Coleshill House, home of Lord Radnor’s sisters, Katharine and Mollie Pleydell-Bouverie, was used to train stay-behind saboteurs.
Your connections in Washington being what they are, you will no doubt be able to give us on return a good picture of the political situation there and the general opinion from outside of the OSS organisation as a whole.
Instructions to Lord Bearsted on a visit to the USA for MI6 in 1943
On 31 August 1939, Peter Samuel, a director of his family’s London based bank, M. Samuel & Co., sent a telegram to the staff at the family’s country house near Banbury in Warwickshire: ‘War imminent STOP CONFIDENTIAL Prepare Upton House STOP No Time To Lose PETER SAMUEL’
The reply came back: ‘Staff Ready’.
Upton House in Warwickshire had been the family’s country residence since 1927, when Peter’s father, Walter Samuel, purchased the house after his father’s death. He had come into an immense inheritance and the title of second Viscount Bearsted. He and his wife Dorothea extensively remodelled Upton over the next few years. It was a house more associated with pleasure than work, designed to accommodate Lord Bearsted’s collection of art and porcelain. For their three sons, Richard (Dicky), Peter, and Anthony (Tony), Upton provided a wonderful contrast to their home at 1 Carlton Gardens in London. Here they could enjoy everything the countryside had to offer, from hunting and shooting to weekend parties and dances. Peter Samuel was a keen huntsman and regularly rode three horses in a day and then returned to Upton to play a vigorous game of squash.
Walter Samuel’s wealth came from his father and uncle who were in business together. His father, Marcus Samuel, born in Whitechapel, had begun his business life as the owner of a small company trading in painted shells and other curiosities. In 1890 the company began shipping petroleum and by 1897 had its own oil wells in Borneo. The Shell Transport and Trading Company was formed that year, the name taken from Samuel’s first business. Ten turbulent years later, Shell was amalgamated with Royal Dutch to form Royal Dutch Shell. The group rapidly expanded and became one of the world’s leading energy companies. Marcus Samuel was ambitious, passionate and keen to be accepted in society. He took his civic responsibilities seriously and was a prominent figure in the City of London, becoming Lord Mayor in 1902. During the First World War he threw himself and Shell wholly behind the war effort, eventually convincing the Royal Navy to switch from coal to oil, advocating the internal combustion engine as the best form of propulsion for its fleet. He turned his house, The Mote, near Maidstone, Kent, into a hospital for non-commissioned officers and took a close personal interest in their welfare.
Marcus Samuel retired from the board of Shell in 1920 announcing that ‘the weight of this gigantic business must be carried by younger shoulders and when the time comes it is a matter of much gratification to me to know that I and every member of your board will have great confidence in my son, Captain [Walter] Samuel, who will, I hope, succeed me and who has all the qualifications necessary.’1 The announcement was greeted by cheers from the shareholders who were pleased to have continuity on the board. A year later Marcus Samuel was created a life peer, choosing the name Bearsted from a village close to his home in Kent. He was not a vain man, his biographer called him ‘uncommunicative about the past’, but his elevation to the House of Lords gave him great satisfaction. He told friends who visited him in his study shortly after the announcement: ‘You can’t think what pleasure it gives me to put the “Honourable” on my children’s envelopes.” ’2 By the time he died in 1927 Shell had a capital of more than £26 million or about £11 billion today.
Marcus Samuel brought up his four children to believe that with great wealth went equal responsibility. With his eldest son, Walter, he set up the Stepney Jewish Lads Club, to give young people a chance to enjoy sports, drama and outdoor activities which they might not have been able to do with their parents. Walter’s younger brother, Gerald, had no desire to go into the family business but he took a great interest in the club, eventually giving up his luxurious life in the West End to move to Stepney and be more involved in the lives of the boys the club supported.
At the outbreak of the First World War Walter Samuel joined the Queen’s Own West Kent Yeomanry, serving in Gallipoli. From there he went to Egypt with the regiment before returning to the Western Front in spring 1918. He attained the rank of captain, was mentioned twice in dispatches and was awarded the Military Cross in 1918 for an ‘act of exemplary gallantry during active operations against the enemy’. Gerald went out to France and was killed at Verdun in 1916, a tragedy that affected Walter very deeply.
Walter’s two sisters also lost their husbands in the war, so that he was the only male of that generation of the family to have survived. In 1908 he had married Dorothea Montefiore Micholls and over the next ten years they had three sons. Like his father before him, he was an intensely private man. When the first Lord Bearsted died there had been what his biographer described as a ‘documentary massacre’ when all personal papers were destroyed and very little is known about the private life of the family.
