A devastating medical diagnosis skewed Vice Admiral James Somerville’s naval career in 1939. He had just been appointed Commander-in-Chief, East Indies, head of the Royal Navy forces who would confront Imperial Japan in case of war, when his check-up detected pulmonary tuberculosis. The bacilli of the ‘white plague’ gradually destroy the victim’s lungs while the body loses strength and wastes away, hence the common name ‘consumption’. The cough-borne contagious disease is dreaded aboard ships, where men live at close quarters. At sea, any patient with TB must be taken off duty and isolated in a well-ventilated cabin, and his clothing, bed-linen, crockery and cutlery boiled and washed separately. So Somerville was sent home and compulsorily retired from the RN active list.
However, the fifty-seven-year-old sailor completely rejected the diagnosis, found a Harley Street doctor to support him and forced a Navy Medical Board to regrade him for employment without command at sea. Wisely, the Admiralty did not waste his talents. Somerville, former Director of the Signal Division, had specialised in radio communications, and his twenty years’ experience made him the right man to develop applications of the new invention, RDF (radio direction finding), also known by its American name: RaDAR (radio detection and ranging).
RDF work had been going on since February 1935 when Robert Watson-Watt first demonstrated that passing aircraft interrupted and bounced back pulses from the BBC radio transmitter at Daventry. Watson-Watt continued developing it in secret at the experimental station of Bawdsey Manor in Suffolk, where tall towers were built for transmitting and receiving signals. On 13 March 1936, an aircraft flying fifteen hundred feet above the North Sea was successfully detected seventy-five miles away. RAF officers were trained to use the apparatus and by May 1937 could locate the bearing and range of all hostile aircraft. This changed the nature of the game: in modern parlance, RDF was a ‘disruptive technology’. Enemy bombers could no longer suddenly appear out of the blue without being tracked, giving RAF Fighter Command time to marshal its defensive forces. Eventually, a network of twenty RDF or radar stations, ‘Chain Home’, was constructed, covering the airspace from Scotland to the Solent at a cost of £2,000,000.
In October 1937, six months after the Condor Legion bombing of Gernika, three very senior German air force officers including General Erhard Milch, the creator of Lufthansa, and heavy-drinking Ernst Udet, a former First World War air ace now promoting the dive-bomber, were on a friendly visit to the RAF Fighter Command HQ at Bentley Priory, Stanmore, northwest London. The Germans were proud and cocky. Earlier that month, Udet had shown the famous US aviator Charles Lindbergh round the secret German air-testing base at Rechlin in Pomerania, where he examined the new Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighter and the Dornier Do 17 light bomber-reconnaissance plane. Udet also took him up in a folding-wing Fieseler Fi 156 Storch. At pre-lunch drinks in the RAF HQ, General Milch, the man who had built up and rearmed the Luftwaffe, caused consternation among the British VIPs by saying: ‘Now gentlemen, let us all be frank! How are you getting on with your experiments in the radio detection of aircraft approaching your shores?’
At least one glass crashed to the floor and the head of Fighter Command, Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, tried to laugh it off in embarrassment.
‘Come, gentlemen!’ said Milch. ‘There is no need to be cagey about it. We’ve known for some time that you were developing a system of radiolocation. So are we, and we think we are a jump ahead of you.’
RDF/radar’s main function at the time was detecting aircraft so the Air Ministry monopolised the research on behalf of the Royal Air Force. James Somerville, however, wanted radar for the Royal Navy. Back at the Signal Division with a cover title, Inspector of Anti-Aircraft Weapons and Devices (IAAWD), he went to work in unofficial liaison with Fighter Command, helped by Winston Churchill, a member of a sub-committee on Air Defence Research.
Churchill had gone to Bawdsey Manor one day in June 1939 to inspect a new coastal radar that would help guns and searchlights aim accurately at low-flying aircraft and ships at sea. This was more difficult than spotting objects high in the sky, and required a high-power ‘split beam’, created by a brilliant New Zealand scientist called Alan Butement (who also went on to develop the proximity fuse that revolutionised anti-aircraft fire).* Churchill pronounced the split beam ‘Marvellous’, and said, ‘We must have this for His Majesty’s ships. I will see to it.’ The very next day, 21 June 1939, Admiral Somerville arrived to view and test the equipment.
