William Joyce was an opinionated fitness fanatic who had grown up much too fast. He was stocky, spoke with a light Irish brogue and often found it hard to say anything other than what he was thinking. There was a mischievous, Puck-like quality to him. Though born in the United States, in New York, Joyce had spent most of his life in Ireland until he and his family fled after they were threatened with execution by the IRA. This had been almost entirely Joyce’s fault.
During the Anglo-Irish War, which began soon after the end of the First World War, Joyce had been a teenage informant for the Black and Tans, the British auxiliary police units dominated by soldiers who had recently served on the Western Front. They were notorious for their heavy-handed response to IRA attacks. Word of Joyce’s collaboration with these government forces had spread far, and by the time the Black and Tans left he was a marked man. Joyce and his family were given just days to leave the country.
In some ways, William Joyce never really left behind that moment in his life. ‘He saw battle, murder and sudden death at a very tender age,’ wrote Max, and was clearly brutalised by the experience.1 Joyce had been compelled to see the world in terms of black and white, and now he carried within him a livid strain of British patriotism that few of the people he met were able to understand. Most of those who did, by the time he arrived in London, had joined the British Fascisti. In late 1923, so did he. Max had joined a little earlier on Makgill’s instructions. It was not long before they met.
Superficially, at least, Joyce was so unlike Max as to be his opposite. At school the American had been a rebel. The Englishman had conformed. Joyce was a student; Max was a teacher. One described jazz as degenerate; the other lived for it. Joyce had been damaged by his experiences during the war; Max had come out of the conflict relatively unharmed. Yet for all these outward differences there were many traits that they shared, and this drew them powerfully towards one another. Each man was quick to see a joke, was charismatic and spoke engagingly and well. Indeed, both would later become experienced radio broadcasters speaking to audiences that numbered in the millions, although the subject of their talks could not have been more different. In this strange encounter between their two personalities there was revulsion, rivalry, admiration and friendship, enough to form the nucleus of a complex relationship, which may help to explain why, in 1924, both Max and Joyce attended a secret meeting of disgruntled British Fascists.
The men at this gathering were younger and rowdier than the majority of BF members. There were out-and-out thugs in that room as well as demobilised Black and Tans and zealous patriots like Joyce who had been too young to fight in the war but who now felt a yearning to prove themselves in battle. All had joined the British Fascisti in the hope of going toe to toe with Communist street gangs, which had become notorious in certain parts of the country for their attacks on right-wing political gatherings. Their standard tactic was to rush the stage, replace the Union Jack with a Red Flag and attack anyone who got in their way. The young Fascists had been waiting for orders to take on these Communists, but these had not come. The BF leadership was perfectly good at issuing forthright statements about the danger of international Communism but more hesitant when it came to sending its troops into battle. Tired of waiting, the renegades at this meeting agreed to form a paramilitary wing of the British Fascisti. Though nominally part of the BF, this unit would only really answer to itself.
They called themselves ‘K’. Others referred to this group as the ‘K Society’, the ‘K Organisation’ or the ‘K Squad’, but its original name was ‘K’, one that hints at the secretive and semi-mythological groups that may have inspired it, including the spiritual and utopian collective the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, for whom the letter K was thought to have magical properties. ‘K’ might have referred to the King, in whose name they fought. There is even a chance that ‘K’ was a nod to the surname of a leading figure in this new unit – Maxwell Knight.
Though he was no streetfighter, Max would prove essential to K. By the end of 1924, as he told his spymaster Don, he was one of the only members of this paramilitary group to have attended every one of its meetings. His role was to gather intelligence on Communist activities, a task he carried out anyway as BF Director of Intelligence, and supply this to his comrades in K, including Joyce, who was about to emerge as the toughest and most enthusiastic member of this violent new unit.
Having recently been the leader of a jazz band, Max was now at the heart of a dangerous paramilitary gang. He had gone further as an agent than his spymaster could have predicted, and had done so in less than a year. Don was impressed, and so was his father, Sir George Makgill, who now put his mind to how he could exploit his agent’s influence within K.
Earlier that year, Makgill had reacted with horror to the appointment of the first ever Labour Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald. Just two years earlier a Communist MP had been returned to Parliament, something that had never happened before. For Makgill, these two events were canaries in the coal mine. He was certain that if this Labour government continued, a socialist revolution was all but inevitable. He was willing to go to almost any length to get the Conservatives back into power. Soon he devised a plan for how to use the likes of William Joyce, Maxwell Knight and the rest of K to nudge the result of the forthcoming General Election to the Right.