As well as being a businessman, the second Lord Bearsted was an art collector and a philanthropist. The New York Times described him as rich in possessions but a man who spent unostentatiously and wisely. He was shrewd in his judgments and managed to maintain ‘a happy balance in his life between sympathy and recreation’3. He had begun collecting art at the age of twenty-three and had an excellent eye. He continued to indulge his passion for the rest of his life, forming one of the most important private collections of the twentieth century, including works by George Stubbs, El Greco, Pieter Brueghel, William Hogarth and George Romney, as well as many other famous artists. At the age of forty-one he donated a vast collection of Japanese art, which included some of the famous wood blocks by Hokusai, to the Maidstone Museum, necessitating the construction of a new wing, which his father funded. The collection remains one of the best Japanese collections in the country, rivalling the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum’s holdings. He had sound judgment and bought works that he liked rather than because they were by artists fashionable at the time. His taste was respected and he served as a trustee of the Tate Gallery, the National Gallery and the Whitechapel Art Gallery as well as being a major benefactor to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford with a donation of £18,000 in 1938. During the war he continued to play an active role on the various museum boards.
At some stage over the summer of 1939, he and Lady Bearsted decided they would have to move the valuable contents of their London home to Upton for safe-keeping. They offered the magnificent 1 Carlton Gardens as a gift to the nation and it was accepted by a grateful government. It is now an official ministerial residence normally used by the foreign secretary.
When Lord and Lady Bearsted handed over the property they moved into the Dorchester Hotel. This became the chosen home of many wealthy people and a favoured meeting place during the war. It was known to be the safest building in London as the basement, which is one third of the size of the hotel above ground, is made of reinforced concrete. The eight upper floors are supported on a massive three-feet-thick reinforced concrete deck that forms the roof of the first floor of the building. When the Blitz began, the dining rooms were moved downstairs into the Gold Room and the ballroom to avoid flying glass. One Canadian diplomat, Charles Ritchie, compared the surreal atmosphere of dining at the Dorchester during the Blitz to cruising on a luxury liner with the remaining members of London’s high society in the midst of a hurricane. Despite the danger of the nightly bombing there were residents who eschewed the communal air-raid shelter in the basement as it was insufficiently exclusive. They chose the less secure option of the hotel’s underground gymnasium and Turkish baths where at least they could sit with like-minded friends. It all seems a little absurd from today’s perspective and indeed some thought so at the time. Cecil Beaton was scathing. He described the hotel as ‘a building in which the respectable and the dubious mixed by the thousand, knocking back cocktails and indulging in careless talk.’
In 1944 General Eisenhower moved out of Claridges and became a resident of the Dorchester because he wanted more peace and quiet in order to plan the Normandy invasion. He moved into two rooms on the first floor today called the Eisenhower Suite. Winston Churchill also had rooms at the Dorchester and had a wall built on the balcony between his and the one next door to afford him privacy. Many politicians, aristocrats, socialites and hangers-on enjoyed a hedonistic atmosphere of dancing, drinking and gossiping but that does not appear to have been the lifestyle that the Bearsteds sought. It seems strange that they, with their focus on philanthropy and public service chose to live there but as wealthy members of society they would have known many residents and besides, they needed a London home.
Peter Samuel left London to join his regiment, the Warwickshire Yeomanry at Thorseby Park in Sherwood Forest, two days after sending the telegram to the butler at Upton House. Meanwhile, his parents made their way to Warwickshire to oversee the alterations which would allow their home to become the headquarters of M. Samuel & Co. – the merchant bank owned by the family – for the duration. The intention was to move the entire operation including all the essential staff to the countryside so that the bank could continue to function.
The central block of the house dates from the late seventeenth century and was altered over the centuries with additions and removals. The twentieth-century alterations include two wings and extensive redecorations, some in the art deco style, including Lady Bearsted’s bathroom which is lined with aluminium leaf. But the real glories of Upton – apart from the art collection – are the gardens. Lady Bearsted took a great interest in the development of the gardens and employed the designer Kitty Lloyd Jones to make sweeping changes, including a paved garden, to be seen from her bedroom, a blue and yellow herbaceous border by the kitchen garden and bog gardens to the west of the house. At the bottom of the garden is the beautiful and picturesque Mirror Pool which reflects the sky and trees around it while the main lawn has a stand of magnificent cedars, which Peter Samuel recalled when he was out in the middle of the desert in 1943:
I would give all the world to be lying under the cedar at Upton in the summer and smell the unforgettable smell of grass and new-mown hay and hear the lazy humming of the birds and bees, and looking and seeing everything calm and green and cool, and then close my eyes and do absolutely nothing. One day I shall do that again and it will be heaven.4
The staff at Upton House had their work cut out to prepare the house to provide suitable accommodation for a London bank within a matter of days. The man in charge of overseeing the changes was George Smith, the head butler. He worked day and night to get a house which normally had a handful of residents and weekend guests ready for almost two dozen bank workers, more than half of whom were women, with just a skeleton staff to help him. By the time the bank was running at full strength there were twenty-three bank employees working in the Long Gallery and the main hall. The dining room, with its precious collection of china and the magnificent paintings by Stubbs, was off limits to the banking staff except by special invitation of the Bearsteds.
Dormitories were set up on the first floor with two, three or four beds. The female staff was quartered in rooms overlooking the back garden while the largest men’s dormitory looked out over the front drive. One of the bank clerks, Barney Adler, who was twenty-three at the outbreak of war, described Upton as being run like a holiday camp ‘but a little more austere’. The rooms for the men were basic and comfortable but the women’s rooms had an ensuite bathroom, an untold luxury in comparison to life back home. Lord and Lady Bearsted’s rooms remained closed to the banking staff, Lady Bearsted’s exquisitely decorated bathroom being deemed too fragile for general use.