Somerville’s travels on behalf of RDF for the Royal Navy took him from Portsmouth in the south of England to Fair Isle in the far north of Scotland, installing early warning Coast Defence (CD) stations. He was also encouraging new research and development for the Admiralty: the Inspector of Anti-Aircraft Weapons and Devices was nicknamed the ‘Instigator of Anti-Aircraft Wheezes and Dodges’. From his innovations sprang DMWD, the Department of Miscellaneous Weapons Development. Staffed by people such as N. S. Norway (who later became the successful novelist Nevil Shute), the DMWD helped to foil German magnetic mines with so-called ‘degaussing coils’, created the Hedgehog and Squid mortars to tackle German submarines, produced the Bouncing Bomb for the dam-busters, and made concrete Churchill’s sketchy idea of the floating Mulberry Harbour in time for D-Day in 1944.
*
War disrupted the cloisters of academe too. On 14 January 1940, on his twenty-sixth birthday, Hugh Trevor-Roper, a bespectacled junior research fellow at Merton College, Oxford, about to publish his first book about seventeenth-century history, Archbishop Laud, found himself in jail. However, he was not banged up with old lags in Wormwood Scrubs prison in West London, but was surrounded by MI5 officers including Guy Liddell, ‘Tar’ Robertson and Dick White because the Victorian gaol was now one of MI5’s wartime offices.
Trevor-Roper was actually working for the Radio Security Section (RSS), part of MI8, the signals intelligence department of the War Office. The young don had been recruited by his college bursar, Walter Gill, formerly a Royal Engineer wireless intelligence officer who used the Great Pyramid of Giza as an intercept mast in the First World War. Radio Security Section were monitoring enemy wireless signals inside the UK, particularly seeking any transmissions from spies who might be guiding bombers to their targets. RSS were also making use of a network of ‘voluntary interceptors’, members of the Radio Society of Great Britain, listening out on their ‘ham wireless’ and crystal sets for any illicit broadcasts. After Post Office detection vans located them, MI5 and Special Branch could then swoop in and bag the offender.
Trevor-Roper was as bright and sharp as a new sabre. Child of a loveless home, he threw his body into field sports and his mind into intense intellectual work. As an undergraduate Classical Scholar at Christ Church, Oxford, he taught himself German in order to read German classicists, breaking ‘the code’ of the language, as he said, by devouring Ferdinand Gregorovius’s eight-volume Geschichte der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter (History of Rome in the Middle Ages) in the original.
Early in 1940, hardly any German spies were in England, but since 1938 MI5 had had its first double agent, a Welsh electrical engineer called Arthur Owens, code-named Snow, now installed in another prison at Wandsworth. His British case officer had alerted RSS to Owens’s messages, mysterious radio signals originating from outside the UK, and these enciphered messages were dutifully sent on to the SIS-run Government Code and Cipher School at its war station, Bletchley Park. For some reason, these early RSS intercepts had been dismissed as unimportant Russian messages from Shanghai. But Walter Gill, who knew some cryptography, and Hugh Trevor-Roper, who knew German, decided to have a go at breaking them themselves. These two amateurs, living in a flat in Ealing, were the first to crack a simple Abwehr hand-cipher in January 1940, and were thus able to eavesdrop on Abwehr Hamburg talking to its agents who were trying to get into Britain.
In March 1940, Bletchley Park formed a separate section to handle what Gill and Trevor-Roper had found. All Abwehr hand-cipher traffic was sent to the cryptanalyst Oliver Strachey, the piano-playing younger brother of the Bloomsbury writer Lytton Strachey, and the decrypts thereafter circulated under the name ISOS (Intelligence Service, Oliver Strachey). In December 1941, the legendary Dilly Knox’s team at Bletchley broke the Enigma key that Abwehr headquarters used to communicate with its controlling stations in neutral countries like Spain. This decrypt material was then sourced as ISK (Intelligence Service, Knox). Because recipients did not need to know the difference, ISOS became the generic term for all decrypts of German secret intelligence service radio traffic. During the war, nearly a hundred thousand ISOS messages were distributed from GC&CS.
