“My Idea of a Perfect Evening”
Baba was becoming close to a man as different from Tom Mosley as it would be possible to imagine. Edward Wood, Viscount Halifax, former viceroy of India and now foreign secretary, was a politician out of a sense of duty rather than the burning ambition and lust for personal power that inspired Mosley. His twin passions were High Anglicanism and foxhunting. Immensely tall and distinguished looking, he had been born without a left hand; instead, he had a false fist with a thumb over which he wore a leather glove in black or brown (according to whether he was in London or the country). It was impossible to imagine him doing anything dishonorable; he was so admired by the king that His Majesty had given him the unique privilege of walking through the gardens of Buckingham Palace to the Foreign Office.
Baba had kept in touch with Halifax ever since she had first met him with Nevile Henderson in Berlin. She had entertained the Halifaxes in London and been to stay with them at Garrowby, their estate in Yorkshire, and all three had soon become close friends. But although Baba was extremely fond of Dorothy Halifax, her real closeness was with Dorothy’s husband. As the foreign secretary was known for his austere reserve, such an intimacy was all the more surprising—and noticeable to observers. It was a friendship that developed while she was still conducting her affair with Dino Grandi: to be the favorite female companion of both the British foreign secretary and the representative of Mussolini’s fascist regime was an irony unremarked on at the time.
Apart from an occasional lunch, the first significant milestone in the friendship between the foreign secretary and the young woman who was to mean so much to him occurred on October 4, 1939, when Halifax wrote Baba a short note: “I was on the point of writing to you to say that Dorothy had had to go up to Yorkshire till Saturday and to beg you to come and cheer my solitude when your telegram came. So I jumped at Friday evening, which I hope may be all right for you, if you don’t mind plain fare and if you really don’t mind being tête-à-tête! It will be very good to see you. Will 6:30 do? And I will try not to have too much work to do after dinner!” It was of that evening that Baba wrote in her diary: “Dined with Edward tête-à-tête—my idea of a perfect evening.”
As foreign secretary, Halifax spent much, if not most, of his time in London, while Dorothy was often at Garrowby. He and Baba would dine together, or go for walks in the park. With her interest in politics, her flattering attention and her lucid comments, she was a stimulating as well as attractive companion; for her part, mixed with her liking and admiration for his nobility of character was the enjoyment of feeling herself at the very center of things.
As they became more intimate, she poured out all her misery over her marriage and her worries about Fruity and the future. For Halifax, the presence of this beautiful, unhappily married young woman who obviously adored him was irresistible. It was not long before London society, buzzing with wartime scandal, wondered if she was sleeping with him. If it had been any other man, the answer would have been yes, but the exact nature of the relationship was a mystery even to those closest to both of them, from Irene on the one side to Halifax’s close friend Victor Cazalet and private secretary Charles Peake on the other.
Yet although Halifax was undoubtedly romantically obsessed with Baba, a physical liaison is unlikely. He was deeply devoted to his wife, he was a man of honor and his religious principles were such that if he had contravened them in this way he would have been tortured by guilt and remorse—and there is no trace of either in the many letters he wrote her. Holding hands during one of their interminable walks through the woods at Garrowby or Little Compton would not have troubled even the foreign secretary’s rigorous conscience.
Halifax’s feelings for Baba can perhaps best be compared with those of Asquith for Venetia Stanley: the adoration, the age gap, the flood of letters that poured out political secrets and gossip with complete trust in the discretion of their recipient. Dorothy, wise and understanding, ensured that the marriage could accommodate this other love—in one of Halifax’s letters to Baba there is a reference to a long discussion which he had had with Dorothy about his relationship with Baba—“disinfecting” it by maintaining her own close friendship with the younger woman.
From Baba’s point of view Halifax represented stability, an older man on whom she could rely utterly; his approach to life provided a compass that helped to guide her through the moral maze in which she so often found herself; his faith helped and underwrote her own—they would pray together—and he exuded that heady, intoxicating scent of power and inside knowledge which she found so deeply satisfying.
At the same time, she was seeing both Michael Lubbock, her affair of the previous year, and Sir Walter Monckton. Monckton was well known to have a weakness for women; he was also an extremely clever and attractive man. Baba had liked him from the moment she met him at the time of the Windsors’ wedding, and their joint involvement in the couple’s affairs had frequently brought them together. As most of those close to Baba knew that she and Fruity now led virtually separate lives, she was usually asked out on her own. With a string of admirers, she was seldom at a loose end.
