When Joe Links dropped round to No.8 on that first Sunday afternoon of the war, wearing the uniform of a Flying Officer in the RAF Volunteer Reserve, Wheatley felt a vicarious pride in his old friend’s appearance; officer’s uniform was “the proper dress for any gentleman when Britain is at war”. This is probably not the first thought that would have occurred to TS Eliot on seeing a Jewish furrier swanning around dressed as an officer, and it shows a more inclusive vision of Englishness, despite the oddly schizoid attitude to Jews in some of Wheatley’s writing.
Links invited Wheatley up to Hampstead for lunch at the Officers’ Mess, which he had generously set up in his own house on Pond Street. After lunch he gave Wheatley a chance to throw a Molotov cocktail – a home-made petrol bomb – at a dummy tank. Never very athletic, Wheatley botched his throw, and it went up in a ball of flame just a few feet away from them.
Wheatley felt he might have a role with propaganda and he tried to get into the newly formed Ministry of Information, but as he recalled in an after-dinner speech years later, “They wouldn’t have me as a gift”. He applied again when he discovered the names of the two senior civil servants appointed to do the recruiting, but once again he didn’t even receive the courtesy of a reply.
The ever capable Joan, meanwhile, who was a keen motorist, had found work with M15 as their “Petrol Queen,” using her knowledge of different cars to dole out tailored fuel rations. Bill Younger, who had already been unofficially employed at Oxford by Max Knight, was now taken on to work in Knight’s office, beginning what was to become a full time career in MI5.
The Wheatleys found work for Diana as a filing clerk for MI5, but she was sacked after five weeks, and Wheatley wrote her another of his long letters. She’d shown a bad attitude, he said; clattering about in high heels, wearing a beauty spot, making her face up in work time, going around the corner for furtive cigarettes, and exercising her wit on the women she didn’t like, just “for the sake of raising a laugh among a few other stupid girls.”
She was rude, vain, snobbish, bad-mannered, and obsessed with young men, which led her to dress and behave in a “flashy” “shop girl” manner, going around the West End with tarty furs, heels and “incredible nails,” and “the way you let your breasts hang half out of your dress at Quaglino’s the other night … honestly made me writhe.”
And so it went on, for four thousand sensible words. Wheatley complained that Diana had no real female friends: “A girl can have any number of lovers yet still cultivate other women. Yet you haven’t got a single real intimate girl friend … there are times when women can do for a woman things no man can and you’ll regret it later.” He appealed to reincarnation: if she continued to live so selfishly “you won’t get such a good deal next time.”
She seemed to take no interest in the War (“It’s no good blaming us for it”) and then there was Brinsley, who also took no interest and seemed to Wheatley to be a no-hoper. If everyone behaved like Diana, said Wheatley, we would lose, with Communist revolution and German invasion: “You wouldn’t find it much fun being conscripted for forced labour or having to become the mistress of somebody you hated for the sake of enough food to eat and their protection. But that’s what is happening to Czech and Polish girls …”
Wheatley’s autobiography veers to the other extreme when he tells his readers that Diana was parachuted into France on secret missions with the Special Operations Executive. There seems to be no evidence for this1.
Through Wheatley, the shadowy occultist Rollo Ahmed also seems to have found work with MI5. Wheatley sent notes on him to Knight, and Knight wrote back to say he would be grateful if Wheatley would “sound him out very gently particularly with a view to finding out if he would be willing to do this sort of work abroad.” Discreet as ever, he doesn’t say what sort of work it is.
The one person Wheatley couldn’t place with MI5 was himself. He asked Knight for work, emboldened by the fact that he also knew MI5’s founder Sir Vernon Kell, but Knight didn’t seem to want him, and told him the best war work he could do would be to keep the public entertained with his thrillers. Knight had other plans for Wheatley.
*
The day before war was declared, the police had raided William Joyce’s basement flat, only to find he had just fled to Germany: someone had tipped him off. It was almost certainly Knight, despite the fact that he disliked Joyce (a “pompous, conceited little creature” with “that romantic streak common to all Celts which makes them double effective and doubly dangerous.”) In the long run it was Knight’s helpful tip that led to Joyce being hanged. Without it, he would have spent a relatively safe war interned under Regulation 18B with the likes of Sir Oswald Mosley, Admiral Barry Domville, and Archibald Ramsay. In the short run it ensured that the police found absolutely nothing in his flat “except old National Socialist League propaganda and evidence testifying to the couple’s abject poverty.”