In time, the Radio Security Section became the Radio Security Service and was taken over by MI6 Section VIII, where it formed the Abwehr interception station at Hanslope Park in Buckinghamshire. Trevor-Roper’s own Traffic Analysis section was hived off to MI6 Section V (counter-intelligence outside the United Kingdom.) They moved to a large country house in North Barnet called Arkley View and became known as V(w), that is to say the wireless part of SIS counter-intelligence. Section V itself was based in St Albans, and the head of its Iberian desk was Kim Philby. He had been a Times correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and had been decorated by Franco, which was good cover for his secret activities as a Soviet agent. Philby’s job was to keep an eye on the enemy in the Iberian Peninsula, particularly Spain, eavesdropping on the Abwehr in Madrid communicating with its substations in Spain and Spanish Morocco, all of which could pose a threat to the Strait of Gibraltar.
Abwehr ISOS/ISK messages – a goldmine of information – were classified MOST SECRET and were not to be disclosed to anyone unauthorised. Their contents could not be summarised, extracted or even referred to without the approval of the Director of the Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park. They had to be protected and kept secret so that the Abwehr would never get any hint that their ciphers were broken and that their secret service, together with its agents, instructions and reports, was open to British scrutiny and analysis. The distribution list of ISOS material in Britain was limited to three named individuals working in navy, army and air force intelligence, one man in B Division of MI5 and four men in MI6 counter-espionage, Section V of SIS, including Colonel Vivian, Major Cowgill and Captain Hugh Trevor-Roper.
Often the material was opaque, and had to be confirmed from other sources. Here, for example, is ISOS message 20247 as it appeared at St Albans, decrypted and translated into English, among a string of others from Bletchley Park.
GROUP 11/126
MADRID TO SAN SEBASTIAN
RSS 906/14/2/42
LF 5200 kcs. 1217 GMT 14/2/42
186/90
[No. 469] Sunday morning, the 15th, fetch RICHARD SCHUBERT from HENDAYE and arrange for a sleeper to MEDIA.
This is an instruction from Abwehr Madrid to its Stelle (station) in San Sebastián in the Basque country to move an individual by car and train from the French border to Madrid, code-named Media. ‘Richard Schubert’ would now have a file opened on him or have his existing one amended with travel details. Good files are crucial to intelligence work, much of which is keeping tabs on suspect individuals. Kenneth Benton of SIS, who ran the key Section V office in the British Embassy in Madrid from 1941 to 1943, handling ISOS material from St Albans, ended up with a fourteen-foot row of sixteen card cabinets over which five women worked every day just checking and adding names. If ‘Schubert’ was an alias then Benton, with a network of contacts across Spain, would know from whom to obtain the passenger lists of sleeper cars or aeroplanes as well as copies of hotel registers, guests’ bills and ships’ manifests to cross-check the real name. Twenty-two British consular posts in the key ports and junctions of Spain, each with its own networks of friends and helpers, also supplied information. So any German agent or V-mann travelling anywhere via Spain or Portugal was identified and tracked early. When such an agent was arrested, say, at Bermuda on his way to the USA, a search of his cabin would reveal the invisible ink, the secret instructions in the microdot, the miniature radio, etc., and everyone would think the discovery of this paraphernalia of espionage was responsible for his capture and downfall, and have no idea of the covert listening and decrypting and card-indexing done so far away.
Yet when young then Lieutenant Trevor-Roper wrote and circulated a paper on the activity of the German secret service in Morocco he was not congratulated by his employers but condemned. Felix Cowgill, the deputy head of Section V, an ex-Indian policeman obsessed with safeguarding secrecy, said Trevor-Roper should be court-martialled for his effrontery.
In his later writings, Trevor-Roper identified the great rift in the wartime intelligence community between the ‘dons’ and the ‘cops’. ‘Dons’ were intellectuals who wanted to critique ideas and techniques and to share information, even between rival services, in a collegiate way; ‘cops’ were subversion-fighters like Cowgill and his boss Valentine Vivian who wanted everybody always to shut up for fear of breaching security. Trevor-Roper thought secrecy often cloaked stupidity.
At Arkley View, Trevor-Roper put together a brilliant team of Oxford professors and lecturers, including the philosophers Stuart Hampshire and Gilbert Ryle and the historian Charles Stuart, who used ISOS material to monitor and analyse the global networks of German intelligence revealed via their radio communications. These clever, sarcastic men helped provide the feedback loop for the successful Double-Cross system. They collated and connected what was eavesdropped from the Abwehr either side of the Strait of Gibraltar and across the world, filing and cross-referencing and footnoting with scholarly precision. They wrote reports of admirable clarity and cogency as they rose to the new challenges of the war, exemplifying intelligence in action. But in their elitist Oxford way they also scathingly derided the secret world, inhabited by ‘timid and corrupt incompetents, without ideals or standards’ whose labours consisted largely of ‘bum-sucking under the backstairs of bureaucracy’.