Downstairs, the Long Gallery became the banking hall with a dining area at one end. Barney Adler wrote: ‘The meals were taken in the Long Gallery, which was full of magnificent paintings and the finest collection of Chelsea china in the world. The food I remember most of all was rook pie and stewed rabbit.’5 Furniture from Shell House at 55 Bishopsgate arrived by lorry and was quickly set up. Tables with typewriters for the secretaries were ranged along the garden wall, with the clerks and managers at the far end of the gallery on individual desks. The senior secretary was Miss Diana Hazlerigg. At five feet eight inches tall she was a striking young woman. George Smith described her as ‘a cut above – not a run of the mill typist. She had blonde hair and was beautiful. She was very smart and imposing.’ Diana Hazlerigg remained at Upton until Christmas 1941 when she left to join the ATS, enlisting at Oxford on 10 January 1942, a week after her twenty-eighth birthday. She returned to M. Samuel after the war and worked there until she married Robert Hope-Falkner in March 1946. Her son Patrick wrote: ‘My imperious grandmother shortlisted her as a candidate for introduction to Dad after he was demobbed – one of six!’
It was only Miss Hazlerigg and Mr A. C. McCarthy, the company secretary, who had telephones. At a meeting held in London on 5 September the board confirmed that ‘the name of Mr A C McCarthy is added to the list of special signatures for the war period.’ Albert ‘Mac’ McCarthy had had a long association with the bank. In the First World War he had fought with the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, attaining the rank of corporal before he was invalided out in 1916. He was brought back to Britain and after hospital treatment was sent to convalesce at the Mote, the large country house in Kent owned by the first Viscount Bearsted. Lord Bearsted senior was taken with the young man and offered him a job as a footman at the Mote. However, he soon realised that McCarthy had a great deal more to offer so he was moved to Bishopsgate where he worked his way up to become chief secretary to the bank in his forties. During the late 1920s he spent time working on Wall Street but returned to M. Samuel after the crash. With war looming, Mac joined the RAF as a pilot officer but he was soon discharged as unfit for service due to the trauma he had experienced in the previous war. He returned to the bank and was immediately put in charge of the move to Upton. On 11 September 1939 he wrote to Lord Bearsted: ‘Everyone is comfortable and happy at Upton.’ His only concern was that during the short days and longer evenings the staff might get bored. Mac lived at Upton during the week but at weekends he joined his wife at a house in South Bar near Banbury Cross.
Bank records show that he was paid £1,000 a year working as the most senior member of staff at Upton. He was responsible not only for the day-to-day running of the bank but also for the welfare of the staff, all of whom were younger than he was, and some of whom found the isolation from London trying. He encouraged the younger staff to make the most of the beautiful grounds. In the early mornings before going to work they swam in the pool that the Bearsteds had had built in 1936. They took walks around the extensive gardens and roamed further afield at weekends. Lord Bearsted bought wellington boots for all the staff and bicycles so that they could explore the countryside beyond the estate. The gardens were not greatly altered during the war, although the borders were turned over to grow fruit and vegetables but the two large pools, the Mirror Pool and the Temple Pool, had to be drained as they shone like glass in the moonlight and it was feared that they might be used by the Luftwaffe to map their routes and find targets more easily.
Barney Adler embraced life in the countryside with relish. He wrote to his fiancée, Joyce, a month after he had arrived telling her how much he enjoyed swimming in the late summer. He had managed a swim almost every morning before work, he told her. It was such an enormous contrast to his life in London just weeks earlier. Two months later he learned to cycle for the first time in his life. ‘The old Chief Accountant gave me a push off and I rode quite a long way until I fell off.’6 The first few rides were a bit wobbly but he soon got the hang of it and spent most of his weekends riding around the Warwickshire countryside visiting antique shops, having been inspired to take an interest in art and porcelain after admiring Lord Bearsted’s collection. Barney and Joyce soon married and moved into a bungalow about three quarters of a mile from Upton House. He wrote in his memoir: ‘It was a wonderful war for us and we were very lucky. We cycled 3,000 miles during the summer of 1941 and bought all sorts of antiques which we stuffed into the bungalow. One day, Joyce cycled to Stratford on Avon to see a play, but they wouldn’t let her in because she didn’t have a gas mask, so she went into Woolworth’s and bought a case for 6d and stuffed it with paper. She saw the play.’7
The bank had a real role to play during the war supporting commerce by funding government projects. Two schemes that M. Samuel & Co. became involved in were providing loans for acquiring supplies of parachute silk and credits for purchasing eggs from Hungary. The company’s board minute books list other items such as the provision of credit for the Ministry of Supply who needed to buy 10,000 sets of leather equipment in October 1939 and quantities of American beer destined for the NAAFI in Egypt. In May 1942, board members were informed that the company held over 2 million sterling 3.5 per cent War Stock as well as Baltic, Bolivian and astonishingly, given the circumstances prevailing at the time, Japanese government securities, reflecting the areas where Shell Company had been active in the 1930s.
