“Night after night for over forty years she had laboured for love’s sake”) Great Aunt Sarah’s tunnel strikes a lake, and her dead body comes flying out of the tunnel entrance towards the Satanists in the sunken chapel, borne by thousands of gallons of water that pour in and drown them all.
Only Toby and Sally survive, and in due course they pray together, “for the happiness of that spirit which for a little time lived in the body of Sarah Jugg – who yesterday was old and mad, but today is young and sane again.”
To be fair to Wheatley, he doesn’t try to suggest this is simply an extraordinary coincidence. Instead it is the working of “an inscrutable Providence” to save two lovers, perhaps even an answer to prayer. And in any case, literary quibbling is beside the point. Highly improbable, full of unintentional humour for the modern reader, Jugg is nevertheless one of Wheatley’s best books, full of plot twists, hopes raised and dashed, near escapes failing at the last moment, Toby’s Hitchcockian frustrations at not being believed, and his love for Sally.
It is as plausible in small details as such an allegorical story could be, combining – for example – the entirely naturalistic nickname of “Toby” for a man in the Forces surnamed Jugg, together with its more symbolic invocation of Olde England under threat, via the familiar character jug modelled as an 18th century drinker in his three-cornered hat; a figure almost as archetypal as John Bull. Wheatley had one of these Toby jugs on his desk.
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The Haunting of Toby Jugg was published just in time for Christmas 1948 and it was a great success, clearing the one million mark. “It propounds a theory that under a new disguise the Devil is still intensely active”, said the blurb, no more than hinting at the Cold War theme. It may have been helped by another extraordinary Frank Pape cover illustration, which – like most of Pape’s Wheatley jackets – has to be seen to be believed.
A lone man, on crutches, confronts a gigantic and amorphous spider-creature which towers over him: it is greenish, and looks to have soft, pale, toad-belly flesh. The creature wraps right around the book and behind it, on the back jacket, there is a suggestion of smoke or incense rising above a naked blonde who is about to be sacrificed on an altar by figures in black cowls. The title of the book is carried on the beast’s face and legs, with the T of Toby in red looking something like a hammer while the tails of the ‘g’ letters drop into red, hooked curves. Taken together, they form a suggestion of the red hammer and sickle.
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The spider-creature in Jugg also resembles the Jewish spider or octopus, often seen getting its tentacles around the planet in anti-Semitic propaganda. Inasmuch as some Jews might be specifically seen as a menace, Wheatley was following a line also to be found in Churchill. In his 1920 essay, ‘Zionism versus Bolshevism,’ Churchill’s argument was that Jews were everywhere behind revolutions (his point being, since he was a Zionist, was that they would cause less trouble if they had a homeland):
This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky, Bela Kun, Rosa Luxemburg, and Emma Goldman … this worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing.
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There is another flash of ambivalence to Jews in Wheatley’s immediately postwar novel, Codeword: Golden Fleece, set in the early days of the war in Eastern Europe:
Rex had often discussed the Jewish problem, thinking in terms of the flashy Americanized Jews who throng the second-class cinemas and restaurants of the great cities of the Western world, and by their overbearing brazenness give a false impression of their numbers. He knew, too, that there existed a small sprinkling of really cultured Jews – men of quiet demeanour and unshakeable integrity, such as his own friend Simon Aron – and he had often argued that, in spite of their reputation for sharp practice, the average Jew was honest and industrious and made a useful contribution to any country in which he settled. Here, for the first time in his life, Rex was brought face to face with the real Jewish problem, and he wondered unhappily how any country could make useful citizens out of these dirty, stupid-looking off-scourings of humanity.
Wheatley probably attempted this as a serious historical point, trying to give a picture of the perceptions that contributed to Continental anti-Semitism in the Thirties. It is also possible that his friend Michael Balcon, the film director, introduced him to the idea that Sephardic Jews – like Balcon himself1, and Simon Aron – were aristocratic, while Ashkenazi Jews were a teeming problem.
As ever, it shows Wheatley’s tendency to ‘split’ the world. We might refine the old cliché to say it wasn’t just that some of his best friends were Jews; rather, some of his best friends were nice Jews.
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The Jewish theme in Jugg doesn’t seen to have bothered anyone at the time. Satanism, however, was a much more alarming prospect, and before long an unwelcome letter arrived through Wheatley’s door.
1 Balcon and the Sephardic-Ashkenazi distinction: see Peter Parker, Isherwood Picador 2004 p.280.