*
The Chamberlain government thought the Hitler regime was fragile and would soon crumble under popular discontent if the material economy was hit hard enough. Blockade had been a British weapon of war since the eighteenth century. Against Napoleon, against the Kaiser and now against Hitler, Royal Navy ships endeavoured to cut off supplies to enemy territory and to sever their communications. In the Great War, the British and the French had taken eighteen months to set up their Ministries of Blockade or du Blocus, and three years to start a system of escorted convoys, although their efforts eventually had a real impact on the Central Powers, where die Blockade was alleged to have starved over half a million people to death by 1918.
Of course Germany also attempted its own blockade of Britain by waging unrestricted submarine warfare on merchant shipping from 1916. An island nation was vulnerable to attacks on its supplies of food and raw materials. In 1939, Great Britain had fifty million mouths to feed. Meanwhile, its industry and commerce relied on sixty million tons of maritime imports every year, much of it carried by the British Empire and Commonwealth’s merchant navy, the world’s largest, with some 6700 vessels of all kinds.
This time there was no dawdling. Immediately after the German torpedoing of the transatlantic passenger liner Athenia on 3 September 1939, the Admiralty took control of a renewed system of escorted convoys, grouping merchant ships and warships together as protection against U-boats, setting their course and speed and appointing a senior naval officer called a convoy commodore to each group. The civilian Ministry of Shipping, working with the Ministry of Supply, requisitioned the ships and authorised their cargoes, although the operation of individual vessels remained with their owners or agents.
At the same time, in September 1939, a new ministry, the Ministry of Economic Warfare (MEW), took over the buildings of the London School of Economics and Political Science in the Aldwych, London WC2. MEW used the Royal Navy as its executive instrument to enforce the blockade of Germany in a system called Naval Contraband Control. Neutral ships were stopped and searched at five maritime choke points.
Here Gibraltar was key because it handled Iberian traffic to South America as well as all eastbound shipping into the Mediterranean. Haifa, Port Said and Malta dealt with westbound traffic, while Aden checked the Gulf and Indian Ocean. Kirkwall in Orkney dealt with Scandinavian and North Sea shipping, while Ramsgate and Dover controlled the English Channel. The French had blocus bases at Le Havre and Dunkirk, Oran and Marseilles, Dakar and Casablanca.
Boarding parties going aboard neutral ships were looking for two kinds of goods to seize. ‘Absolute contraband’ was obvious war matériel: arms, ammunition, explosives, precursor chemicals and minerals, fuel, means of transport and communication, machine tools, dies, components, bullion, coins, currency, evidences of debt. ‘Conditional contraband’ was all foodstuffs, hides and skins, textiles and clothing: all materials potentially helpful to the enemy war effort.
Much contraband cargo was carried in ships heading to neutral countries, particularly ‘adjacent neutrals’. This was a ploy the British had spotted in the First World War, when food imports to Germany’s neighbours in Denmark and Holland shot up dramatically. The first Ministry of Blockade was set up after Basil Clarke of the Daily Mail reported that neutral Denmark’s 1915 imports of cocoa, coffee, lard, pork and rice had increased grotesquely since 1913. ‘WE ARE FEEDING THE GERMANS’, shouted his dramatic headline. Boarding parties had to keep their wits about them. At Gibraltar in the First World War, they found wolfram being smuggled in barrels of grapes and guns inside hollowed-out timber stacks.
Contraband control was also paralysingly slow in the Second World War. A neutral ship could be delayed for many days while manifests and bills of lading were posted to headquarters for verification and cargo holds were minutely examined. From December 1939, obtaining a ‘navicert’ (navigation certificate) from an official of a blockading power at the port of embarkation speeded the process. A navicert was a kind of commercial passport issued to neutral ships certifying that the cargo had been checked at point of egress. Gibraltar’s boarding parties went aboard with crowbars and pincers, led by an uncanny petty officer nicknamed ‘The Ferret’ who had the gift of sniffing out any hidey-hole of contraband. A dozen large canisters marked on the Buenos Aires manifest as ‘Tinned Soup’ did indeed contain a beefy broth, but each also had a secret compartment welded inside, holding a slab of platinum and a bundle of letters for the German Foreign Office.