On 22 October, 1924, just one week before the British people went to the polls, several thousand voters made their way to a political rally at Lambeth Baths in Battersea, south London. The streets surrounding the venue were covered in messages and slogans, most of them written in chalk. Sometimes these contained nothing more than the scrawled name of a candidate and his qualifications, otherwise they were more blunt. ‘Join the Fascisti’ was a popular BF slogan. ‘To Hell with the Communists!’2
Battersea had become a key target for the Right, largely because of the incumbent Communist MP, Shapurji Saklatvala, whose ‘pernicious’ influence, according to The Times, had ‘crept like duck-weed among a large section of the electors’, fuelling the local ‘revolutionary element’.3 Battersea was now a battleground, and in recent weeks most political events had been interrupted by violence. There was no reason to think that the rally that night in Lambeth Baths would be any different.
Sir George Makgill belonged to numerous right-wing groups, yet the most powerful of these was the Economic League, a newly minted coalition of trade organisations with vast financial backing. Its Chairman was Admiral Sir Reginald ‘Blinker’ Hall, recently the Royal Navy’s Director of Naval Intelligence and now a Conservative politician. The group Admiral Hall had taken on was supremely well connected and rich, but it lacked muscle. The Economic League needed foot soldiers to distribute its literature on the streets and to protect Conservative, Unionist and sometimes Liberal Parliamentary candidates when they were out on the campaign trail. Makgill had the idea of using the K organisation.
With Max as go-between, the Economic League ‘chose from among the “K” members about 50 men to “propaganda” in the worst Labour centres throughout the country,’ explained Max.4 ‘The men were carefully trained and well paid’ and ‘did excellent work before and during the election’.
Some of this involved simply handing out leaflets, and in the closing stages of the campaign K was responsible for distributing up to 20,000 pamphlets a week in Battersea alone. But this ragtag band of ex-servicemen and thugs was also paid to take on local Communist gangs and protect right-wing candidates at political events, such as the one that was going to be held at Lambeth Baths on the night of 22 October, 1924.
The man in charge that night of an eleven-strong contingent from K was William Joyce. He and his heavies had been instructed to police this rally in support of the Conservative-backed candidate for Lambeth North, a young stockbroker called Jack Lazarus. At least one of Joyce’s men turned up with a concealed weapon. Shortly before the rally began, Max appears to have passed on to Joyce intelligence he had received from one of his informants: a Communist gang was on its way.
By the time Lazarus got up to give his speech, the hall was packed. He looked out over a dim-lit sea of faces. Before him were activists as well as loyalists, fair-weather supporters, undecided voters and, it turned out, a swarm of opponents. There was heckling from the start. Joyce and his men removed the ‘interruptors’ as fast as they could, and at one point the chairman of the meeting read the Riot Act, but there were too many hecklers. Lazarus staggered through to the end of his speech, yet as the opening bars of the national anthem played, to mark the end of the rally, Joyce and his men lost control.
‘Pandemonium,’ reported the Daily Mirror.5 ‘Scenes of great disorder,’ recorded The Times.6 Men rushed the gangways. Punches flew. Fights broke out around the hall. A Red Flag was brandished. Joyce and the others from K were in the thick of it. Anyone who did not want to get hurt pushed to the exit, and in the confusion and the crush there was a brutal attack.
A band of Communists had noticed that William Joyce was for a moment unguarded. This cocky young Fascist, who had been ‘untiring in his efforts’ against the local Communists in the past few months, and who had ‘made himself so obnoxious to the Communist Party’ as to become a marked man, was now alone.7
The story that Joyce later told was this: several Communists rushed over and pinned him to the ground. One produced a razor blade. He leaned into the teenager’s face, placing the slip of metal in the corner of his mouth and pulled hard into the cheek. The blade sliced easily through his flesh. The man kept going until he reached Joyce’s ear, then he picked himself up and ran away. A senior figure from K called Webb, a brute of a man, apparently chased after this Communist and clubbed him over the head with a twelve-inch spanner.
Joyce was left with the skin on one cheek hanging loose. There was blood everywhere. People clustered around in shock. One of them was Max. It seems that he had been close enough to witness part of this savage attack on his friend, later describing it as ‘little short of attempted murder’, but he had not intervened.8 Perhaps it had all been over too quickly, or there were too many of them.
Joyce was picked up by a policeman and carried to the Lambeth Infirmary. He lost a lot of blood and it was unclear at first just how deep the blade had gone. Yet twenty-six stitches later, William Joyce was told that he would live. For the rest of his life he bore on his cheek a mad, lilting scar that served as a permanent reminder of that bloody night. He called it his ‘Lambeth honour’. Many years later he suggested that a Jewish Communist had been responsible. Yet his wife would tell a rather different story.