Stephen Howarth, author of the company history of Shell, A Century in Oil, wrote that ‘Shell Transport entered World War II in an uncompromising mood.’8 It is hardly surprising. The experience of the First World War had shown how vitally important oil would be in any future conflict. An army can march hungry, albeit inefficiently, but tanks and battleships cannot run without fuel. Petrol was the first commodity to be rationed and the government exercised complete control over its distribution throughout the war.
As far as the board of Shell was concerned, the greatest role they would have to play in the war was to secure sufficient oil whenever and wherever it was needed:
Under Shell Transport’s leadership, the creation of the Petroleum Board, or ‘the Pool’, symbolized the nature of the British wartime oil industry. Planned during 1938, it was activated at ‘time zero’, the last second of Britain’s first day at war: midnight on the night of 3–4 September 1939. Following the plan, the Pool was ready to continue its work for as long as the war continued.9
Shell was one of the four largest distributing companies that dominated the Pool. Ninety-four smaller companies were also involved and all had been rivals pre-war. They agreed to suspend their competition and work together as a group for the duration of the hostilities. Lorries with the logos of both Shell and BP were used to deliver petrol around the country. The Pool’s board’s headquarters was in Shell-Mex House on Bishopsgate, which had air-raid shelters in the basement and a comprehensive duplicate telephone system with their lines re-routed – some to the Strand, some to Embankment – so that if one or other telephone exchange were put out by enemy action they would still be able to communicate. Shell also installed a teleprinter which had a dedicated phone line, giving it extra security. This machine was for the Pool nationwide but it was also linked to the three armed forces and was in constant use, twenty-four hours a day, handling as many as five thousand messages a day. Although there is no documented link between Lord Bearsted’s work for the Secret Intelligence Service and this close relationship between Shell, the government and the armed services, it is hard not to imagine that he was at the very least a highly regarded individual who could be trusted with information close to government.
The Pool was not responsible for fuel rationing, merely for its distribution, but it proved to be a highly successful and effective relationship which was mirrored on the high seas by a working relationship with the Royal Navy and their convoys:
Shell tankers served in every part of the world. In the latter part of the war they acted as oilers for the British Pacific Fleet; they brought fuel to Malta and, through the Murmansk convoys, to Russia; they were present on 6 June 1944 at D-Day . . . not only carrying millions of gallons of fuel but also distilling and providing fresh water, that other essential for armies on the move; and throughout the war they brought oil to Britain on the core transatlantic routes.10
With Walter Samuel as its chairman and the majority of Shell’s directors both Jewish and proud to be British, the rumours of Jewish persecution in Nazi Germany gave an added urgency to decisions taken by the board. Immediately after the declaration of war one of the first actions of the company was to furnish the British intelligence services and the RAF with all the available information on Shell’s refineries and oil fields in Germany. ‘Though easily seen as a correct decision, it was nevertheless depressing, because it was a clear invitation for the bombing of Shell installations and Shell personnel; yet the alternative was too awful to contemplate.’11 By the end of the war it was discovered that the oil establishments in Germany most comprehensively destroyed were those belonging to Shell.
Lord Bearsted also suggested putting the Shell Film Unit at the disposal of the government. The film unit had been set up in 1934 to take advantage of a new kind of cinema: documentaries. Cinema-going was at its peak in the mid-1930s and Shell spotted the opportunity for high-profile advertising. Their first film for public screening was called Airport, which depicted a day in the life of Croydon Aerodrome. ‘The film lasted only seventeen minutes, but nothing could quite compare with aircraft, and everything associated with them, for excitement. Many people had never seen an aeroplane (of if they had, only at a great distance) yet everyone recognised the exotic glamour of flight.’12 Airport was a critical success and it cleverly positioned Shell at the ‘vanguard of modernity’ while providing high-quality entertainment and education. The technical quality of the Shell films, often using techniques such as mechanical animation, were so innovative that one critic raved over a film with the unpromising title Transfer of Power as ‘most exciting and beautiful . . . a short but dazzling demonstration of the human genius for invention.’13 With such a pedigree it is easy to see why the government accepted the offer with alacrity. Over the next six years, forty-seven films were made for the Admiralty, the Ministry of Home Security and the Ministry of War Transport – some aimed at boosting public morale, while others focused on secret instruction and training.