The Admiralty term for anything legally confiscated was ‘condemned in prize’. In the first four months of the war, British Contraband Control seized nearly 530,000 tons of contraband heading for Germany, including 190,000 tons of base metals, 130,000 tons of petroleum products, 48,000 tons of oilseeds, 25,000 tons of textiles, and 22,000 tons of food and drink.
*
The Second World War disrupted women’s lives in many different ways. One of those working in the Naval Contraband Control office in Gibraltar was twenty-three-year-old Mollie Spencer, who was not quite twenty when she was first evacuated from Spain on the destroyer HMS Beagle at the start of the civil war. She was English, but raised in Andalusia, one of the five daughters of Tom ‘Don Tomás’ Spencer, the British pro-consul in Jerez de la Frontera and manager of the Williams & Humbert sherry bodega there. He was the man who first introduced soccer to the city before the Great War. Mollie Spencer was bilingual, having grown up in the heart of Jerez, though she was mainly educated in England and was a devout Anglican. She hated the civil war because she knew people on both sides and it threatened the whole world she had known as a child.
Come the Second World War, however, Mollie Spencer was determined to join up and serve, just like her brother Tom. She was in Gibraltar on her way to England to join the women’s branch of the British Army, the ATS, when someone offered her a job in Gibraltar Contraband Control office, where they held a copy of MEW’s continually updated, loose-leaf Black List of firms and companies trading with the enemy, plus all the names of ‘undesirable’ seamen. (Anyone persona non grata could not sail on an ocean-going neutral ship because their presence would block the issuing of a navicert.) Mollie’s photograph appeared in The Times on 8 February 1940, showing her in the Contraband Control office with a poster on the wall behind her which says ‘DON’T HELP THE ENEMY! Careless Talk May Give Away Vital Secrets’. A naval cap with a white cotton cover hangs on the same nail as an aircraft identification chart, and there are eight RN and RNVR officers also visible. The only woman, Mollie, is sitting, pen in hand, bent over some papers at a wooden desk with a typewriter on it (she was a skilled shorthand typist). She is wearing a dark dress with a plain white collar and her dark hair is tied back in a roll which rests on her pale curved neck. She has the still beauty of a Madonna, and although she appears demure, she regularly rose to the challenge of boarding suspect vessels out in the bay, on duty with her new colleagues.
The RN Contraband Control patrols were on the lookout for letters. The right of ‘visit and search’ extended to post; a ship’s navicert stated that all sacks of mail carried aboard would be submitted for British censorship. This was a vital function of wartime intelligence. People might be less shocked by Edward Snowden’s twenty-first-century revelations if they knew the process of screening world communications has been going on for over a century. By the time of Hitler’s War, the British authorities owned the major telegraph companies and had an effective ‘Y’ or listening service so that they could read most cables and eavesdrop on nearly all wireless messages. In those analogue days, most of the world (including its agents, spies and traitors) entrusted handwritten letters and brown-paper parcels to the universal postal service. Perhaps because the penny postage stamp had been a British invention of the 1840s, and because their national security was now at stake, the British arrogated to themselves the right to screen not only their own domestic post but much of the world’s mail in transit through the British Empire or Allied countries.
The global censorship system was run first by the War Office and then, after April 1940, by the Ministry of Information. Its first headquarters was in Liverpool, using the offices of Littlewood’s Football Pools, before it moved to London and the massive Prudential Assurance building in Holborn. Gibraltar was the first of six Imperial Censorship Stations to be set up round the Atlantic; later additions included Bermuda, Trinidad, Jamaica, and Bathurst (now called Banjul) in the Gambia.
In Gibraltar, the 230 Imperial Censorship staff took over the newly erected King George V Memorial Hospital as their office. Staff slept in bunks set up on the ground floor of the now evacuated Loreto Convent School in Europa Road. Germany redirected a lot of its post through neutral Italy for the first nine months of the war, so there were thousands of bags of mail to check at Gibraltar, and staff pleaded for even more office space on the South Mole where the ships docked. When the liner SS Rex tied up in February 1940, President Roosevelt’s special envoy Sumner Welles, on his way to talk to Mussolini, Hitler, Daladier and Chamberlain, had to wait for several hours while 334 US mailbags were hauled off for inspection.