Almost seventy years after this attack the historian Colin Holmes managed to track down and interview Joyce’s first wife, who had met her husband around the time of this attack. ‘It wasn’t a Jewish Communist who disfigured him,’ she said.9 ‘He was knifed by an Irish woman.’
This is not the story that Max would later tell. Yet it is easy to see how he came to believe Joyce’s version of events. Every account of that night describes a sudden eruption of violence, and that for several minutes nobody really knew what was going on. There was certainly a large Irish contingent in the audience that night, and it is conceivable that Joyce’s past with the Black and Tans in Galway had suddenly caught up with him, and that a woman, possibly with connections to the IRA, had recognised him and taken a blade to his face. It is also possible, given the confusion, that Joyce was able to convince his friends that his assailant had in fact been a Communist man, and was part of a gang.
We may never know. What matters is that everyone in K, including Max, believed that Joyce, their brother-in-arms, had been the victim of a vicious attack by the Reds. The next day, William Joyce woke up in the hospital as the poster boy of the British Right. People he had never met before came to visit him and commend his bravery, even if not everyone seemed to understand what had happened.
‘These Fascist blackguards are damn swine to carve you up like that,’ one press photographer sympathised.10 ‘They should be shot.’
Joyce laughed so hard he nearly burst his stitches.
Less than a week later, the British people went to the polls. Although the Communist MP Saklatvala won in Lambeth North, the nationwide result was a landslide victory for the Conservative Party.
For years afterwards, even to this day, that result would reek of scandal on account of the so-called Zinoviev Letter, the name given to a fake Communist directive published in the Daily Mail five days before the General Election. The letter itself was hardly revelatory. It purported to show Grigori Zinoviev, a senior Soviet official, telling the British Communist Party to fire up the working class into launching an uprising against the bourgeoisie. Men from Moscow had been saying the same thing for years. Yet the political traction came from the Labour Prime Minister’s response to the Zinoviev Letter, which had been to do nothing.
This was enough to remind some voters of the idea that a Labour government might be more sympathetic to Moscow than it cared to admit. Although the Labour vote actually grew in the 1924 General Election, there is a chance that it might have grown much more, given the collapse of the Liberal vote, had it not been for the Zinoviev Letter.
The scandal that persists even today is centred on how this forgery ended up in the public domain. There is no doubt that the document was received originally by MI6’s Estonian Station and was passed on from there to MI6 Headquarters in London. Not long after, it was indirectly leaked to the press. We also know that MI6 used a report from one of Sir George Makgill’s undercover agents erroneously to authenticate the Zinoviev Letter. Makgill’s role in the Conservative victory of 1924 was greater than most people would ever realise.
When William Joyce heard about the result of the General Election, he was too weak to register anything more than relief. On Remembrance Sunday, almost a fortnight after polling day, he was still too frail to leave hospital. But he did so anyway. Ignoring his doctors’ advice, this determined, diminutive figure made the short journey across the River Thames to the Cenotaph, where he stood alone in his trench coat, his pale face heavily bandaged, his eyes ablaze with patriotic fervour. He must have looked like a ghost from the trenches. Joyce’s mind churned with thoughts of those noble Britons who had given their lives for King and Country, of their sacrifice, their courage, their commitment – when, suddenly, it became too much. He collapsed.
The first person to Joyce’s aid was a girl who recognised him as a fellow undergraduate at Birkbeck College. Somehow she managed to get Joyce back to her parents’ house, and in the weeks that followed she nursed him back to health. They fell in love, and although her mother did not approve, they would later get married and have children together.
This attack and the events that followed changed Joyce’s life both personally and politically, yet it also had a profound effect on Max. Although he did not write about his feelings after that night at the Lambeth Baths – this was not his way – many years later he would recall the attack with telling clarity. Perhaps he felt partly responsible for what he thought had happened to Joyce, because it had been his job to warn his friend about imminent attacks. Or he may have regretted his failure to intervene. What had happened at the Lambeth Baths also changed the way Max saw his enemy. Until then he had disliked Communism in a fairly loose, possibly abstract sense. After all, he had only joined the British Fascisti on the instructions of Makgill. He was not there for ideological reasons. But now his antipathy towards those on the Left was more personal.
The razoring of William Joyce had left Max with a new desire for revenge, as well as a sense that the rules had changed. There had been many clashes in the past between Fascists and Communists, but none that had involved razor blades. From that night on, Max saw less need for gentlemanly restraint. The sight of his friend’s face became proof, for him, that the enemy was playing a different and more violent game. It was time for Max to do the same.