TAWNY OWL
Monthly Archives: April 2020
Book Club: The Walls Have Ears
LITERARY REVIEW
REVIEW
DURING World War II, captured German generals and other senior officers were taken to Trent Park, a mansion house in North London.
On arrival, they were greeted by a one-legged Scottish aristocrat named Lord Aberfeldy. He was, he told them, their welfare officer and a second cousin of the king, who was very concerned that they should be treated well.
But this was all an elaborate charade. Aberfeldy was no royal relative – he was an intelligence officer called Ian Munro, who also happened to be a very good actor. So enthusiastically did he throw himself into this role that, according to a colleague, “he became too grand to talk to any of us” and “expected orderlies to address him as Your Lordship”.
His job was to butter up the generals and keep them happy. While Aberfeldy flattered them and brought them treats, they were less likely to notice what was unusual about Trent Park, which was that everything that could be bugged was.
Hidden microphones were everywhere: in the light fittings, in the fireplaces, under the floorboards in the generals’ bedrooms. There were even some hung in the trees in the grounds. The whole place was wired for sound and, in rooms hidden from view, secret listeners tuned in to everything the Germans said.
This was one of the most effective intelligence operations of the war, yet probably the least known. Its records have been declassified only over the past 20 years, and Helen Fry’s remarkable and insightful book throws new light on its workings.
It was run by Thomas Joseph Kendrick, a man with 30 years’ worth of experience in the secret services behind him.
WHILE working as a British passport officer in 1938, he became the “Oskar Schindler of Vienna”, arranging for hundreds of Jews to leave Austria after the Nazi takeover. He was arrested, interrogated by the Gestapo and expelled from the country for espionage.
Returning to London, he was the ideal commander for a new unit setting up a special bugging operation in the Tower of London. When war was declared, and the first German prisoners of war (PoWs) arrived – most Luftwaffe pilots and U-boat officers – Kendrick was ready.
Early results were promising, although, very occasionally, one of the shrewder prisoners became suspicious. Wilhelm Meyer, a pilot shot down over the Thames in November 1939, asked a cellmate: “Do you think listening apparatus are built in here?” But even Meyer finally decided he was being over-cautious.
Most were blithely unsuspecting as Kendrick’s team recorded every word they said.
As the war went on, and more and more PoWs arrived, Kendrick expanded his work. Three more sites, including Trent Park, were fitted with cutting-edge recording technology shipped over from the Radio Corporation of America in New York. With Allied victories in North Africa, more senior German officers were taken captive. (There was, of course, a huge influx of high-ranking Wehrmacht personnel after D-Day.)
As operations grew, Kendrick needed extra listeners. His interview techniques could be terrifying for candidates.
He once handed a would-be recruit a pistol across his desk. “If you ever betray anything about this work,” he said, “here is the gun with which I expect you to do the decent thing. If you don’t, I will.” His original listeners were British-born, but fluent in German. Soon, because of the variety of accents and dialects they were encountering, he needed native German-speaking emigres, most of them driven into exile by the Nazis.
They were the “King’s Most Loyal Enemy Aliens”, as one man sardonically described them.
Kendrick also used “stool pigeons” – fake fellow prisoners who joined real PoWs in their cells and subtly encouraged them to talk. One of these, a fluent German speaker, was the father of singer and actress Olivia Newton-John.
Another, whose name has never been revealed, was a former inmate of Belsen, imprisoned for his political views. After release, he had been conscripted into the German army and then captured by the British.
Unsurprisingly, his loyalty to the Nazi regime was non-existent. He was one of the first to reveal the horrors going on in the camps. But Kendrick’s greatest successes were with the generals at Trent Park. The more senior they were, the more they knew (and could unwittingly reveal) about the German war effort.
Most of them were eccentric, arrogant parodies of the Prussian officer class. One, Lieutenant-General Gotthard Frantz, wore a monocle at all times, even under sunglasses, and went to bed with all his medals on.
