‘Gloomy, darkened and lifeless buildings looked like menacing cliffs.1 The streets between them were black gorges. Cars moved slowly in the thick darkness, like ghostly shadows. Like magic birds with a red eye on their tail. Quiet. Gloomy. Watchful. Fantastical. A scene from Dante’s Inferno,’ wrote Ivan Maisky, the Soviet Ambassador to Britain, of the scene in the capital each night following the start of the Second World War. ‘That is how London lies low, waiting for the raids of the German bombers.’
Although the city was not pulverised by the Luftwaffe in the immediate aftermath of the Prime Minister’s declaration of war on 3 September, 1939, as many had feared, very quickly it had begun to look and sound like a city at war. People spoke a little louder than they had done in the days before. Windows were now latticed with tape. Cinemas were locked up, and the streets had crazy white lines meandering over them to guide cars and pedestrians during the blackout. Tens of thousands of women and children had been evacuated from the capital, making London a more masculine metropolis, which, in turn, triggered an influx of prostitutes.
All over the country the first few weeks of the war were characterised by uncertainty: uncertainty about where to live, what job to take, how long it might all last and, ultimately, uncertainty about whether this war was really necessary. For some the answer came easily – yes, and that was all there was to it. Others paused before reaching the same conclusion. Yet for a respectable number of people the decision to wage war against Germany had been a mistake. There was little of the jingoistic certainty which had accompanied the start of the last war, when young men all over the country had rushed to enlist. Not everyone in Britain saw this conflict in terms of democracy standing up to dictatorship, or as one nation’s heroic attempt to resist a murderous tyrant. Instead there were those who positioned it within the ongoing struggle between Right and Left, which had dominated European politics over the last decade, and who felt that a strong Germany was an essential protection against the Soviet Union. They also worried that a prolonged period of total war would cause a lurch to the Left in domestic politics.
After an initial muddle, the British Communist Party denounced the conflict as an ‘Imperialists’ War’ and urged all workers to have nothing to do with it. Mosley’s Fascists immediately labelled it a ‘Jews’ War’. They too called for resistance. At both extremes of the British political spectrum there were calls for peace, and from a clutch of Liberal, pacifist and religious groups, such as the Peace Pledge Union. Thousands of anti-war pamphlets were printed in the first few weeks of the war. Pacifist slogans appeared on walls. There were also times when Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister, gave the distinct impression that he had cold feet about a fight to the death against the Nazi war machine.
‘One begins to wonder whether we are really at war at all,’ despaired Guy Liddell, Deputy Director of MI5’s B Division, who was not the only one in the Office to resent this hesitant, nebulous atmosphere.2 Liddell wanted all anti-war publications shut down and the immediate internment of the 70,000 Germans living in Britain. He felt that ‘enemy aliens’, as they were then known, must be locked up and then ‘called upon to show cause why they should be released’.3 Not the other way around. This was the policy stipulated in the War Book, and it was roughly what had happened during the last war.
The Home Office refused. Inspired by what Liddell dismissed as ‘old-fashioned liberalism’, senior Home Office officials took a principled stand at the start of the war against the prosecution of anti-war publications and the mass internment of enemy aliens.4 ‘Our tradition is that while orders issued by the duly constituted authority must be obeyed,’ wrote Sir Alexander Maxwell, the donnish Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, ‘every civilian is at liberty to show, if he can, that such orders are silly or mischievous and the duly constituted authorities are composed of fools or rogues.’5 Although Maxwell accepted that this gentler approach might backfire, because it could encourage those ‘who desire revolution, or desire to impede the war effort’, he insisted that this ‘risk is the cardinal distinction between democracy and totalitarianism’. The Home Office would rather lose the war nobly than sanction an all-out attack on civil liberties.
MI5 could only offer strongly worded protests as the Home Office pursued its alternative policy on enemy aliens, which was to set up one-man tribunals all over the country and review the case of each German national individually. This was both enormously fair and unbelievably time-consuming. After several months it would lead to the internment of 569 Germans. A further 6,800 were told to observe a curfew and stay away from certain parts of the country, while the remainder, some 64,000 people, were given no restrictions at all.
MI5’s Guy Liddell called this ‘laughable’.6 ‘The liberty of the subject, freedom of speech etc. were all very well in peacetime,’ he wrote, ‘but were no use in fighting the Nazis.7 There seemed to be a complete failure to realise the power of the totalitarian state and the energy with which the Germans were fighting a total war.’ Already there was a fundamental rift in Whitehall, and it reflected a similar division throughout the country. The Home Office saw the war as a clash of principles, yet for MI5 this was a bloody fight for survival and it began at home, as the example of Poland and Czechoslovakia had shown.