Irene was as busy as ever. Her health, never very good, was not improved by her drinking bouts, characterized as “neurasthenia,” “cramps in my tummy” or even “lumbago,” which became more frequent when she was worried. But they never stopped her from seeing friends, conducting committee meetings—or worrying about Denham. The question of its future continued to dominate her: Nick, who had won an examination prize at Eton for the fourth time running, told her that he had never been told he was going up to Wootton after Christmas; Nanny refused to discuss the future, and Baba smiled pleasantly and told her not to worry. Irene resorted to bed and a course of colonic irrigation.
Nevertheless, the first Christmas of the war began well. Irene, always generous, had given a champagne party and a Christmas dinner, cooked in her kitchen, to the barrage-balloon unit and their wives and girlfriends; her staff and the nurses got turkeys and a bottle of whatever drink they liked, the VADs received ten shillings apiece so that they could take their boyfriends to the theater. At Denham, she did her best to keep up the spirit of past Christmases with a tree, presents and the tradition of Father Christmas down the chimney performed by Nick. On Boxing Day evening they listened to Lord Haw Haw on the radio attacking the British government from Germany. Irene told the Mosley children, accurately if tactlessly, that this was William Joyce, who until recently had been one of their father’s chief fascist executives—a piece of news to which they reacted defensively.
Fruity, in Paris, told Baba on January 30, 1940, that the duke was going to GHQ for a few days and was very pleased about the proposed trip, which he described to Fruity as “the thin end of the wedge.” “I am glad for him,” wrote Fruity. “I too think something better will come up fairly soon for HRH and then, I guess, I disappear.”
In the meantime, it was Fruity’s turn to accompany his employer. “I’m off on a very interesting and exciting tour of a section of the French line,” he wrote in a letter of February 19. “I’m very pleased at being taken. They are in wonderful form. I am getting to really like her. I find I can do a great deal with her, much more than with him, and so I get things done.” Confidently he added: “She likes me now.”
Baba was not so sure. Fruity was hoping for some home leave and she wrote an alarmed postcard to Walter Monckton. “I have a sinking feeling it may forbode [sic] bad news as something tells me that our dear friends may be planning the dirtiest ever!” Monckton replied reassuringly, though wrongly: “I do not think you will find the news from the Suchet front as bad as you expect.”
At Denham, the alterations to “halve” the house and thus cut down on the rates were in full swing. Nanny and Micky, there on their own apart from a daily governess, found themselves without heat or hot water during one of the coldest months of the year while boiler and pipes were removed, shut down or replaced. For Nanny, the discomfort was aggravated by uncertainty about the future. She had given her life first to the Curzon daughters, then to Cim’s children; in Irene’s absence, she was wholly responsible for Micky. Yet she only discovered matters that affected her deeply at second hand. With the arrival of Diana’s nanny and two-year-old son, Alexander, and, soon, Diana’s second child (Max, born in April) she foresaw herself being pushed into a subordinate position. She felt that Tom was too cowardly actually to sack her but hoped that constant pressure, overwork and humiliation would eventually force her to leave. All this she poured out to Irene in a painful interview at the end of February.
Putting these worries to one side, Irene went to stay with her sister, seeing Little Compton for the first time and finding it spectacularly beautiful. “Baba seems to get a very satisfying life,” she wrote in her diary on February 24. “I wonder where I make the error—perhaps through too much work and thought, giving no time to men and social leisure. She has her regular dinners every week with her two beaux, Sir Walter Monckton and Lord Halifax. I have nothing of that and oh! If I had the ear of Lord H on church questions. She is interested in none of these things.”
Fruity, just returned from his French tour, had received the duke’s permission to go on leave, “H.R.H. was absolutely wonderful all through,” he told Baba. “I think he was better this tour than ever before. He was remarkable. He never gets tired and he was never in a bad temper or a bad humour and interested in everything. There is no question, at jobs like this he is unbeatable.” Soon, these views would alter drastically.