Shell’s involvement in the war went far beyond the transport of oil for the war effort. As a petrochemical company it was constantly innovating and many of its products were used in a variety of fields, from flexible pipelines for transporting oil or water to acetone which was used in the manufacture of Perspex for aeroplane hoods. On 18 January 1943, the Ministry of Supply asked Shell if a suitable waterproofing material could be made to coat up to 150,000 vehicles that would be landed off the beaches of Normandy:
The challenge was uniquely daunting. First and foremost, the material had to provide 100 per cent water-proofing efficiency, ‘to enable a vehicle to wade in sea water’ to a depth of three feet with eighteen-inch waves on top. It had to be easy to use, so that comparatively unskilled personnel could apply it with a high degree of reliability. It had to be a good insulator; it had to be rigid up to 200 degrees Fahrenheit, and to survive exposure to that temperature for long periods without either sagging or hardening and cracking, and without showing any oil separation whatever; it had to smear easily and ‘take’ on slight greasy surfaces, without being tacky or clinging to the operators’ hands; and it had to be something which could be provided soon, in enormous quantities.14
By 24 February, after just thirty-seven days, Shell was ready to trial Compound 219. An engine was covered in the material, placed in a water tank, warmed up, immersed in salt water and when it was turned on it worked. There was jubilation after the trials and the company was proud to record that over 24 million pounds of Compound 219 was used at D-Day. The secretary of state for war told the board that ‘despite the fact that many of them went ashore through five feet of water in heavy seas, less than two out of every thousand of the vehicles, or 0.2 per cent, were “drowned” off the beaches.’15
Lord Bearsted took a keen interest in all the developments within Shell’s chemical products but he could not hide his dislike of the purpose to which they were put. He said in 1942, ‘We look forward to the time when the manufacture of all these materials for war purposes is no longer necessary; they will, however, each be able to play a more constructive part in peacetime.’16 He never expressed the slightest doubt that there would be anything other than an Allied victory when peace finally returned.
Lord Bearsted also took a close personal interest in Shell’s personnel during the war, particularly the tanker-men who were the lynchpin to everything else the company undertook. They were constantly under threat from U-boat attack when they made their way in the convoys across the north Atlantic and through the Mediterranean. When the crew of the Ohio arrived in Malta in a dramatic and critical operation which so very nearly failed, to his great delight the crew was decorated. The captain, D. W. Mason, was awarded the George Cross and the chief engineer, J. Wyld, the DSO. Other members received between them five DSCs and seven DSMs. At the end of the war, Lord Bearsted could count over 300 Shell employees who had been given medals, citations, mentions in dispatches and other recognition. Probably the most famous of them all was Sir Douglas Bader, who flew for Shell after he was invalided out of the RAF in 1933 having lost both legs. He rejoined the RAF in 1939 earning both the DSO and DFC in 1940 before taking command of a squadron in 1941. He was shot down in France later that year and captured. Repeated escape attempts landed him in Colditz. After the war he rejoined Shell, becoming manager of Group Aircraft Operations and the first managing director of Shell Aircraft in 1958.
The highest decoration of all was awarded to former Shell employee Major Robert Cain when he and his men came under heavy attack from Panzer tanks during the Battle of Arnhem. ‘Taking an anti-tank launcher Cain left cover alone, shot at the leading Panzer, immobilised it and then, though wounded, co-ordinated its destruction by Howitzer. For this and other subsequent acts and examples of extreme courage and leadership he was awarded Britain’s highest military decoration, the Victoria Cross.’17 He had been a manager in Nigeria and after the war resumed his employment with Shell working in East Asia and then Africa, dying of cancer in 1974. His daughter, Frances Cain, was unaware of her father’s Victoria Cross until after he died because, according to her ex-husband, Jeremy Clarkson, ‘he’d never thought to mention it.’
Lord Bearsted was as quick to show his pleasure for small promotions as he was for the award of high military honours. When two of the bank’s junior members of staff, Barney Adler and Harry Bluglass were made assistant and chief accountant respectively, Lord Bearsted gave a lunch in the dining room at Upton for his newly promoted employees. There was a ‘royal feast’ with roast turkey and two different wines. Barney Adler recalled later: ‘It so happened that Turquand Youngs, the auditors, arrived by chance at the same time, so they sat down to lunch too. They had a new articled clerk with them – Drysdale – he looked amazed and asked me if we ate like this every day. I said “Yes”. He was delighted and he wasn’t to know that we had rook pie again next day!’18
In the summer of 1940, the tranquillity of Upton was rudely disturbed by the Battle of Britain which roared and exploded above the country. Members of the bank staff took it in turns to be on fire watch and ARP duty. The Blitz on Coventry and other provincial cities that autumn focused Lord Bearsted’s attention on the precious paintings and china at Upton. The most important consideration for him after the safety of his banking staff was the preservation of his art collection. Pictures from 1 Carlton Gardens had arrived along with the bank’s furniture and files in September 1939 and were stored in the cellars, in spaces on the walls and in the long corridors on the first and second floors. Initially he had believed Upton House to be a safe distance from London and in a sufficiently remote location to remain unthreatened by bombing. Now he was no longer confident that the house was as safe as he had thought. As a trustee of the National Gallery he was aware that plans had existed since 1934 to evacuate the national collection out of London in the event of war. In the summer of 1940 there had been plans to move the entire National Gallery collection to Canada but when the director, Kenneth Clarke, who was worried about submarine attack, suggested this solution to Churchill he met with a blunt response: ‘Hide them in caves and cellars, but not one picture shall leave this island,’ the prime minister thundered.