Contraband Control at Gibraltar also looked for letters that were not in mailbags. They regularly cleared out ship’s lavatories blocked by the epistles stuffed down there by panicking couriers. Ratings rowed dinghies round many a ship’s hull scooping up correspondence ditched through portholes. On large passenger ships, they sometimes searched all the cabins on one side, port or starboard, duly chalking each door. The next day, they would search exactly the same cabins and find loads of booty stowed there by the occupants of the unchalked cabins.
Imperial Censorship employed intelligent linguists and boasted that it never opened a letter it could not read. Indiscreet sentences in letters, perhaps revealing the names or whereabouts of military units, were physically snipped out of the letter with scissors, and the envelope was stamped ‘PASSED CENSOR’ or ‘EXAMINED BY CENSOR’. The artist and SAS soldier John Verney noted how the ‘savage, irrational depredations’ of the censor’s scissors turned his descriptive letters to his wife Lucinda into Surrealist poems. He likened them to the trick of some Cubist painters, sticking random strips of paper on the blank canvas, which, when pulled off the completed painting of jugs, fruit, guitars or whatever, left the picture suggestively incomplete.
Much of the surveillance was secret. Though some letters were destroyed entirely, others were sent on to their destination having been photographed and logged for the attention of the Secret Intelligence and Security Services in London. Envelopes could be gently steamed and their letters extracted, read, returned and resealed without obvious evidence of tampering. They could be tested for invisible ink by two diagonal chemical slashes, back and front; microdots could be immensely magnified. The diplomatic and consular bags of allied, friendly, neutral and hostile nations were regularly perused by ‘Special Examiners’ in an unmentionable, highly classified (and illicit) operation known as XXX or TRIPLEX.
*
Belfast-born Harford Montgomery Hyde was no longer a working barrister, and was not yet the Ulster Unionist MP who would campaign so vigorously for homosexual law reform that it would cost him his parliamentary seat in bigoted Northern Ireland. H. Montgomery Hyde arrived in Gibraltar at the end of January 1940 to carry on the secret service work that the war had pitched him into. Colonel Lawrence Grand in D Section of the Secret Service first employed him in the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool inserting anti-Nazi black propaganda leaflets into letters inside sealed US mailbags destined for Germany. He would do the same sort of thing in Gibraltar, though he could not tamper with everything because he said he lacked the facility to reproduce wax seals.
Montgomery Hyde shared a house with the man who ran Gibraltar Censorship, Captain Humphrey Cotton-Minchin. They lived in Secretary’s Lane, at the back of the Convent, in between the Colonial Secretary’s residence and Fortress Headquarters on Line Wall Road. Montgomery Hyde thought garrison Gibraltar ‘unattractive’ and ‘no great credit to our colonial administration’. He deplored the lack of a good bookshop in a place with a population larger than Oxford, finding the Garrison Library contained little ‘beyond military manuals, Leaves from a Staff Officer’s Diary and so forth’. He was amazed that after 240 years of British occupation, so ‘few of the natives can speak English. I am quite certain that were the French to take over for five years everyone would be able to speak French …’
Gibraltar’s Postal Censorship kept busy. In the porter’s lodge of the hospital, renamed Room 99 after the secret site in Liverpool, Montgomery Hyde was soon removing pro-Nazi propaganda leaflets in English, Spanish and Portuguese from the German postbags heading towards the republics of North and South America. Once they were extracted, he substituted anti-Nazi propaganda leaflets in the same languages, delighted that the Nazis were paying for the postage. The ‘Special Examiners’ interfered with personal mail too. One Fraülein, writing passionately to her lover in Argentina, enclosed a sample of her pubic hair, which accidentally got lost when the letter was opened. So Montgomery Hyde plucked some coarse bristles from a floor-broom and substituted them instead.
Many of his two hundred-plus censors, termed ‘examiners’, were formidably intelligent women. Myrtle Winter had been brought up in India and could read and speak Dutch, French, German, Italian, Persian and Spanish, as well as excelling at photography, swimming and horse-riding. Another was the thirty-year-old, Egyptian-born Alethea Hayter, a thin, elegant beauty who had been the fashion editor of Country Life before war disrupted her life. She would go on to become a distinguished independent scholar, author of the classic Opium and the Romantic Imagination. Perhaps her years in postal censorship in Gibraltar, Bermuda and London helped Hayter later to become such a brilliant close reader, alert to layers of meaning within a text, able to synthesise and distil from many sources. (The exigencies of war may have shaped other women writers too. Did Muriel Spark’s work in the Political Warfare Executive’s black propaganda unit in London prompt the interest in fakery and double-dealing shown in her fictions? Did Christine Brooke-Rose’s work at Bletchley Park perhaps lead her to write the kind of novels that need decrypting?)