Knight rang Wheatley to ask him about Joyce, and Wheatley – despite the fact that Joyce was razored from mouth to ear, and had told him how much Goering liked his books – said he couldn’t remember him. “Oh yes you do,” said Knight, “He was at one of your parties.” And then he had some surprising and perhaps uncomfortable news for Wheatley: when MI5 had raided the flat, they had captured his papers, which included a file on Wheatley. Joyce had apparently reported to his German superiors that Wheatley could be an excellent collaborator after the invasion of Britain, and would even make a good Nazi Gauleiter for North West London. This is one of the best known stories about Wheatley, and it has gone from Wheatley’s autobiography to books on Knight and even Joyce, but there is no evidence for it.
Knight had plenty of good stories: he told Wheatley that a soldier had been found with a slip of paper bearing suspicious names such as Carlotta Casado, Heinrich Hauser, Pauline Vidor, and Serge Orloff. The list was sent to MI5, where Knight spotted that the man had simply been playing Wheatley’s Herewith The Clues. Very droll. It could be true, of course (like Knight’s stories of sitting next to a Marx brother in the cinema and taking jazz lessons from Sidney Bechet, although they start to seem cumulatively unlikely) but his story that he and Wheatley had attended Crowley “ceremonies” and been “initiated” by him was definitely untrue, as we have seen. Knight had also fabricated a letter to help his case when he framed the innocent pacifist Ben Greene as a Nazi.
This compromising piece of information about Wheatley the potential Gauleiter – people had been interned for far less – could have been very damaging, but as Wheatley says, “fortunately Max knew all about me; so we had a good laugh over it.” It is possible that Knight was having a better laugh than Wheatley.
*
Hardly had they finished laughing when Knight asked Wheatley for a favour. Wheatley would have done all he could to help anyway, but Knight probably felt the Joyce story increased his hold over him. As Joan Miller remembered, “he liked to control people”.
Knight had a newly arrived Austrian girl named Friedl Gartner or “Fritzi” working as a double agent, and he wanted a respectable member of the public – safely outside MI5, in case the connection should be discovered – to provide her with employment and vouch that they had known her for several years. Wheatley was more than happy to do this, and employed her as a research assistant for his wartime novels, paying her by cheque while Max forwarded him untraceable cash.
Wheatley and Joan met another agent, this time a genuine Nazi, at a cocktail party of Charles Birkin’s. Wheatley describes her as a Hungarian named Vicki, married to a peer. Max Knight (“having learned by his own mysterious means that we had met her”) then filled Wheatley in on her background. He wanted the Wheatleys to entertain her at No.8 and generally cultivate her, which they did, and they also made the acquaintance of her friend, a dark-haired baroness whom they nicknamed The Black Baroness.
Knight had Vicki so well under surveillance that when she threw a party for thirty-odd people, her guests included Wheatley, Joan and Diana; Bill Younger with Fritzi; Charles Birkin, Bunny Tattersall, and a colleague of Bill named Grierson Dickson; and Max Knight himself, who tapped his nose and told Wheatley the room was full of his operatives. Vicki was, Wheatley realised, “more or less throwing her party for MI5”.
*
Wheatley was meanwhile working hard on the wartime adventures of Gregory Sallust. Pitting Gregory against the Germans gave him a chance to shake off the slur of fascist sympathies that some reviewers had felt in the first two Sallust books. Writing sixteen hours a day, from ten in the morning until two the following morning, Wheatley managed to produce his 172,000 word novel The Scarlet Impostor in seven weeks.
It was a phenomenal success on its publication in January 1940. Its bestseller status caught Wheatley in a trade battle between his publisher and the big libraries – Boots, Smiths, Harrods, and The Times – who in those days could make or break a book. Hutchinson used Wheatley’s name to force a two shilling price rise from 8/6 to 10/6 (£16 to £20 today; in the days before television, novels were relatively expensive). The reviews were excellent and the book was selling well, but the libraries refused to buy it. Wheatley argued with them, saying they would be damaged if they refused to stock the books their customers wanted, and he even wrote to Freddy Richardson at Boots with a version of an old music hall favourite:
We don’t want to fight, but by Jingo if we do,
We’ve got the book, we’ve got the quotes,
We’ve got the money too.