The National Gallery’s collections had been stored in various sites in Wales such as Penrhyn Castle, the National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth and the University of Wales. However, the feeling was that these were not immune from enemy bombardment either, so Assistant Keeper Martin Davies searched Wales for a better venue and finally settled on Manod Quarry, a disused slate mine above Blaenau Ffestiniog. Lord Bearsted was sufficiently worried that he wrote to Kenneth Clarke, asking whether he might send a selection of his paintings for safekeeping in Wales too. He wrote: ‘The present position is that every picture I have is now at Upton. I originally considered Upton as safe as anything but now they have built an aerodrome quite close. As you know, most of my pictures are comparatively small and I should be very glad if I could send a few of the best to the Quarry.’19 Kenneth Clarke agreed to Lord Bearsted’s request in recognition of the importance of the collection at Upton. Forty small paintings were chosen and spent the rest of the war in Chamber 5 in Manod Quarry with works from the king’s own collection. The press heard rumours regarding the whereabouts of the National Gallery’s treasures and Lord Bearsted offered advice: ‘I see no harm in the Daily Telegraph saying that the pictures are stored in a bombproof cave in a mountain, which is very vague. The only question which occurs to me is that, if such a statement were made, we might have a lot of enthusiastic journalists trying to find out where the mountain was. I do not think Wales should be mentioned in any way.’20
While thinking about his works of art and his employees at the bank and at Shell, Lord Bearsted was also busy working behind the scenes to help his country at its time of greatest need. In the febrile atmosphere of the late 1930s, the British Secret Service underwent an expansion and metamorphosis that would have a great impact on the war. While Hitler was rearranging the map of Europe with his incursions into the Rhineland, Austria and the Sudetenland, activity in and around a small area of west London was on the increase. The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), or MI6 as it became known in the Second World War, was so secret that its existence was not acknowledged until 1994. As M. R. D. Foot, the historian and authority on Special Operations put it, ‘Governments like to keep up with each other the pretences that no such bodies exist, though without one no strong regime can stand for long.’21 SIS was created in 1909 and from 1921 was under Foreign Office control. It formed part of the UK’s intelligence machinery and its job was to secure secrets from abroad. The security service, MI5, was responsible for guarding secrets at home and came under the auspices of the Home Office.
SIS had offices at 54 Broadway, near St James’ Park, and was undertaking the purchase of a house in Buckinghamshire that would be the wartime home of the Government Code and Cipher School, Bletchley Park. The head of SIS, known simply as C within Whitehall, was Admiral ‘Quex’ Sinclair. By 1938 it had become clear that war was imminent and that some form of subversive tactics would be called for in addition to ‘normal’ military warfare. In April, C ‘borrowed’ an officer from the army to work for him in a yet undefined capacity. Major Lawrence Douglas Grand was seconded to SIS and told to start up a new section, at first called IX, later known as D. His task was ‘to investigate every possibility of attacking potential enemies by means other than the operations of military force’,22 yet at first he was forbidden to initiate any overt action. His was to be purely a research role and to make a report and recommendations to SIS. ‘Examining such an enormous task’, Grand wrote after the war, ‘one felt as if one had been told to move the Pyramids with a pin.’23
Lawrence Grand was described by Bickham Sweet-Escott in Baker Street Irregular as having some of the traits that have come to be expected in a secret service leader: ‘He was tall, handsome, well-tailored, with a heavy dark moustache; wore a red carnation; smoked cigarettes, almost without cease, through an elegant black holder; had an equally elegant wit. He was brimful of ideas and energy and he had a rare gift: he gave full trust to those under him, and backed them up without question against outsiders.’24 He was to be responsible for the civilian arm of this new branch of intelligence, while parallel to his department another was set up to focus on military intelligence and the potential for disruptive sabotage and guerrilla warfare. This branch will be discussed in the next chapter.
Set up in a little office in 2 Caxton Street with only limited funds and a brief ‘to do nothing but to think’, he had a small full-time staff but expanded his team by recruiting men on a ‘territorial’ basis, that is to say unpaid, to be trained and then co-opted as full-time intelligence officers in the event of a war. In the first instance these new recruits, mainly civilian businessmen from the City of London with wide commercial and foreign experience, were asked to produce intelligence on a wide range of activities within their own spheres. By the end of the 1930s, SIS had a network of intelligence gathering agents who were in effect spying on behalf of Britain.
When Lord Bearsted was recruited to SIS by his friend Stewart Menzies, he was already exceptionally well connected and keen to lend his support to this small branch of intelligence. He had no illusions but that there would be another war. That Shell had refineries and factories in Germany meant he had already observed the worrying signs emerging from that country. Menzies, who had been working in SIS since the end of the First World War, would go on to play a prominent role in the organisation.
As the war progressed, so SIS’s influence and therefore funding grew, and Menzies became closer to Churchill than any other head of an intelligence section. He was eventually responsible for the Government Code and Cipher School, which famously, with considerable Polish and French help, broke the naval Enigma code, Germany’s secret communications system, for which he was knighted and created a KCB (Knight Commander) in 1951.
Thanks to the brilliant fiction of Ian Fleming, the image of a spy as a dashing, gun-toting, martini-swilling bachelor with the flashiest of cars and the gadgets of schoolboys’ dreams has become hard-wired into the public’s mind. There was unprecedented collecting of intelligence, otherwise known as spying, during the Second World War and much of it was done by people ostensibly going about their everyday lives and far from the profile of the cinematic legend 007. Lord Bearsted was one such businessman, who was known in the secret world of MI6 by his code name K. Lord Bearsted and others similarly recruited would provide all important contacts but they could also act as a conduit for secret funding and this was key, especially abroad, where channelling hush-hush funds from Britain was more difficult.