Alethea Hayter drew on her Gibraltar experience as well as her imaginative sympathies in her early 1970s book A Voyage in Vain, the story of the poet Coleridge’s journey by naval convoy to Malta in 1804, during the Napoleonic Wars. ‘England was fighting for her life against a power that had dominated the Continent and threatened her with invasion, and the war at sea, of which this convoy was part, was the most vital and active sector of the war at this time.’ Hayter explained Coleridge’s apparent indifference to history and the wider world of England’s war against Napoleon by referring to her own experience of returning from Gibraltar with 175 other colleagues from Postal Censorship when they were evacuated in mid-June 1940, yielding their sleeping quarters in the Loreto Convent School to scores of ‘listeners’ from the radio interception ‘Y’ service working at Middle Hill.
It had been decided that now Italy had formally entered the war as a belligerent and the Mediterranean was a war zone, Western Hemisphere postal censorship must be moved 3500 miles west to Bermuda and that all the censors should go with it. The Gibraltar ‘examiners’ left aboard a 3900-ton steamship with a chequered imperial past. The ship had taken Indian indentured labourers to the sugar-cane fields of Trinidad, Surinam, British Guiana and Fiji, and had carried Muslim pilgrims to Jeddah on the haj. Now renamed SS Al Rawdah and war-requisitioned, it became a troopship.
Twenty-one ships in naval convoy HG 34F left Gibraltar on 13 June 1940, heading for Liverpool. It was dangerous. Their convoy – only protected by a single sloop, HMS Scarborough – was attacked by German submarines northwest of Portugal and three of its vessels were torpedoed and sunk by U-48. And yet, Alethea Hayter says, her own diary of the perilous voyage reflected ‘the timeless irresponsible life of a passenger on board ship’, with minor observations and shipboard gossip, just as Coleridge in 1804 had written nothing of Nelson and Napoleon but merely sketched sails and scribbled his complaints about fat Mrs Ireland’s endless gorging and gourmandising. ‘One cannot be afraid twenty-four hours in twenty-four,’ wrote Hayter, ‘or even consciously resolute and aware …’ In the face of danger, ‘one’s mind persists in trivial routines and enjoyments.’
Having survived their voyage home, the censors soon set sail again across the North Atlantic to Bermuda, which became the busiest station, growing to employ some fifteen hundred so-called ‘censorettes’ in the requisitioned waterfront Princess Hotel in Hamilton. They could process a hundred bags of mail a day – around two hundred thousand letters – and test fifteen thousand of them for microdots and secret ink messages, before putting the bags on the next flight or ship. Bermuda, the place where all the transatlantic passenger liners and the Lisbon–New York Pan American Airways clippers called, was the ideal spot for scooping up spies and contraband. The Americans, having initially grumbled, soon saw the advantages of this useful infringement of freedom. The Office of Censorship USA became part of the intelligence-gathering machinery, sharing the information gleaned with its allies.
*
The blockade of Germany leaked like a sieve. One curiosity was that Germany’s exports were not targeted like her imports. For example, ‘neutral’ Fascist Italy produced only a sixth of its own coal and was completely dependent on the nine million tons of coal imported from Germany. Most of this passed through the Strait of Gibraltar, having been shipped down the English Channel. When Contraband Control finally stopped thirteen ships carrying German coal for Italy in early March 1940, the Italians kicked up such a storm of indignation about breaches of international law that Neville Chamberlain let the vessels go.
The Labour MP Hugh Dalton pointed out other gaping holes in the blockade in the House of Commons on 19 March 1940. ‘We are much too gentlemanly, too slow-witted and too traditional in the conduct of this war,’ he declared, robustly.
Philip Noel-Baker described Dalton as ‘a man of violent passions, uncertain temper, great ambition and real ability … flamboyantly a Socialist and a social rebel’. This had begun early. The four-year-old son of the Dean of Windsor had said to Queen Victoria when she came to tea, ‘Go away, Queen, I don’t like you.’
