Soon after being taken on by Sir George Makgill in 1923, Maxwell Knight walked into a severe-looking building off the King’s Road in Chelsea, west London, the headquarters of a group called the British Fascisti, where he offered his services as a volunteer. Max had just stepped into the political fringe of postwar London. This was a land with its own rules, and he would have to learn them all, and fast, for Makgill provided no training. Instead, this first-time agent had to make it up as he went along.
Max’s task was to secure a lowly position inside the Intelligence Department of the British Fascisti, or BF, as it was known, before quietly working his way up in the years that followed. He was a ‘penetration agent’, but with a difference. Usually, Makgill ordered his men to join a target organisation, gain acceptance as an ordinary member, and then, like a young cuckoo in another bird’s nest, wreak havoc from within. Yet Max’s instructions were to let the British Fascisti carry on with its work uninterrupted. His job was simply to keep an eye out for potential recruits to the Makgill Organisation and otherwise to steal intelligence from the BF. Quite why Makgill did not openly collaborate with this group, given their shared interests and aims, is unclear. We can only assume that the wealthy industrialist had tried to do this but had been rebuffed, and in response he decided to send in an undercover agent.
In the headquarters of the British Fascisti, Max encountered a ‘superfluity of voluntary workers’, most of whom seemed to ‘come and go as they wish and can never be depended upon’.1 He became one of them, taking the part-time and unpaid position of ‘Research Officer’. His career as an undercover agent had begun. Now he could learn more about the organisation he had infiltrated.
The British Fascisti was the brainchild of Rotha Lintorn-Orman, a twenty-eight-year-old lesbian who had served as an ambulance driver during the war. She had been decorated for bravery but had returned to a country she frequently found hard to recognise. Many of those who came back from active duty overseas experienced a similar sense of unease and bewilderment. It was as if they spoke a different language from the civilians at home, and had acquired an alternative set of values. Lintorn-Orman was also amazed to find the country paralysed by industrial unrest. Like so many others, she blamed international Communism.
It is hard to exaggerate the impact on British society of not only five years of bloody, total war but also the collapse of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian empires and the birth of the Soviet Union, all in the space of just a few years. The effect was cataclysmic. It was as if the foundations of the established world order had been blown out, leaving an apparently endless vista of new political possibilities. Whereas some people in Britain found this inspiring, others were more fearful. Rotha Lintorn-Orman wanted to do whatever she could to prevent Britain from succumbing to Socialism, which meant protecting the country from the Soviet Union and its ideology, and in this she was not alone. One of her closest allies at this point in her political career, a woman who shared her resolve and determination, was her mother. In May 1923, Blanche Lintorn-Orman gave her daughter Rotha the colossal sum of £50,000 (equivalent to just over £1 million today) to defend the country from the so-called Red Menace.
At the time, Benito Mussolini was the only European leader to have successfully expunged Communism from his country’s political fabric. Without really looking into the minutiae of what Mussolini stood for, or what Fascism was, Rotha Lintorn-Orman set up a group inspired by the Italian leader’s example. It was run initially from the London offices of the Partito Nazionale Fascista Italiano, Mussolini’s party, and was called ‘The British Fascisti’.
At the time, expressing admiration for Mussolini was a lot less radical than it sounds today. The Times, the Morning Post and the Observer were frequently complimentary towards the Italian leader. Winston Churchill referred to him as ‘the Roman genius’.2 Mussolini had even been employed by MI5 in 1917, when he was paid £100 a week to ‘persuade’ left-wing Italian protesters to stay at home.3 Yet the strangest feature of Rotha Lintorn-Orman’s new group was not so much its name or the overt connection it had to Mussolini, but that the original programme of the British Fascisti did not contain anything that could be described as clearly fascist. Instead of being patriarchal, anti-Semitic and revolutionary, the British Fascisti seemed to be more interested in dressing up in uniform, organising marches and professing its love of the monarchy or its desire to defeat Communism. Rather than being entirely male, this group had been set up by a woman and its original Grand Council contained more women than men.
Lintorn-Orman’s first move as leader of the BF was to set up an informal nationwide militia with branches all over the country. In the event of a socialist uprising, the idea was that these units would rise up to fight ‘for King and Country’ – a popular BF slogan that had also been used to recruit British soldiers during the war.
The reaction of most British people to the launch of Lintorn-Orman’s patriotic new group was one of bemusement. The group’s acronym did not help. ‘BF’ also stood for ‘Bloody Fool’. One eager member of the BF recalled those who ‘decried my youthful enthusiasm and dismissed us as having Bolsheviks under our beds’.4 Yet there were those who took this group very seriously. Within a year of the BF’s formation, tens of thousands of Britons had paid to join up, including minor aristocrats, disgruntled ex-army officers and Conservative members of Parliament such as Patrick Hannon and Colonel Sir Charles Burn, a former aide-de-camp to the King. The BF even recruited the captain of the England cricket team, Arthur Gilligan, who may have introduced Fascism to Australia during the 1924–25 Ashes tour. He probably saw this as his only accomplishment during what turned out to be a whitewash 5–0 defeat.