Lord Bearsted was re-commissioned as a lieutenant on the ‘special list’ of the Territorial Army (TA) Reserve and asked to sign a copy of the Official Secrets Act, which he did on 23 September 1939. In order to give the officers recruited by SIS some official status and legal protection during wartime, from 1940 recruits were given a formal army rank, with a choice of appearing either on the General List or the new intelligence corps. By March 1940 Lord Bearsted held the rank of acting colonel and had become involved in the development of resistance networks in Scandinavia. According to Malcolm Atkin, the author of Fighting Nazi Occupation: British Resistance 1939–1945, he put Royal Dutch Shell in Scandinavia at the disposal of Section D and instructed the company’s office to provide full funding to the agents aiming to recruit and build intelligence gathering networks in Sweden and Denmark. As a trusted officer Lord Bearsted was permitted direct communication with the Section D’s agent in Scandinavia, Gerald Holdsworth, ensuring he had the necessary funds to carry out his secret work in Norway and Sweden.
Lord Bearsted was also involved in one of Lawrence Grand’s more convoluted schemes to send and distribute black propaganda in Germany. He obtained the loan of the ‘addressograph’ facilities at Shell, complete with two trained operators, and persuaded the company to buy three stencil-cutting machines from the USA. Once Section D had compiled a mailing list, the equipment was used to send propaganda material into Germany which ‘apparently’ emanated from the USA. Eventually this had to be stopped in case the Americans found out what Section D was up to. It was felt it would not be a good thing to discover in an election year that a foreign government was using its ‘signature’ to send subversive material into another country, enemy or not.
Meanwhile, back in the real world of business and civilian life, Lord Bearsted had to keep up the perfect disguise of being himself. He was in almost every way ideally suited to the double-sided life of businessman and member of the secret services. He was scrupulously polite, modest and reserved and with a dry wit, appearing to some unapproachable, but this hid an extremely generous philanthropic side to his personality. Despite the fact he was leading a double life he never would have thought of himself as duplicitous; he was a true patriot and proud of his country. The summer of 1940 was a time of the greatest imminent danger to Britain. A German invasion looked likely and as a prominent Jewish figurehead and as chairman of Shell, Lord Bearsted was a key Nazi target. He figured not once but twice on the infamous German ‘Black List’ of Britons who would be arrested in the event of invasion.
Section D’s activity was at its zenith, with Lawrence Grand energetically setting up arms dumps all over the country for stay-behind sabotage parties to access in the event of an invasion. Lord Bearsted was put in charge of the Home Defence Service (HDS). This was the part of Grand’s scheme that would be responsible for intelligence gathering after the Germans had landed and would be able to feed reports from behind enemy lines back to the regular armed forces who would still be in the unoccupied sections of the country. His exact role in this intelligence gathering has never been made clear but John Warwicker, the historian of the stay-behind parties, the Auxiliary Units, suggested in his book Churchill’s Underground Army that he may well have been the ‘overlord’ of the Special Duties Section in charge of ‘civilians . . . trained to collect and communicate intelligence. In a nutshell they were to be spies.’25 He wrote: ‘On just one occasion in the otherwise typewritten Section D closing report, the name “Bearsted” is added in pen and ink . . . It is understood – and it will be no surprise if true – that intelligence corps may simply be cover for his role for the Secret Intelligence Service as overlord of the SDS.’26 After the high point of anxiety in that summer, when the threat of invasion began to lessen, Lord Bearsted was seconded to the newly formed Special Operations Executive again on the intelligence gathering side. This was a significant move as the Auxiliary Units continued to operate, as we shall see in the next chapter, until late 1944 but clearly Lord Bearsted was deemed to be too valuable not to be used in the more ambitious organisation that was developing to place trained men and women into Nazi-occupied Europe.
As part of his undercover reconnaissance work, Lord Bearsted travelled across the Atlantic several times, ostensibly on Shell business. In November 1942, he was informed that the Minister of Economic Warfare had organised for him to visit Washington ‘in connection with the JIC [War Cabinet Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee] on the Far East’. In a letter addressed ‘Dear K’, Lord Bearsted was instructed to report back on the relationship between the newly formed American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) – the US equivalent of the UK’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the US intelligence service. There was clearly some friction within the US intelligence service, as there had been within the British equivalent and he was to garner the opinion of the two highest-ranking officials in the US military intelligence as well as the Director of National Intelligence as to how things were developing. In the fullness of time the US and British would be working together and it was key to know what was going on.
In a long and colourfully worded report Lord Bearsted answered all the points requested of him and then summed up the situation as he saw it in Washington: ‘Generally I found Washington a domestic bear-garden. There are far too many inter-services and inter-departmental jealousies. There never seemed to be any central body to whom one could go where all information on any subject was collected and filed for reference.’27 It would be difficult not to imagine someone from the outside would have made a similar assessment about the state of the British secret services in the summer of 1940.