Dalton’s criticism of the blockade in parliament was the more pointed because he was using information secretly acquired from inside the Ministry of Economic Warfare itself, where his young economist protégé Hugh Gaitskell (later leader of the Labour Party) was the Head of Intelligence for Enemy Countries. Dalton pointed out exactly how the Germans were using adjacent neutral countries to obtain oil from Romania, iron ore from Sweden, cotton from America. Dalton also indicated the blockade’s great hole in the Pacific Ocean, where the British and the French could not stop and search the ships of Japan, the USA and the USSR. As a result rubber, tin, copper, nickel, chromium and other resources were pouring in through Vladivostok, the main port of Soviet Russia’s Far East, and being transported to Nazi Germany via the Trans-Siberian railway. ‘I suggest that in certain directions we have been outwitted and outdistanced by Hitler.’
Hugh Dalton was also making a naked political play. Focusing on economic warfare’s offensive possibilities meant that he was very well placed when Chamberlain fell and Churchill had to set up a new wartime coalition government that included Labour and the Liberals. On 15 May 1940, Dalton replaced Ronald Cross as the Minister for Economic Warfare and quickly established his own team, including his ‘mole’, Gaitskell. Dalton was the kind of politician who lets his civil servants know who is boss. He once sent an underling to summon a senior official ‘immediately’ from the lavatory. ‘Tell him to wait,’ said the man with his pinstripes round his ankles, ‘I can only deal with one shit at a time.’
Dalton’s antennae were ever alert for more sources of power. When he heard in late June that the military were looking to co-ordinate ‘covert’ and ‘irregular’ activities abroad, he immediately began lobbying to run the new organisation. ‘Dalton ringing up hourly to try and get a large finger in the Sabotage pie,’ the head of the Foreign Office, Sir Alexander Cadogan, wrote in his diary on Friday 28 June.
Dalton thought that subversive economic warfare had to be ‘ungentlemanly’ and told the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax so.
We have got to organise movements in enemy-occupied territory comparable to the Sinn Fein movement in Ireland, to the Chinese Guerrillas now operating against Japan, to the Spanish Irregulars who played such a notable part in Wellington’s campaign … This ‘democratic international’ must use many different methods, including industrial and military sabotage, labour agitation and strikes, continuous propaganda, terrorist acts against traitors and German leaders, boycotts and riots.
Dalton the intellectual socialist thought this stirring up of revolutionary insurgency had to be done from the left. As George Orwell observed: ‘Patriotism has nothing to do with conservatism.’† On 19 July 1940, Neville Chamberlain, the dying but still game Lord President of the Council, drafted a memorandum setting up the Special Operations Executive (SOE) ‘to co-ordinate all action, by way of subversion and sabotage, against the enemy overseas’, and announced that the organisation would be ‘under the chairmanship of Mr Dalton, the Minister of Economic Warfare … Mr Dalton will also have the cooperation of the Directors of Intelligence of the three Service Departments and of the Secret Intelligence Service (M.I.6) for the purpose of the work entrusted to him.’
With the Special Operations Executive, Hugh Dalton was soon ‘poaching on C’s preserves’, annoying the Secret Intelligence Service. With the Ministry of Economic Warfare, Dalton also bullied his way into the china shop of diplomacy with Iberia. David Eccles wrote a perceptive letter about him from Lisbon later that summer:
Hugh Dalton, that renegade Etonian, has laid hold of MEW and aspires shortly to be Foreign Secretary. He hates dictatorship on principle; Franco in public and in particular, and Salazar in private and half-heartedly. Therefore seeing that the [Iberian] Peninsula now has open communications with Germany, and must be regarded as an adjacent neutral, he would like to teach the dictators a lesson by starving them out with a ferocious system of rationing. Nothing could make the entry of Spain into the war on Germany’s side more certain.
‘You don’t marry a girl by throwing stones at her window,’ Eccles wrote in a later letter: ‘out with the guitar and a bunch of roses.’ Eccles was proved right and Dalton wrong: offering to trade with Spain, loosening the economic chokehold of navicerts and contraband control, was ultimately more effective than outright starvation of the country by blockade. The promise of carrots rather than the threat of the big stick helped preserve Spanish neutrality and thus Gibraltar’s freedom.
* The Wikipedia entry on W. A. S. Butement notes that he was one of the very first to conceive a radio apparatus for detecting ships, as recorded in the Inventions Book of the Royal Engineers Board, January 1931.
† Orwell also distinguished ‘patriotism’, love of one’s own country, from ‘nationalism’, which was often hatred of someone else’s.