With the war less than a month old, reports had come in from Poland to suggest that the Nazi invasion had been assisted, in part, by ethnic Germans living inside Poland. Some of these stories were accurate. The Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz, a series of paramilitary units made up of Germans resident in Poland, had indeed committed acts of sabotage during the invasion and had even taken on armed Polish units. The German occupation of the Sudetenland the year before had been assisted very slightly by the Sudetendeutsches Freikorps, a similar paramilitary organisation for ethnic Germans living beyond the borders of Nazi Germany. For MI5, this raised the spectre of there being inside Britain already a so-called Fifth Column.
This term had been coined several years earlier by General Franco, during the Spanish Civil War, when he referred to his ‘Fifth Column’ of sympathisers in Madrid, living among the enemy. Now, in Britain, Fifth Column became shorthand for a supposed network of Germans living in Britain who were ready to rise up in the event of a Nazi invasion to carry out sabotage, espionage and perhaps launch attacks against British forces.
This was a familiar fear. Although it had not been referred to back then as a Fifth Column, in the years before the First World War millions of Britons became convinced that there were hundreds of German spies living secretly among them. The hysteria followed the publication of various novels and speculative newspaper articles by the likes of William Le Queux, whose best-seller The Invasion of 1910 cemented this idea of expatriate Germans forming a readymade network of potential spies. Indeed, the spy fever had been so intense in 1909 that the government had felt compelled to respond. It had asked a young Vernon Kell and one other officer to set up the Secret Service Bureau, which later divided into MI6 and MI5. MI5 had been born out of spy fever, and it was easy for those in the Home Office, in September 1939, to imagine that its fear of a Fifth Column in Britain was inspired by little more than institutional prejudice.
This was part of the reason why those in the Home Office refused to authorise the mass internment of enemy aliens that MI5 had called for. As a result, Kell, Liddell and the rest of MI5 were swamped with work relating to the new one-man tribunals, which, in turn, made it harder for them to concentrate on combating German espionage. MI5 also had growing pains to contend with. During the early stages of the war, Kell’s department doubled in size. At the same time its staff struggled to adapt to their new wartime headquarters in Wormwood Scrubs, a former prison block.
M’s situation was rather different. He continued to run his section from a palatial housing development overlooking the River Thames, and his staff of three officers remained unchanged. Captain Knight, as he now was, would have to make do with just Jimmy Dickson and Bill Younger. Yet with the small injection of funds he had received several months earlier, M had been able to take on several new agents. These included ‘M/C’, a female typist in the mould of Mona Maund and Olga Gray. M/C had managed to get a job as a secretary at BUF National Headquarters and over the following months she would supply M with a valuable stream of material on Fascist activities. But he needed more.
Following the outbreak of war, M Section found itself responsible for dealing with individual cases of suspected espionage as well as monitoring the Communist underground and penetrating all extremist political organisations on the Right. As usual, M would have to do a lot with very little. But the stakes were higher now. His choice of precisely where to deploy his agents, when and how to instruct them could be the difference between his uncovering a Fifth Column and there being a successful German invasion.
M had to think very carefully before deciding where to direct one of his newest agents, Marjorie Mackie, codenamed ‘M/Y’, a middle-aged single mother from Essex who was short and broad and had remarkable sky-blue eyes. Mackie’s only son had recently joined the merchant navy. Before the war she had made a living doing public cooking demonstrations for a well-known flour company. Like a modern-day television chef, only without the cameras, she baked bread and pies while chatting to an audience of passing shoppers, a job that seemed to combine her two great skills in life: cooking and talking. Yet the legacy of this work, even if she did not recognise it in herself, was an exaggerated manner. Mrs Mackie would often come across in conversation as the kind of person who was willing to embellish a story if she felt her audience was losing interest. She could try too hard to be believed, a quality that did not bode well in her new job as a government agent.
M wanted Mrs Mackie to infiltrate the Right Club, a secretive anti-Semitic group committed to undermining the war effort and spreading the idea that this conflict was part of a global Jewish-Communist-Masonic conspiracy. M had reason to believe that the Right Club was developing its own network of agents – just as a Fifth Column might do. This rumour almost certainly came to him from one of his two agents already inside the group, John Hirst and Eric Roberts. Yet neither man was at all close to the figure at the heart of the Right Club. This was where Mrs Mackie came in.
The Hon. Captain Archibald Ramsay, MP, usually known as ‘Jock’, was a former officer in the Coldstream Guards and a Conservative backbencher whose outlook was essentially Fascist. He had set up the Right Club earlier that year in response to the looming possibility of Britain and Germany going to war, an event which he felt was a terrible mistake. Yet he was not anti-war on humanitarian grounds. Instead Ramsay thought that Britain and Germany should be allies in the struggle against Jews, Masons and Communists.