Another was heard to exclaim in utter bafflement, “We have the best generals and we are losing the war!”
As Fry wryly comments: “Clearly, talking too much within earshot of the hidden microphones may have had something to do with that (the loose talk).”
Others, however, more sensitive and intelligent, became severe critics of the Nazis – although toasts were still raised on Hitler’s birthday. “Pity it has to be English beer,” remarked one of the generals.
RIVALRIES developed at Trent Park between pro-Nazis and those utterly disillusioned with the progress of the war.
Kendrick’s methods of dealing with the generals was unusual, to say the least. As well as listening in on their every conversation, he took to wining and dining them. There were even lunch trips to Simpson’s on the Strand.
When Winston Churchill found out about this, he was furious and had them stopped – so Kendrick relocated the lunches to The Ritz.
Helen Fry likens the atmosphere at Trent Park to a traditional London gentlemen’s club.
Living a life of relative luxury, with their egos stroked and sense of self-importance encouraged, they relaxed – and played straight into Kendrick’s hands.
However unorthodox his operation, it worked. His listeners never set eyes on a single German PoW, but eavesdropped on more than 10,000.
They picked up enormously valuable intelligence on the secret weapons programme that produced the V1 and V2 rockets; on battle plans and troop positions; and on U-boat bases and new aircraft technology.
“You have done a Herculean task,” Kendrick was told towards the end of the war.
It was on a par with the better-known work at Bletchley Park and the cracking of the enigma code.
Helen Fry’s richly researched book, packed with surprising and fascinating detail, will bring the covert listeners of the time some of the attention they deserve.
– The Walls Have Ears: The Greatest Intelligence Operation of World War II is published by Yale, 320pp
Book Review – Eileen: The Making of George Orwell
LITERARY REVIEW
BACK in 1934, a poem was published in the Sunderland Church High School magazine. It had been written by one of its alumnae, Eileen Maud O’Shaugnessy entitled, End Of The Century, 1984.
The poem foresaw a bleak near-future in which academic scholars, with no need for books, “know just what they ought”, and which led to a situation described as “mental cremation”.
A year after writing that poem, pretty dark-haired Eileen would meet George Orwell at a smoky party in a flat in London’s Hampstead. He fixed his piercing blue eyes on her and they talked all evening. “Now, that’s just the kind of girl I would like to marry,” Orwell said afterwards to the party’s host – and he proposed within weeks. He was so hard up that he could afford only a cheap ring from Woolworths.
That “1984” poem was rediscovered only in 2001. It’s surely not fanciful to suggest, as the author of this fascinating biography of Orwell’s first wife writes, that Eileen’s poem planted the seeds of the Nineteen Eighty-Four dystopia in Orwell’s mind: a world where the thoughts of a brainwashed society are prescribed by Big Brother.
The Canadian author Sylvia Topp has brilliantly recaptured the flavour and texture of the Orwell’s marriage.
One that is vividly bound up that the reader of this book might feel as if they themselves had been living in a damp, cold, mouse-infested cottage with a corrugated iron roof, regularly milking the goats and living on eggs from the stock of 26 hens. Eileen spent hours typing up her husband’s manuscripts, while he repeatedly coughed all over her, a perpetual drip on the end of his nose, his infected TB breath imbuing the place with a sickly-sweet odour.
THEIR tragically brief nine years of marriage took place before Orwell became famous. He was a little-known, struggling author. In a drive to shrug off his well-healed Eton years of public schooling, the couple embarked on a Thirties Good Life, a Tom-and-Barbara type of existence, which aimed to prove it was possible to subsist on their own produce.
They kept a goat, named Muriel after one of Orwell’s aunts (there would later be a goat in Animal Farm also called Muriel). Every morning Orwell rose at 6.30am to milk Muriel and to record precisely how many eggs each hen had laid. Utterly shabby in the daytime, the Old Etonian in Orwell came out at night: he changed into black tie every evening, and tucked into Eileen’s apple meringue pie.