Relations between Wallis and Baba, who kept up a sporadic correspondence, were cordial. On April 8 Wallis wrote from La Cröe, suggesting that Baba came out later in the year. “We have had a lovely second honeymoon. We are delighted to hear that Fruity feels so much better and has gone to England—the Duke wired him to stay as long as he could because it must be a most dreary life at the Ritz marking time for the war to begin. We always want him for dinner at Suchet but that is not very gay—but nothing really is now with this lowering over us always. When will it stop and what then?”
It was a question that was about to receive a terrible answer. All over Europe there was chaos. Britain watched in horrified disbelief as the Nazis invaded first Norway and Denmark (on April 9) and surged toward the Low Countries. Rumor and counter-rumor were rife; as the Nazi forces drew nearer the coastlines of the North Sea and Channel the wildest stories abounded—German paratroopers floating down dressed as nuns, a “fifth column” of spies and traitors who secretly informed Hitler of British plans—and those with any kind of official position were eagerly sought for what they could tell.
Fruity, close to the French GHQ through the duke of Windsor, was one of these, and making the most of it. When Georgia Sitwell met him on April 14 she found herself writing: “Fruity is now so much ‘in the know’ no one else can speak—what the generals think etc.” Baba, too, relished her inside knowledge. When Georgia visited her at Compton she noted that Baba was able to state firmly that although the prime minister had said, “Hitler has missed the bus,” and a number of enemy warships had been sunk, the withdrawal from Norway was inevitable. “She had seen Halifax and Walter Monckton and they both said it was no good going on; the Norwegians offered no cooperation and did not want to fight.”
On May 10, German forces invaded Holland, Luxembourg and Belgium. Neville Chamberlain resigned and Winston Churchill became prime minister in his stead, leading a coalition wartime government. The Home Guard was formed, as Britain’s last line of defense against invaders. Five days later, the duchess of Windsor left Paris for Biarritz. The duke accompanied her and then returned to the Military Mission.
As the Dutch surrendered and the French defenses were pierced (near Sedan), the threat of invasion was in everyone’s minds. Posters went up warning that “Careless Talk Costs Lives,” the Home Guard drilled with what weapons they could muster and contingency plans were laid to prevent the royal family and senior politicians from falling into the hands of the enemy.
Tom Mosley, as Britain’s fascist leader and a man who passionately believed that the war was a mistake, appeared to many an obvious Quisling figure. Even Baba, still in his thrall, had recorded of her first wartime political conversation with him (three months earlier): “I find his attitude quite dreadful; you can’t make him admit Germany is to blame.” On May 16, Irene visited Sir John Anderson, the home secretary, at his request. Anderson asked her if she had any evidence that Tom would betray his country at this moment of its greatest peril, through the “fifth column” or otherwise. Irene replied that, although she had none, “if Tom thought such a thing was good for England in conjunction with Hitler’s regime then he might do anything if he got angry and thought we were mucking the whole thing.
“I gave him bits of conversation from Tom and Diana and I said I had been useless as we had not met for weeks. He said I had given him all he wanted.”
Public opinion had swung violently against Tom. When he spoke on behalf of a British Union candidate at a Lancashire by-election on May 19 he was booed and the BU man polled a mere 418 votes to the Conservative 32,063.
It was clear that France would soon fall—the Germans were turning from the coast to Paris—but the duke, accompanied by Fruity, continued to visit various sectors of the front. By May 19 German troops were approaching Paris; by the twenty-first they had captured Amiens and Arras. “It really is a case of all to stand or die,” wrote Irene that day. “If the Channel ports go, England is bombed and invaded at once.”
On May 22 the government rushed through an Emergency Powers Act that gave it almost unlimited authority over the lives and property of all British citizens. One of its regulations, stemming from an earlier Emergency Powers Act, was that labeled 18B: this empowered the home secretary to detain anyone “who he had reason to believe” was of “hostile origins or associations” or thought to have been involved with anything “prejudicial to public safety or the defence of the realm.” This regulation was now strengthened to include powers of detention over any members of an organization that in the home secretary’s view was “subject to foreign influence or control” or whose leaders “have or have had associations with persons concerned in the government of, or sympathetic with the government of, any power with which His Majesty is at war.”
The fascist newspaper Action the following day brought matters to a head. “The question has been put to me why I do not cease all political activity in an hour of danger to our country,” Mosley wrote. “The answer is that I intend to do my best to provide the people with an alternative to the present government if, and when, they desire to make peace with the British Empire intact and our people safe.”