Finally the advertising campaign, in addition to word of mouth, created such a clamour for the book among library subscribers that the libraries were forced to give in and stock it.
Along with whatever charm they found in Gregory – whose amorality and worldly savoir-faire make him the major precursor of James Bond, as distinct from the cleaner and tweedier heroes of John Buchan – the public devoured the Sallust books for their extraordinarily well-informed narratives and news-like coverage of the war.
Allowing that Wheatley’s place “may not be the loftiest niche in the mighty edifice of the world’s fiction,” one reviewer neverthless praised him as “as a dealer in magical spells of sensationalism” and noted “the book is so up-to-date that you can even read that the Royal Oak was torpedoed at Scapa ‘on the 14th’ Phew!”
This newsiness continued through the next two Sallust books, Faked Passports, and The Black Baroness, published in October 1940. “I have been reading Dennis Wheatley’s thriller called The Black Baroness,” a journalist wrote, “in which he refers by name to the capture by the Germans of Major-General Victor Fortune, who commanded the 51st Division … and yet it was only on October 3 that Major-General Fortune’s name appeared in the list of prisoners of war.”
The public were only given The Black Baroness because they voted for it. Wheatley put a questionnaire in the back of Faked Passports: “Shall I send Gregory to Norway and perhaps to other fronts as the war develops, or have you had enough of him for the time being? The alternatives are a story of strange happenings in the West Indies … or a new departure for me into Historical Romance. Any postcards stating a preference will be gratefully acknowledged and, as a servant to the public whose business it is to entertain, I will write the book that gets the largest vote.” The largest vote was “more Gregory”. Wheatley had put a questionnaire into a book before, but given his cinema speeches it is not too far fetched to think this one emphasised the importance of voting and democracy.
Sallust also led to Wheatley’s attendance at a Foyle’s Literary Lunch with the theme of “Spies”. Wheatley had become a founding patron of Christina Foyle’s ‘Right Book Club’, which Frederic Raphael remembers his parents subscribing to, receiving “a succession of furiously fascistic books (in nice tweedy covers)”. Wheatley hoped it would counter “the spate of subversive stuff … pouring from the Left Book Club under the aegis of Victor Gollancz.”
Wheatley met Sir Paul Dukes at the Foyles lunch. Dukes had been a British secret agent in Tsarist and Bolshevik Russia, and he was a former associate of the man known as Sidney Reilly, “Prince of Spies”. He was also adept at Yoga, a subject on which he eventually wrote books, and interested in reincarnation. Wheatley told an acquaintance that Dukes was the sort of man he would like to have been.
*
When the Spanish Fascists had attacked Madrid, they claimed they not only had four columns of troops marching on the city but a “fifth column” of secret supporters already inside. It became a famous phrase of the time (Hemingway wrote a play called The Fifth Column) and the idea of infiltrators caught Wheatley’s imagination. He drafted a script for a BBC broadcast “with a view to putting the fear of God into Fifth Columnists and as a warning to misguided people to disassociate themselves from bodies such as The British Union, the Peace Pledge Union, etc.” Many of these people were guilty of holding the same sort of views that Wheatley himself had held a few years earlier.
Describing the Fifth Column as a “sinister force” which had been active with devastating effects in Norway, Holland and Belgium, Wheatley considered it in England. There was Mosley (“this ranting schemer”) and his followers:
His lieutenants and helpers believe that they would be the Himmlers and Gauleiters of this country. They are mostly small-time people who have become embittered through lack of success in honest occupations and having been tempted by the Devil, have bartered their soul with him for a chance of power.
“I can tell you that we have lists of several hundred British-born traitors,” said Wheatley, and “and every single day some of these people are leading us to others who do not belong to any particular organisation and who normally we would never have suspected.”
The likes of Mosley and Captain Ramsay had got off lightly. “As this is not Germany, they will not be beaten with steel rods until the flesh hangs down in gory strips from their backs.” Instead they would be interned. But for smaller fry, caught aiding the King’s enemies, there would be no such good fortune.
I do not suppose that many of you have ever seen a firing squad execute a spy. It is a grim business. Such executions are usually carried out in the early morning. The scene is generally the cold grey yard of a military barracks. Perhaps there is a little pale sunlight giving promise of a lovely day which the spy knows that he will never live to see as he is led out of his cell.