It was Eileen, not her husband, who was the university graduate. Orwell had left Eton to be a policeman in Burma where, with servants to do everything for him, he’d picked up slovenly habits, such as dropping his cigarette ends onto the floor. Eileen had a degree from St Hugh’s College, Oxford, and was studying for an MA in psychology in London when she met Orwell. She gave up her studies and devoted her life to be his helpmeet and typist.
Neither of them was healthy. In fact, there’s so much illness in this book that you may well feel that the very pages you’re reading are contagious. Orwell kept having to spend months in sanitoriums because he was coughing up blood. This made life even more exhausting for Eileen, who had to visit him (starting with a three-mile walk just to get to the railway station), as well as typing up his manuscripts, and tending to the animals and plants on her own.
She was so tied up doing all this, and he was so busy writing and being ill, that neither noticed that Eileen, working herself to the bone, was ailing faster.
A few months into their marriage, in 1936, Orwell vanished to Spain to fight for the Republican army. Eileen followed him there shortly afterwards; she managed to get Orwell’s Aunt Nellie to live at the cottage and milk Muriel in their absence.
Eileen got a job as a secretary to the Independent Labour Party representative in Barcelona, which she greatly enjoyed. It’s thought that, while in Spain, she had a brief affair with Georges Kopp, Orwell’s commander. Her husband, meanwhile, was shot in the shoulder by Fascists, and said to the American beside him: “I’m done for. Please tell Eileen I love her.”
Thanks to Eileen’s swift organisation and care, the couple managed to escape by train, just before the war turned really nasty. Back they went to their mouse-infested cottage, the unkempt garden gone to seed, Aunt Nellie totally out of her depth.
How was Orwell and Eileen’s relationship, really? Infuriatingly for posterity, they threw almost all their letters to each other away – which suggests a marked lack of romance.
Eileen had that brief affair in Spain, and Orwell, returning to Britain, started pursuing Eileen’s best friend, Lydia Jackson, to whom he wrote: “I would regard it as a privilege to see you naked”. Lydia succumbed, writing later that Orwell’s kissing was “good and clean”, but his hands were “coarse and clumsy”.
So the Orwells’ marriage was a bit of an open one. The great sadness was that the couple couldn’t conceive a child. This may have been caused by Eileen’s mild attack of Spanish flu in the pandemic of 1918. Orwell refused to submit to a medical examination, thinking it “too disgusting”.
YET there’s a real sense that these were two kindred spirits who found one another’s company perpetually stimulating. Topp’s subtitle for her book is The Making of George Orwell, and she argues that it was thanks to Eileen that Orwell’s prose took on a fresh zip and wit. Many critics noted a new zestfulness in his writing after they met, though no one credited her.
Orwell admired Eileen’s highly educated mind. They sparked off each other, keeping up a “merry war” of words. She would pronounce on his generalisations, such as “all tobacconists are fascists”, and would not let him get away with them.
Typically cussedly, the couple returned to London during the Blitz, renting a succession of cabbage-smelling London flats. Both got wartime jobs: Eileen with the Ministry of Food, and Orwell as talks assistant for the BBC Foreign Service. All too imaginable.
Wonderfully, in May 1944, the couple adopted a baby, Richard. But you can feel tragedy approaching. Eileen, increasingly weak, took their son to stay with her widowed sister-in-law, while Orwell went off to Paris as a war correspondent.
One of the very few letters to survive is the last one Eileen sent to her husband in 1945, asking for his signed permission to pay for an operation for a hysterectomy to remove a growth, saying: “I really don’t think I’m worth the money.”
You can see her handwriting trailing off as the morphine takes hold. She died of cardiac failure under anaesthetic, aged 39. Orwell would live for only another five years, dying just a few months after marrying his second wife, Sonia, on his deathbed. Even he didn’t live to see his own astonishing success.
– Eileen: The Making Of George Orwell by Sylvia Topp is published by Unbound, 560pp
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