Maxwell Knight was one of the most eccentric spymasters of the 20th century. When he wasn’t recruiting spies, he was collecting unlikely pets. New recruits arriving for training in his flat were confronted with a parrot, a toad, an Indian mongoose and several grass snakes. They may have been grateful to learn that he had sent his pet bear Bessie to the zoo on the grounds that “breeding bears in a private establishment is something which is not very practical”.
He was also, at least during the second world war, one of the most successful spies of his day. His section at MI5 exposed a network of London fascists responsible for passing US secrets to the Germans. This has all the ingredients of the best spy stories and Henry Hemming, who made his name with an account of unconventional war hero Geoffrey Pyke in Churchill’s Iceman, is well placed to tell it.
Knight’s rise to prominence was unlikely. A period as a naval cadet in the first world war was followed by a career as a dissolute Soho jazz musician. He was cut off financially by his uncle and in 1922, at the age of 23, found a job as a school games teacher. It was now that he was recruited by a private intelligence agency run by maverick anti-communist Makgill, who set him the inauspicious task of infiltrating the British Fascisti.
While working for Makgill, Knight developed his talents at developing agents. He was already adept at gaining the trust of animals and adapted these skills to train men and, more unusually, women. He rose to prominence easily at the British Fascisti, even joining a young William Joyce as early members of a violent splinter group, burgling and fighting the communists. When he married a young fascist, Gwladys, in 1925, he gave up spying and went to run a pub in Exmoor. But this was the first of three marriages that was unconsummated and he was grateful to escape back to London after being unofficially recruited by MI6.
Now came a foolish mistake that had the bizarre effect of speeding him into power. After Knight boasted about his MI6 activities to Special Branch, the whole secret service was reorganised in a sudden panic and, amazingly, Knight at the age of 31 was put in charge of a whole section at MI5.
It was at MI5 that the persona of “M” was created. Hemming tells us that Knight was reputedly the model for Ian Fleming’s “M”, albeit in name and not character. He was certainly the model for John le Carré;’s Jack Brotherhood in A Perfect Spy. Le Carré worked for Knight in the 1950s and enjoyed characterising his fictional counterpart as “a handsome English warlord who served sherry on Boxing Day and had never had a doubt in his life”. This is a man who is angry about the “retreat into bureaucracy” of “the Firm” and still likes to stick to his old, amateur but effective methods.
Hemming, too, is conscious of Knight’s amateurism as both a strength and a weakness. In many respects Knight was peculiarly clumsy. He met his agents rather publicly at St James’s Park underground station; he wrote a spy novel under his own name. Intelligence officer Guy Liddell described the atmosphere in M Section as “deplorable, both from the sex point of view and organisationally”. It was chaotic and there were too many people having affairs, perhaps because of Knight’s consistent belief in allowing his agents to be individuals.
This had its costs. Hemming is strong on the high price paid for the excitement of spying. The most moving story concerns Olga Gray, a young woman of conservative politics whom Knight persuaded to serve her country by rising high in communist circles as a secretary. She was so convincing that she was sent to Moscow on a secret mission for Comintern and became the close confidante of an influential communist, Percy Glading. Eventually the time came for Glading’s arrest in 1937, and suddenly Olga found herself facing her friend in the dock. She was saved, while he was damned; her virtue was that she was on the right side.
Knight knew the costs of betrayal and he didn’t always choose to place his country before his friends. On the eve of war in 1939, he warned William Joyce that he was on a list of British fascists to be sent to prison in the event of war. It was thanks to Knight’s intervention that Joyce was able to escape to Berlin and make his memorable wartime broadcasts as “Lord Haw-Haw”, though arguably therefore thanks to that same intervention that he was eventually hanged. There are no moral victors in the murky world of espionage. But there’s courage and ingenuity and imagination; qualities that are justly celebrated in this engaging and suspenseful book.
M: Maxwell Knight, MI5’s Greatest Spymaster, by Henry Hemming, Preface, RRP£20, 416 pages
Lara Feigel is author of ‘The Bitter Taste of Victory: Life, Love and Art in the Ruins of the Reich’ (Bloomsbury)
Photographs: Ron Francis, reproduced courtesy of Surrey Heath Museum; John Gay, National Archives; Getty
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