Chapter Fourteen

As OUR fame spread in the world of the Secret Service, more and more visitors, both British and American, asked to be shown over MB with its studios, record library, intelligence files, and newspaper and radio news rooms. Some of them, like General `Wild Bill' Donovan of O.S.S., even sat in on our morning conference and listened as Clifton Child and his intelligence officers produced their suggestions for news items and I directed how each item should be written and angled.

But mostly my guests were satisfied with a brisk look around, a brief audition of the various stations and the inevitable conference in my office where we discussed at length how their organisation could help mine and what we, in return, could do for them.

When they had gone I often found myself smiling wryly at the thought of what an odd impression we must have made on them. For a more weirdly assorted group it would have been hard to find anywhere in Britain at that time. German refugees, German prisoners, Balkan beauties, Italians, Hungarians, Rumanians, Bulgarians, British girl secretaries, British and American editors and executives, all jostled each other in the passages of MB talking their different languages and their assorted varieties of English. Each of them dressed as the fancy took him or her.

On one occasion a functionary of the Court of Admiralty met me and my team at a local cinema bringing us a canister containing German films found on a German boat taken in prize. I wanted to show the film to my team to give them an idea of German war-time life as seen through the eyes of Dr. Goebbels's cinema studios. As the men and girls tumbled out of the buses and into the cinema the Law Courts official contem plated us with the severe and disapproving stare of a churchwarden regarding a bunch of tipsy Teddy boys. " You're something to do with the Ministry of Information I suppose?" he said when the last of my gang of wild Bohemians had disappeared inside the vestibule.

" Oh no, not M. of L" I said quite truthfully, and then I added wickedly, "as a matter of fact we are Foreign Officediplomats you know!" He looked me over in dumbfounded amazement. And indeed I must have appeared an odd species of diplomat in shapeless grey flannels, khaki shirt open at the neck, my old suede jacket from the Spanish war, and a beard. The beard I had grown, not as a disguise, as has been said by some of the post-war German magazine writers elaborating their bits of tittle-tattle about the mysterious boss of the Soldatensender, nor even, as still others have said, to impress and terrify the members of my team. The simple truth is that I had found it hard to get razor blades. Once a week therefore, on my regular trip to London, I called at the barber's shop in the basement of Bush House. A cheerful little Whitechapel barber named Iky tended my beard. He called it `our beard' and treated it as though it was a piece of ornamental box hedge at Hampton Court. Each week he tried to cut it into a fresh shape.

" A spade beard today, sir?" he would ask, while the other barbers crowded in close to listen to him. "Or shall we continue with the Trotsky you're wearing now, sir, with perhaps just a shade more deviation to the left? No? Then how would it be to try something like this one I found on this tin?" And he produced an empty tin of Skipper's Sardines with a picture on it of a beard-fringed Skipper.

My team had expanded so rapidly that we had been forced to requisition extra houses in the village of Aspley Guise. The Germans alone now occupied seven houses and as soon as new prisoners came in from Normandy-we would have to take over yet another `desirable residence'.

The villagers were much intrigued by the mysterious foreigncrs who strolled around their narrow lanes and village streets. No one knew who or what they were. Our men were forbidden t o enter the local pubs, and the housekeepers and servants of our houses were all sworn to silence under the Official Secrets Act.

In my house, R.A.G., we lived well enough. Much better, in fact, than most people in Britain. And we did so although we adhered strictly to the war-time rationing regulations. From Woburn Park we used to get venison, which was unrationed and unwanted, thanks to the obtuse refusal of the average Briton to eat this delicacy with which he is unacquainted. Our own chickens laid eggs for us, fed on pellets for which we had given up our egg coupons. Vegetables were grown in our grounds by the gardener, father of my highly efficient housekeeper and cook, Freda Maddy. The team collected mushrooms when out on their walks in the fields, and Isabel, to whom I had given Can expensive Paris education' in the culinary arts-as artist Peter Rose Pulham used to say-taught Mrs. Maddy the finer points of French cuisine. Moreover, my wine cellar was still well stocked, thanks to my wine merchant friend John Hill of Hedges & Butler.

Somehow the story of R.A.G. dinners of mushrooms cooked in wine got around, and soon there was ugly talk of `foreigners living in luxury while Britons starved'. It even got to the ears of my old colleague John Gordon of the Sunday Express. He sent a reporter to investigate `the scandal'. The report was not published until after the war,* when the security ban forbidding any mention of our existence had been lifted.

" `Fat-of-the-land' Life of German P-O-Ws. Mushrooms cooked in wine." said the headline, nicely calculated to excite the indignation of John Gordon's Scottish-Canadian master on grounds both of patriotism and thrift. The dispatch fully lived up to the headlines.

" The German prisoners who did broadcasting and propaganda work for Britain in civilian clothes had a good war here. ... This alien propaganda corps, which included women, were lodged in big 20 to 14-roomed houses standing in their own grounds ... the men were all dressed in lounge suits or sports clothes ... villagers told how the foreign contingent lived on the fat of the land. In one week last year 434 pints of milk were delivered to the houses where the Germans and others were lodged.

" I was told how Continental delicacies were bought from Bedford for their table, how the best produce of a local fruit (arm was allocated to them, how sometimes they dined off mushrooms cooked in wine......

How this piece would have rejoiced the victims of our 'Diplomat Rations' Campaign! `Der Chef' could not have done better.