On 6 October 1943, Lord Bearsted wrote to Stewart Menzies announcing his decision to return to civilian life and to relinquish the special commission he had been granted in 1939. This was agreed on 18 October and a note from a senior SIS official read: ‘The matter, we understand, was discussed at a high level and is quite in order.’28 Lord Bearsted was given the honorary rank of colonel in recognition of his valuable contribution towards the war effort.
The history of Section D and the activities of men like Lord Bearsted are usually relegated to single sentences or footnotes in the official histories. This is not a slur on their work but the vicissitudes of life and of official paranoia. Section D suffered in the mass but haphazard obliteration of material relating to the secret services during the war. There was, for example, the destruction of sensitive documents in the summer of 1940 for fear that they would fall into Nazi hands in the event of a successful invasion. After the war there was a further purge of secret papers and this was followed by a fire in Baker Street that destroyed many more records. Ironically, the cover name for Section D had been the Minimax Fire Extinguisher Company, a name well known to taxi drivers and German agents as the home of Britain’s secret intelligence service.
And of course there was a reluctance in the first place to keep records on secret missions, which explains why there is so little material available for historians on the early months of the Auxiliary Units, as we will see in the next chapter. In 1949 the secret services carried out another ‘weeding’ of historical records and finally, during the Cold War there was absolute silence maintained on all secret service activities. Lord Bearsted did not live long enough to see the era when it was considered acceptable to write or speak of clandestine wartime activities. His behind-the-scenes work within SIS will never fully be known or celebrated, but it is likely that he would not have wished it to be. He would have seen it simply as part of his patriotic duty to his country in the same way as it had been to ensure that the Shell Transport and Trading Company kept the engines of democracy oiled.
The other side of his life was philanthropy which he had fostered with the same degree of energy and modesty that he did his secret work. The list of organisations Lord and Lady Bearsted helped over the years, and especially during the Second World War, is long and varied. They supported many Jewish charities including the Bearsted Memorial Hospital at Stoke Newington, on which construction began in 1939, and a daughter hospital, begun in the same year, which was a maternity home near Hampton Court. But Lord Bearsted was prepared to cross religious fault lines. He supported Christian organisations such as the YMCA to which he and Lady Bearsted gave financial support both before and during the war. Between them they helped children’s charities, orphanages, boys’ clubs, prisoners’ aid, the Red Cross, and many other groups who needed support. Locally they were active and many small organisations near Upton House benefitted from their generosity including the local Women’s Institute, the Girl Guides and the Volunteer Fire Brigade. Lady Bearsted had been alarmed to see children walking to school along the main road in the late 1920s and had a footpath created so they could make their way safely, and she provided a bus to take children from the local area to Banbury Grammar School. At the height of the Great Depression when Lord and Lady Bearsted bought Upton House, Lord Bearsted wrote to the local community and said: ‘Any man who presents himself at my house at 9am on Monday morning shall find work there.’
In 1936 Lord Bearsted had travelled to the United States with Sir Simon Marks and Sir Herbert Samuel to raise money for German Jews. The three men travelled extensively throughout the States, giving speeches and persuading the Americans of the desperate situation in Germany. As things got worse for the Jewish children, in particular those who were orphaned or having parents in concentration camps, Lord Bearsted and Anthony Rothschild secured an enormous loan from the Prudential Insurance Company of £365,000 (the equivalent of around £14 million today). This helped to fund the Kindertransports, which brought some 10,000 child refugees, of whom 7,500 were Jewish, by train from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland between December 1938 and September 1939 to safety in Britain. About half the children lived with foster families and the remainder stayed in hostels, schools or on farms throughout the country. Later, after the Allied victory in North Africa, when refugee Jews were rescued from Spain and Portugal, he helped to work towards a peaceful accommodation in Palestine.
There is no doubt that through his generosity and genuine concern for men and women of all faiths Lord Bearsted touched many thousands of lives and probably saved a number of them as well. The bank staff at Upton House were among those whose lives had been changed by Lord Bearsted’s thoughtfulness in keeping them out of London. When they returned to 55 Bishopsgate in 1945 they found the building had survived the war unscathed though much of the surrounding area had been badly damaged in the Blitz, including St Helen’s Place, just 350 feet away from the Shell building.
After the war, Upton House once again became the Bearsteds’ family home. The Long Gallery was rehung with the works of art that had returned from the quarry in North Wales and the rest of the porcelain and art taken out of storage. The Temple and Mirror Pools were refilled and the borders planted with herbaceous shrubs. The three Samuel sons all returned from the war with distinguished records, the two older boys having fought in Africa while the youngest, Tony, had, like his father, been involved in secret operations. Dicky and Peter went back to work in the city while Tony became a highly successful race-horse trainer in Warwickshire. The bank’s wartime senior staff Albert ‘Mac’ McCarthy and Barney Adler both worked for M. Samuel & Co. until they retired. Lord Bearsted was reunited with his art collection and spent the rest of his life living at Upton House.
Coleshill House, home of Lord Radnor’s sisters, Katharine and Mollie Pleydell-Bouverie, was used to train stay-behind saboteurs.