Poised to act, the authorities now swooped. That afternoon the BU offices were raided and over forty people detained. Tom was not among them. An evening newspaper headline announced that the Conservative MP Captain Maule Ramsay had been arrested that afternoon.
When Irene arrived home the telephone was ringing as she walked through her front door. It was Viv—to say that her father had been arrested at Dolphin Square in Pimlico and taken to Brixton Prison. Irene begged her niece to come and stay but she said she would rather remain at Denham and that she would tell Nicky.
Irene passed the news on to Baba and Lady Mosley, then went to the dinner party to which she had been invited. “I felt that if I chucked they would think I was in sympathy so with black grief in my heart I went out. On my way back I saw a light in Donald Somerville’s room and I rang to ask him his thoughts of Tom. He told me to impress on Viv and Nick it was not a disgrace but a precaution. I could only see one thing clearly: Thank God Cim was dead.”
Tom’s detention in prison raised several questions. Who would decide things for the children? Would Diana become their guardian as well as their stepmother? This thought prompted Irene to ask the Canadian high commissioner, Vincent Massey, with whom she was dining, if he did not think Diana was as dangerous as Tom. Should she write to Sir John Anderson to that effect? Massey agreed. Feeling in any case was running high: the Mosley Day Nursery in Kennington was vandalized, its glass sheds and sun parlor smashed.
Baba, still in a state of nerves over her children, was doing what she often did when strung up: flailing out at those nearest to her. The first to fall victim to her black mood were Irene, who had argued strongly against sending the children to America, and Fruity, who was castigated for not writing. His reply, on May 24, contained an unusual touch of sarcasm.
Well, I really should have thought that knowing you are always so well informed with the news, you would have understood why you had not received any letters. Perhaps the short line I did send you, at the first opportunity, explains this, if you have not been getting much war news.
These last few weeks have been a great strain. Today the situation is much the same, if anything it is worse. I am very busy, going anywhere at a moment’s notice, day or night. Each night (and day) we have been expecting the German bombers and tanks to arrive. We have two or three alerts each day.
You ask me if I will still remain in Paris! Good God, I don’t know if there will be a Paris in 24 hours. What or where I will go to God again knows. You speak of an interesting time. Yes, it is all that and more. A lot more. Re your remark about the German tanks having wings or part of the French Army having them, well the latter is very true, unluckily.
As you now know, the 9th Army could not “take it.” The General and all his staff are now either shot or prisoners of war. It has been a terrible shock and surprise. I fear there are bigger shocks to come. HRH came back two days ago. I am uneasy about him. He might do anything. Anything except the right thing. I live from hour to hour, fearing to hear the worst. He talks of having done enough. Of course do not repeat any of this. Gray P is no use in an emergency. None at all. Anything he says is the worst advice possible, or else he sits mute, which is even worse and more dangerous. I do not know what will happen. W. is like a magnet. It is terrible. I have seen a great deal and hear everything. I can’t yet work out what Thomas and I will do, or where even to try to make for, if the situation changes much worse (I refer to one’s life and also should HRH make his fatal decision). I’ll write when I can.
By May 25 the British army was separated from the French and Boulogne was in German hands. As the Channel ports fell one by one, Britain waited in suspense. Everyone believed that invasion was now days rather than weeks away. In Paris, Fruity followed the routine set up by the duke. Sometimes the arrangements for the following day were already known or could be made the evening before; when this was not so, Fruity would telephone the following morning for orders.
One evening toward the end of May Fruity said his usual “Good night, sir. See you tomorrow.” When he made his customary telephone call the following morning at eight-thirty and asked to be put through to the duke he was answered by a servant who said: “His Royal Highness left for Biarritz at six-thirty this morning.”
Fruity, who had worked for months without pay, doing everything he could to support the duke and make the lives of the Windsors easier, found himself abandoned without a word by the man he considered his best friend, to find his own way home as best he could.
He wrote to Baba at once, a letter that was a paean of rage, misery and disillusionment. After advising her to take the children for safety at once to Cornwall or Devon where, with luck, there would be sun, bathing and tranquillity, he went on to say that his own situation could not be much worse.
