The story that Max and Gwladys told their friends, when asked why they were leaving London to run a pub in the heart of Exmoor, a wild and windswept moorland deep in the West Country, was that they wanted a fresh start away from the city. Gwladys also liked the idea of being closer to her family and her childhood friends, many of whom lived nearby. Max was excited as well by the thought of so much fishing and having more space for his beloved pets, such as Bimbo, his baboon and a Great Dane called Lorna. His fondest childhood memories were of scouring the fields around Mitcham and Tythegston Court looking for injured animals to rescue; his teenage years had largely been spent on the deck of a ship; and even in London he had worked as a games teacher, which usually involved being outside. Max was at his happiest outdoors. Moving to the country was a release.
The pub that Gwladys had bought, the Royal Oak Inn, in the remote village of Withypool, also had personal significance for Max. It was here that his second cousin twice removed, R. D. Blackmore, had written parts of the famous Victorian romance Lorna Doone (this may also explain why Lorna the Great Dane was so named). Yet there was another reason for their move, one which the Knights kept to themselves, understandably. What few people guessed was that leaving London was part of an attempt to save their marriage.
Take one Saturday afternoon soon after their arrival on Exmoor. Gwladys had bought not only a pub but an eight-mile stretch of the River Barle, which her husband enthusiastically began to fish. Max was, by his own account, ‘a madly keen fisherman’.1 On this particular Saturday, he had gone to the river while Gwladys rode out as usual with the local hunt, the Devon and Somerset Staghounds. The trout were rising well. As Max waded down the river, casting over the most likely spots, he could hear off in the distance the plaintive blast of the huntsman’s horn. Perhaps he was imagining his wife and her friends on horseback when he heard an enormous splash. He turned around. The stag that they were hunting had leapt into the shallow water behind him.
This magnificent beast sniffed the air. Its head moved this way and that. It seemed tired yet alert. Max was downwind from it and hidden from view. The stag concluded that there was no danger and began to relax, ambling about in the river before moving towards the opposite bank.
Nearby Gwladys and the rest of the hunt tore along in the hope of finding this creature and killing it. Had she been in her husband’s position, she would have done everything in her power to drive the stag towards the dogs and alert the hunt to its presence. But Gwladys was not Max. She was a hunter. He was a watcher. Max kept very still and observed the creature as it crossed the river and moved off to safety, after which he quietly returned to his fishing.
The problem here was not so much that Max and Gwladys had different attitudes towards animals and hunting, though this did not help. It was that Max did not fully recognise this in himself. His reaction to being parachuted into Gwladys’s world was to try to reinvent himself as a male version of his wife. In the past he had played the young naval officer, junior civil servant, prep-school games teacher, jazz musician and enthusiastic Fascist. Now he was hoping to pass himself off as a young country gent. It was a demanding role, and even more so given he was surrounded by so many examples of the real thing.
Gwladys’s friends picked up on this. Her husband came across as a charming newcomer who seemed to be playing a part. In an attempt to win over his wife’s more hesitant friends, he confided in some that back in London he had been working informally for MI5 and Special Branch. This was a major breach of security. Of course Max had been working for the government at one remove, effectively as a freelancer, and perhaps it is unfair to expect a level of discretion otherwise associated with a full-time, professional agent. Yet at the very least, this suggests that anonymity did not come naturally to Max. Perhaps it was for the best that his espionage career appeared to be more or less behind him.
By sharing this information with some of Gwladys’s friends, Max had hoped to go up in their estimation and earn their trust. The problem was that nobody believed him. Now he was seen as both an outsider and a fantasist.
Some locals took this further, spreading the rumour that Max went out at night to fish from land that belonged to others. Others went further still, claiming that he was a werewolf.
It was hardly surprising that Max spent so many hours fishing by himself. But neither his lack of friends nor his dislike of hunting accounted in full for the tension in his marriage. Gwladys was uncertain about her future with her husband because after two years together their relationship had not yet been consummated.
How can we be sure? The sex life of a married couple rarely leaves a paper trail. The absence of a child confirms nothing. Yet the recollections of Gwladys’s friends, when interviewed many years later, were consistent on this one point. Max would later confirm, under oath, that around this time his wife became estranged from her mother, and according to Gwladys’s friends this was because Mrs Poole had found out about her daughter’s non-existent sex life. She had urged Gwladys to leave Max and to have the marriage dissolved, but her daughter had refused.
In his letter to the British Lion, Max mentioned that he would be leaving London for ‘reasons of health’.2 It is possible that he had seen a doctor about his problem, whatever it may have been, and that he had been told a move to the country might help.
Another possibility is that Max was secretly gay, as one ex-lover suggested in an angry memoir that came out after his death. That book was published in the 1980s, amid the climate of renewed homophobia that accompanied the AIDS epidemic. This take on Max’s sexuality would then be repeated so many times in the following years that it soon took on the hallowed status of fact. But the evidence to support it was almost non-existent. This claim about Max’s private life left his family and friends both bemused and baffled. Throughout his life there were references to him flirting with women, being attracted to women and to their being attracted to him. There are also suggestions that he had affairs with various women. One of his superiors at MI5 complained that Max, as a married man, was known ‘to have lived with one of his [female] secretaries and now to be living with another’.3 No man ever claimed to have been Max’s lover; equally the notion that he married Gwladys to hide his sexuality is tenuous. Both of Max’s parents had died by the time of his marriage and it is difficult to imagine either of his spymasters, one of whom was a confirmed bachelor, being remotely concerned about his marital status.
For all this, after two years of marriage, Max and Gwladys had not consummated their relationship. There was a problem in bed, and this added to the strain on their relationship. It might have been a purely physical issue, or a more psychological one, but it seems that those long fishing trips, when Max often stayed out late into the night, were a series of escapes. He was running away from Gwladys, from his failure to consummate and in some ways he was running away from himself.
By 1929, Max was stuck. The course of his life seemed to have run into an eddy. Having so recently been a young, high-flying spymaster with contacts throughout British intelligence, he was now a pub-running fisherman thought by the locals to be either a fantasist or a werewolf. Possibly both. When working for the Makgill Organisation, he had displayed a rare aptitude for recruiting and running agents; indeed, this was the only job in which he had ever flourished. Although Max loved his wife and there were times when he enjoyed living on Exmoor, after two years of this he was desperate to find a way out.