* Sunday Express, February 17th, 1946.

Undeterred by this gossip, however, I continued to do my best to keep up the morale of the team and give `birthday parties' on each anniversary of Gustav Siegfried Eins and the Atlantiksender. The P.o.W.s joined in all this with as much zest as our old-timers. So, too, did Father Andreas. " I was prepared for anything at MB," commented one of my delighted American visitors watching the Father at one such party, "but never, never, never did I expect to see a priest in a Conga line!"

Soon I found romance blossoming between the British and Balkan girl secretaries and my new friends from the U-boats, the Luftwa$e, and the Afrika-corps. Young Virchow fell in love with Marianne, a very pretty young Jewess of the Elizabeth Taylor type, and she with him. They announced their engagement. It created a big stir among the prisoners. Another officer reproached Virchow. He was a Bavarian monarchist with a lamily name known throughout Europe as long ago as the fifteenth century. " How can you possibly do this? Your family will never forgive you!" " I am sure they will approve," replied Virchow. "Marianne belongs to a very old and aristocratic Jewish family. Much older than mine or yours!" Oh, that Hitler could have heard them. I do not, to this day, know whether it was due to a natural mischievousness, or whether it was the psychological effect of the work we were doing. But the members of my team were for ever playing tricks either on each other, or my guests or on me. And as often as not these pranks took the form of forgeries in the best `black' manner.

Max Braun they hoaxed with what purported to be a Foreign Office letter warning him that an attempt was to be made on his life. Another victim was an American Marines major of the U.S. Naval Intelligence, who in the autumn of 1944 travelled down to stay with us most nights of the week, partly because he wished to be in touch with our work but also because he wished to sleep undisturbed by the German V. i rockets. My young villains hoaxed Major Dickson into a conviction that R.A.G. was less safe from buzz-bombs than he thought.

Early one morning, while he was still in bed, they catapulted a lump of earth through his window, shattering it with a thud and a crash. When the major came down to breakfast he found the team all earnestly discussing how far off the doodle-bug had fallen. Each man volunteered a different estimate. They told each other how the windows of their rooms had been shattered by the blast, how pictures had fallen, and how the roof had been blown off the vicar's house.

Great was their joy when Major Dickson told them that his window, too, had succumbed to the blast. " I guess Aspley Guise," he said, "is also in the V. i danger zone now." Despite the pranks and the festivities, we all began to feel the pressure of our work and its nervous strain. It was particularly exhausting for Karl Robson and myself. My day began at nine-thirty in the morning, when in my office at MB I would read the latest batch of Foreign Office telegrams and the reports from the Secret Intelligence Service. I also had to attend to a mass of administrative detail even though I did not have to bother with the management of the compound and its affairs.

At ten forty-five the team assembled for our editorial conference in the central operations room. This went on until half-past one or two. For, with the comparatively untutored staff at our disposal, Karl and I found it best to discuss the presentation of each item that was going into the programme. The afternoon was spent getting the news and talks written, the programmes and the music arranged. Nothing was broadcast without having been seen and approved by Karl Robson or myself. And much of it invariably had to be rewritten. In the evening I listened at intervals to the programme as it went out, suggested improvements here and there, sub-edited and `angled' fresh items of news as they broke on the Helschreiber or our British and American agency tapes, and in between it all I discussed new ideas and new campaigns with my team or any visitors who might have come down to spend the night with me at R.A.G.

Never did Karl Robson or I get to bed before one a.m. Let no one, however, imagine that my sleep was uninterrupted. For at three a.m. the door of my bedroom would softly open, a hand switched on the lamp on my bedside table, and a girl's voice spoke. " Mr. Delmer," it said sweetly through my dreams, "Major Glarke's compliments." Standing beside my bed, solicitously offering me a large buff envelope containing a dispatch, I saw a blonde angel, blue uniformed, breeched and high-booted. From under a crash helmet peeped corn-coloured curls. Her slender waist was tightly strapped in a leather corset. There she stood awaiting my command, her cheeks flushed by the icy before-dawn air, her crimson lips slightly parted-the dream vision of a James Bond fetishist. But this was no dream.

She was the dispatch-rider sent over to my bedside from Marylands, as Harold Keeble's printing shop was called, with the page proofs of .Nachrichten fur die Truppe. As my bedside visitor waited, I went through the proofsscanning them, I hope with almost the same critical care I had seen the great master of the Daily Express devote to his productions. If I found anything wrong my rage was certainly no less than his.

And by the time I had put the telephone down again I had pumped myself into such a fury and generated so much adrenalin that it was hours after the blonde leather-strapped vision had departed, before I dropped off back to sleep again. All this soon became too much for Isabel. First she insisted on separate rooms so that she should not be awakened by my dawn visitor. Then she got herself a job as an artist designer for one of the department's productions in London. She went off to live there and only visited us at R.A.G. at remote intervals. That was the beginning of the end of my first marriage.

Chapter's 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Aspistdistra Photos - Milton Bryan Photos - Contents

The Soul of Hitler : Series of articles published in July 1939 in the Daily Express "H.M.G.'s secret pornographer" : Article by Sefton Delmer Ian Fleming : Secret Memo Sefton Delmer Attack on Morale of German Forces in Norway : Article by Sefton Delmer on Lord Haw Haw