Re my Master, he has run like 2 rabbits. He never made one single mention of what was to happen to me, or his paid Comptroller Phillips. He has taken all cars etc and left not even a bicycle!! He intended to go at 6:30 a m. the morning before he did go without even telling me he was going but was held up for petrol or something. He has denuded the Suchet house of all articles of value and all his clothes etc. After 20 years I am through—utterly [several underlinings]—I despise him—I’ve fought and backed him up (knowing what a swine he was for 20 years), but now it is finished.
Live at Suchet, you suggest. No thank you—I’ve been busy doing anyone’s job, taking papers etc, but only used when there was no one else. Everything is packed up at the Mission. I cannot yet figure out where I go or what I do—but I will do something, believe me. I have ideas, as I always have, I guess they will not come off but it will not be for want of trying! Our rifles are at Purdeys—get them. I am like a sheep without any fold—Mission No I is not on the map for me. Now no more. Fondest love to you and the children.
PS Re Walter M I cannot of course advise him to any kind of action. But, I say this, if Walter works once again or does anything for HRH then I say he is demented. The man is not worth doing anything for. He deserted his job in 1936. Well, he’s deserted his Country now, at a time when every office boy and cripple is trying to do what he can. It is the end. He said to Gray something about coming back later on!!! Yes, he’d come back and her when things are OK. F
To the duke he wrote briefly from the Travellers Club in the Champs-Elysées on June 3:
I am leaving for England this evening. I hope there to work in some way more actively than I have been able to do for the past few weeks. I do not mind what I get to do but I will then feel that I am helping my country more than I have been doing lately.
My position here since you left has been impossible and one I cannot stand. I have had not one word from you, Sir, and so can only surmise that you intend to stay where you are now.
I am sorry, Sir, to leave your service, but I feel sure that it is the only thing to do. I thank you, Sir, for all your past kindnesses to me, also for helping me to come out to France with you in September.
I will say Goodbye, Sir, and wish you and Wallis the very best of good luck. Please remember me to Wallis.
He ended the letter “Yours ever.”
Baba never forgave the duke for abandoning Fruity in Paris. She felt he had behaved appallingly and it increased her protectiveness toward her husband—although it did not alter her behavior one whit.
As for Fruity, he struggled back to England, arriving on June 5. The effect on him of this total and unexpected betrayal by the man he had loved, trusted and faithfully served was disastrous. At a stroke, he had lost not only one of the two main pillars of his life but a job that had given him back much of his self-respect after years spent helplessly watching his wife’s affairs with other men.
Irene’s days passed in committee meetings, war work, good causes and speeches—to the Federal Union Club, the Sisterhood in Lees Hall, the Canning Town Settlement, where she spoke as the sponsor of a movement called Responsibility, which aimed to inculcate in everyone a sense of personal responsibility. “I am convinced that we must put our own house in order, during this tragic conflict, before we try to tidy up Europe after the war,” she said, using as example the poor housing, nourishment and education brought to light by the mass evacuation of underprivileged city children. She spoke well and fluently, with all the force and passion of someone who believes deeply in what she is saying.
With Tom in prison, the question of the guardianship of his children came up. On June 10—the same day that Italy declared war on France and the Windsors, now at La Cröe, were entertaining Maurice Chevalier—Tom’s lawyer, who had seen him in Brixton Prison, told Irene that Tom had said he would have nothing more to do with his children if their guardianship was taken from him—and Denham would be barred to them. The next day Irene’s lawyer met Tom’s, who took a more sober line than his client by suggesting joint guardianship between Tom and Irene. Irene’s response was that she thought the difficulties of the situation and their divergent views would make this unworkable, an opinion strongly endorsed by her solicitor. The matter, he said, would be settled in court.
Less than a week later the first German troops entered Paris, making the collapse of France a virtual certainty and Britain’s peril even greater. All that Tom Mosley stood for was more than ever abhorred and, as stories of the infamous behavior of the Nazis in occupied countries began to trickle back to England, those in authority who knew of Diana’s close friendship with Hitler scrutinized her more closely than ever.
When Irene saw her close friend (and former father-in-law to Diana) Lord Moyne, he told her that he felt Diana was more dangerous than Tom but that she was to be allowed to continue her life at Wootton “in case she was useful to the Home Office.”