This moustachioed, balding politician had belonged in the early 1930s to various right-wing and anti-Communist groups, including the Christian Protest Movement, which campaigned against the persecution of Christians in the Soviet Union. Its Assistant Secretary back then had been Mrs Mackie. This was why M had taken her on. Mackie’s first job for MI5 was to get back in touch with Captain Ramsay and to find out what he was up to.
‘I telephoned to Mrs Ramsay,’ wrote Mrs Mackie, ‘and asked her if I could see her and Captain Ramsay and renew our acquaintance.8 She invited me to tea.’
The conversation that followed was ‘violently anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic,’ explained Mackie. The former cookery demonstrator played along, nodding when necessary and otherwise trying to persuade Mrs Ramsay that her views were just as extreme as her husband’s.
It worked. The following month Mackie was invited to join the Right Club, and in late September 1939 she finally got to speak to Captain Ramsay himself. What she heard was extraordinary.
Ramsay told this MI5 informant that Right Club members, his agents effectively, had infiltrated not only every leading right-wing group but also Whitehall. ‘He told me that he had most of the Government Departments covered with the exception of the Foreign Office and the Censorship Department. He added, “If you could help us here it would be very useful.”’9
‘I made no promise,’ she told M, but Mackie led Ramsay to believe ‘that I had many friends in military circles who would use their influence on my behalf’.10
Captain Ramsay was not only building up a network of agents inside the British government, but, according to Mrs Mackie, he was making tentative plans for a right-wing coup. M had also begun to receive disturbing intelligence from within the Communist movement, including one report suggesting ‘that instructions have now been received from Moscow to go right ahead with all plans for creating a revolution in this country when the time is ripe’.11
There seemed to be danger from homegrown Fascists and homegrown Communists, as well as the growing threat of a Nazi invasion. At the same time, M had a more personal crisis to contend with. Just four days after Captain Ramsay had told Mrs Mackie to find a job in the Foreign Office or Censorship, a Special Branch report came into the Office to suggest that M, of all people, had tipped off William Joyce about his imminent arrest. By then Joyce’s broadcasts from Berlin were being discussed in the press.
M responded immediately. While he conceded that he had spoken to Joyce on the phone shortly before his escape, ‘there was no question of Joyce having been warned or given any improper information’.12
Yet M offered no plausible explanation as to why Joan Joyce would have made this up. She knew that M was trying to get one of her other brothers, Quentin, released from prison and she had no incentive to slander this MI5 officer. If this had been a lie, it was an elaborate one that served no purpose. It is hard to say which of his colleagues actually believed M’s denial. Yet, by that stage of the war, the Office was overwhelmed with more pressing work and this matter was left alone.
The first month of the war had been a strange, discomforting time for M. He had received ominous intelligence about plans being made by Captain Ramsay and the Right Club, and had seen reports describing Communist and Fascist plots for a coup. In the background came the drone of his former comrade, Lord Haw-Haw, as he made broadcasts from Berlin. It was impossible for M to know what the fallout from his telephone call might be, but this did at least force him to confront his relationship with Joyce and perhaps with British Fascism more generally.
Most of M’s identity as a young man had been bound up in his experiences with K and the BF. The reinvention of this movement as a pro-Nazi phenomenon must have been painful for him and confusing; it was a shift that ate into his understanding of himself and his past, as well as his amour propre. It also challenged his sense of what this war was about. Many people, including those who, like him, had once been involved in the Makgill Organisation, men whom M respected, admired and liked, saw this as part of an ongoing conflict between the Right and the Left in which Britain would be better advised to side with Germany. For others the war belonged to a struggle between dictatorship and democracy, and steps should be taken to limit the freedoms of those people in Britain who sympathised with Hitler and the forces of dictatorship. Maxwell Knight was not a man given to long expressive outpourings of his innermost feelings, either in conversation or on the page, so there is no direct account of his political position at this time. Indeed he was so accustomed to presenting different sides of himself to his many agents that keeping his interior world hidden came naturally. Instead, we are left with the record of what he did.
Inasmuch as this tells us anything, it suggests that by the start of October 1939 this MI5 spymaster, like so many others with connections to the Right, was still undecided about how he saw the war, or indeed the threat of homegrown Fascism. Politically the BUF was by then something of a joke, and there was no prospect of a truly popular Fascist uprising in Britain, yet the danger was that radicalised British Fascists, for whom ideology was more important than nationality, may have already decided to work for Nazi Germany. M’s dilemma was centred on just how serious that threat really was.