Apart from these headline-grabbing recruits, the rump of the BF’s membership was made up of disillusioned Tories, many of whom had fought during the war and were now gravely concerned about a Communist uprising. They shared a belief that the government was not doing enough and that it was time for decent British patriots like themselves to do the job themselves. Almost everything about this new group harked back to the war. Its central message was that the country was now locked in an epoch-defining struggle against a foreign enemy. It had a hierarchy and language that appealed intrinsically to ex-servicemen, some of whom had come to miss the camaraderie and sense of purpose they had felt during the war.
Also familiar to these new recruits was a feeling that the people in charge were not doing their job as well as they might, and that applied to the country as well as the BF itself. ‘The opinion of Headquarters is rather low throughout the whole organisation,’ wrote Max, once he had established himself within the British Fascisti, ‘and it appears not without reason.’5
This was part of an early report Max delivered to his spymaster in the Makgill Organisation, a man codenamed ‘Don’. His identity has never been revealed. Yet the little evidence that there is suggests that Don was Sir George Makgill’s son, Donald, a Mason, like his father, and the future Viscount of Oxfuird, whose confidential account of this period in his life was ‘experience of intelligence work with father’.6
Sir George Makgill’s son Donald was described as ‘self-confident, possibly to excess, intelligent, reliable, intensely keen’.7 Like Max, he was learning on the job and had no training in intelligence work. Unlike him, this rookie spymaster was working for his father and could afford to make a few mistakes. What made Max’s task so much harder was the toxic atmosphere he began to experience inside BF Headquarters.
The Communist Party frequently tried to infiltrate the ranks of this group, and Max’s new colleagues often speculated about who in their midst might be a spy. If becoming a BF volunteer had been easy, lasting for anything more than a few months was going to take considerable skill and perhaps a little luck.
There were various ways for Max to handle himself in this suffocatingly tense, watchful environment. He could look to win over key figures or take aim at anyone who seemed suspicious of him. Instead, he did everything possible to become invisible. ‘Information will come to you, it is a mistake to go out and try to find it,’ Max later told an agent.8 ‘It is so easy to feel that one would like to find out a certain point, but one often forgets that the whole of our work may be destroyed by trying to hasten.’ When a new job came up in BF Headquarters, Max did not put himself forward. Instead he hung purposefully back. When a task was actually given to him, he accomplished it efficiently, in contrast to most of the other volunteers in the office.
During those first few months in the BF, Max learned the art of doing both a lot and very little, until his efforts came to the attention of Rotha Lintorn-Orman. Makgill had instructed his agent to join the British Fascisti and slowly work his way up. In one sense Max failed. His rise was meteoric. After just a few months inside this right-wing group, Sir George Makgill’s operative was promoted by Lintorn-Orman to be Director of Intelligence for the entire organisation and Deputy Chief of Staff.
This was an extraordinary coup, even if it left Max with a colossal workload. When he was not teaching games to pre-pubescent boys just over the river in Putney, he now had to look after the British Fascisti’s registry of ‘personal files’, containing information on known left-wing agitators and suspected spies, root out Communist agents inside the organisation, run Fascist cells inside the trade union movement, gather intelligence on Communist activities, supply this to local Fascist units, attend meetings as the BF deputy chief of staff and report on all this to his spymaster, Don.
Only a year before, Max had been a loser-ish jazz enthusiast who spent most of his spare time looking after pets and writing pulp fiction. That had all begun to change. Now he was a less frequent habitué of Soho, having tired of what he called the ‘look of unutterable boredom which characterises the British upper classes when dancing’.9 Even his much-loved bear, Bessie, that emblem of his earlier life, had been removed from his flat and now lived in a zoo. This may have had more to do with Bessie’s desire to mate than Max’s growing maturity, but as a younger man his solution might have been to find a male bear to satisfy her needs. As he later wrote, sounding like a man who had given the idea serious thought, ‘breeding bears in a private establishment is something which is not very practical’.10
Instead, Max devoted himself to his two part-time careers: working for the British Fascisti and for the Makgill Organisation. The success of the latter job depended on the continuation of the former. If for any reason he was thrown out of the BF, his value to Makgill would evaporate. That was one risk. The other was more insidious: it was that he might lose sight of himself.
Leading two lives like this was both nerve-racking and psychologically precarious. Max’s undercover work required him to play the part of an enthusiastic young Fascist, and to do this he dutifully read BF publications, attended Fascist rallies and took abuse from Communists, Socialists and trade unionists, and he made many Fascist friends. Although he rarely spent more than a few hours in character, an evening here, a morning there, the longer he played this part, the harder it might become to maintain his inner division between the fictional personality he had constructed and his real self.
By the summer of 1924, however, he appeared to be managing it. Max’s reports to Don, his ‘intensely keen’ spymaster, had not lost their edge.11 He continued to find the setup in the British Fascisti Headquarters chaotic and to describe many of his colleagues as vain or lazy. In spite of his position in the upper branches of the BF tree, Max had not become a Fascist. But, when he needed to, he could do a very good impersonation of one.
Indeed, there were times when Maxwell Knight seemed willing to go further than anyone else in BF Headquarters in the fight against international Communism. This was one of the reasons why he had come to the attention of a teenager who had recently joined the movement. This newcomer was unhappy, funny and impetuous. Max had never met – nor would he ever meet – anyone quite like him.