He is escorted to a large post driven into the ground and tied to it, because sometimes traitors lose their nerve at the last moment and show a desperate desire to run away. The victim’s hands are tied behind his back and a canvas mask is drawn over his face. But he has already seen the little group of soldiers loading their rifles and a cold sweat breaks out upon his forehead. Those soldiers are uneasy because they hate the job they have to do. When the traitor has been blindfolded, he can still hear what is going on. The officer’s orders, the clicking home of the bolts of the rifles. He tenses himself for the last ordeal and perhaps begins to pray.
‘Fire!’ cries the officer. The rifles crack. The awful split second has come and the victim tenses himself to receive the bullets that will end his life. Another split second; another second. Dully, he realises that he is still standing there unharmed. For an instant, he may believe that he is already dead, but a moment later he hears the officer giving fresh orders and realises the horrid truth. The soldiers, each not wishing to be responsible for his death, have all fired high. They can be punished for that, but they do it all the same. In consequence, the sweating victim stands there in an agony of apprehension while the whole appalling ordeal has to be gone through all over again.
But at the second attempt, the victim is rarely killed. Nine times out of ten, the troops, hating their work, do not aim at the heart or head, and after the second volley, the wretched traitor hangs groaning from the post — five or six bullets having smashed into his body — but still conscious. He hears footfalls as the Provost Marshal, whose duty it is to finish him off, crosses the yard. After what seems to him an interminable time, the cold barrel of a revolver is placed against his temple and his brains are blown out. The still quivering body is cut down and dragged away to be cast into the lime-pit of the prison yard. That is the end reserved for traitors. It is also the fate of misguided idealists who are led into aiding the enemy by placing their personal theories before their country’s safety in time of war.
Wheatley’s fear of Fifth Columnists was the mainspring for a series of stories he wrote in 1940 for the Daily Sketch, featuring a new hero, “The Man With The Girlish Face.” This was Vivien Pawlett-Browne, whose “lazy smile and brown eyes with their ridiculous curling lashes might have caused him to be thought effeminate, had it not been for his good jaw and strong, well-shaped hands.” Wheatley had already experimented with the effete sophistication of the super-criminal Oxford Kate, and Diana also had some input into the new character.
Pawlett-Browne specialises in rooting out treacherous Jews and suspicious foreigners in general. When bubonic plague breaks out in “cosmopolitan” Hampstead, he traces it to a refugee librarian (“definitely non-Aryan and spoke with a heavy accent”) who is handing out free Union Jack bookmarks impregnated with plague bacilli. And so it goes on: German Jew Jacob Bauer is a radio engineer with access to top secret transmitter plans, fortunately cut short by Pawlett-Browne: “It’s curious that your name rhymes with Tower, isn’t it, dear Herr Bauer, since it’s at the Tower of London that we shoot people like you.” And a Miss Marlowe turns out to be of German descent, despite her father changing his name by deed poll back in 1928: “how right you were, my sweet, about our cherishing snakes in our bosoms.”
Stories one might wish Wheatley hadn’t written, but entirely of their time. ‘INTERN THE LOT’ ran the Beaverbrook headline, and Sir Neville Bland’s pamphlet The Fifth Column Menace told readers that “The paltriest kitchen maid, with German connections, not only can be, but generally is, a menace to the safety of the country.” It was one of those moments when the outer world and the inner world are in tune, because it chimed with a lifelong fear of contamination in Wheatley’s mind. One of the things people often remember about his occult books is the importance of keeping dust and dirt out of pentagrams and magic circles, in case evil spirits should use it gain a foothold in the purified “astral fortress”.
The struggle with the Fifth Column came close to home. When MI5 raided the flat of a pro-Nazi American cipher clerk, Tyler Kent, they captured Captain Ramsay’s notorious “Red Book”: a leather ledger with a heavy lock, containing the Right Club’s membership list. Along with the likes of William Joyce it contained the name of Brinsley, “Le P Trench, B.”
Wheatley was still writing hard – he published nine books during the war, six of them new novels – but other war work continued to elude him, until one day Joan was chauffeuring an MI5 officer named Captain Hubert Stringer. It seemed clear Hitler would soon invade Britain and it was part of Stringer’s job to think of counter-measures, but he wasn’t finding it easy to come up with ideas. “Why don’t you ask my husband?” said Mrs Wheatley, “That’s rather his cup of tea.”
1 Neither I nor Diana’s brother Major General Sir Jack Younger could find any trace; and if it is true, it is suprising that Wheatley doesn’t say more about it.