On June 25 Irene’s solicitor passed on the guardianship verdict. Although the judge was willing to waive all question of guardianship and cooperate with Tom on important issues, Tom had flatly refused this. “He wanted entire and complete control of the boys—he was not interested in the girl!” reported the solicitor. As Tom had said that he wanted sole guardianship—obviously impossible from prison—or nothing, after much deliberation the judge had no other course but to request guardianship from outside. Irene’s name was put forward and accepted. Tom’s reaction was to send Irene a message that he would never again have anything to do not only with the guardianship but with the care of his children.
That night, Irene wrote in her diary: “God in his inimitable way has handed me Cim’s children. May they see the possibilities and not blame me and may Cim from afar be assured I will do my duty.” What effect this total rejection from their surviving parent might have on the children she did not speculate.
That evening, June 30, Diana was arrested at Denham and taken to Holloway Prison, leaving behind her Alexander and her second son, eleven-week-old Max, whom she had been breast-feeding. No one knew how long she would be detained but it looked as if the problem of Denham would soon be resolved: the War Office had sent someone down to inspect Savehay Farm with a view to renting it. Agreement came through in a few days and, stifling her revulsion, Irene kept all Diana’s jewelry, brought up by Andrée, in her own house for safety.
In July 1940, after the Windsors’ flight to the South of France had taken them through Spain, Portugal and a series of indiscretions, the duke was reluctantly offered, and as reluctantly accepted, the governorship of the Bahamas. The duke, ran one of the protocol instructions that preceded him, was to be accorded a half-curtsey, the duchess was to be called simply “Your Grace.”
As her husband’s late employer sailed with his duchess for Bermuda, Baba took her family to Scotland. Here Lord Halifax wrote to her, gossipy letters full of inside knowledge. “Hitler hasn’t invaded us yet. The latest date to be tipped is [July] the 11th when I hope to be at Garrowby. Full moon 15 or 17 and the waning moon doesn’t suit. So I am counting the days off till 17th!”
For Irene, a bank holiday visit to Cliveden and to a nearby military hospital churned up some painful memories of that earlier war in which she had lost so many friends and potential suitors. “I could not face the ward, the medics, the nurses, the blue uniforms of the wounded, the sickening smell of ether again—the whole of me revolted in anguish.” After this wretchedly evocative experience, she too set off for Scotland; here, much of the time was passed in inconclusive but increasingly angry rows about the various possible permutations of Micky’s schooling, punctuated by outbursts from the unhappy Fruity—“a most ugly diatribe on Baba’s selfishness in not wanting to come north and when he was ill spending all her time with Lord Halifax.”
Fruity’s complaint that Baba deserted him to spend time with Halifax was well founded. She left him in Scotland to return to London on August 21, to dine with the foreign secretary (“His sweetness and love for me is touching,” she wrote in her diary. “Thank God for it as otherwise I would feel very lonely at present”). The tête-à-tête dinners continued, followed by a visit by both Dorothy and Edward to Little Compton in early September. “My dearest Baba,” wrote Halifax after it. “The weekend was delicious . . . that perfect walk. It was wonderful being with you and I loved every moment.”
Baba was determined to do what she could to secure Tom Mosley’s release from prison. One obvious route was Halifax, who saw the prime minister and Herbert Morrison, the home secretary, at every cabinet meeting. “I saw Herbert this morning and he was quite friendly. He said he hadn’t heard about the phlebitis [a recurrent problem for Tom Mosley]. So perhaps something may happen; but I think it is wiser to appear fair so did not press him unduly. He seemed still to be a good deal impressed by the political difficulties of release. More on this when we meet and meanwhile you had better say nothing to anybody.”
Halifax’s caveat about the political difficulties of releasing Mosley was an understatement. Not only would the whole Left have risen against it (as they were to do three years later); moderate opinion too would have been outraged at a time when Britain was fighting for her life. All through that long hot summer, the Battle of Britain raged overhead. The only barrier between the might of the Luftwaffe and probable subsequent invasion were Britain’s pathetically few pilots (on August 21, Fighter Command had a total of just 1,377 pilots at its disposal and on a bad day as many as twenty were killed).
Irene arrived back in London on September 6 after a nightmare journey from Scotland to witness the beginning of the Blitz— September 7 saw the first large-scale night air attack on London. During the following twenty-two days and nights nearly seven thousand tons of bombs were dropped on the capital and the docks blazed almost every night. Within days, she and Baba were part of a loose coterie of friends whose focal point was the London hotel known to them as “the Dorch.”