Churchill's Iceman Read online

  CONTENTS

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Henry Hemming

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Introduction

  PART I

  How to Become a War Correspondent

  How to Escape

  How to Become Invisible

  Pyke Hunt, Part 1

  How to Raise Your Child (and Pay for It)

  PART II

  How to Resolve an Epidemic of Anti-Semitism, a Royal Scandal and the Threat of Fascism

  How to Prevent a War

  Pyke Hunt, Part 2

  How to Defeat Nazism

  Pyke Hunt, Part 3

  How to Change the Military Mind

  Pyke Hunt, Part 4

  How to Succeed in America

  Pyke Hunt, Part 5

  How to Win the War with Ice

  How to Survive

  How to Live

  Pyke Hunt, Part 6

  Epilogue, or, How to Think Like a Genius

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Book

  There is no reason why you should have heard of Geoffrey Pyke. After his suicide in 1948 he was described as one of the great geniuses of his time, to rank alongside Einstein, yet he remains today, as The Times put it, ‘one of the most original if unrecognised figures’ of the twentieth century.

  Inventor, escapee, campaigner, war correspondent, Pyke was an unlikely hero of both world wars and is seen today as the father of the U.S. Special Forces. He changed the landscape of British pre-school education, earned a fortune on the stock market, wrote a bestseller and in 1942 convinced Churchill and Lord Mountbatten to build an aircraft carrier out of reinforced ice. He gave birth to the Mass Observation movement, escaped from a German concentration camp, devised an ingenious plan to get ambulances and microscopes to the Spanish Republicans for free and launched a private attempt to avert the outbreak of the Second World War by sending into Nazi Germany a group of pollsters disguised as golfers. But there was another side to this man. Pyke, it seems, was a man with a secret.

  In 2009 MI5 released a mass of material suggesting that Pyke was in fact a senior official in the Soviet Comintern. In 1951 papers relating to Pyke were found in the flat of ‘Cambridge Spy’ Guy Burgess after his defection to Moscow. MI5 had ‘watchers’ follow Pyke through the bombed-out streets of London, his letters were opened and listening devices picked up clues to his real identity. Convinced he was a Soviet agent codenamed ‘Professor P’, MI5 helped to bring his career to an end.

  It is only now, more than sixty years after his death, that Geoffrey Pyke’s astonishing story can be told in full. Churchill’s Iceman is a many-faceted account of this enigmatic man’s genius, and reveals him as one of the great innovators of the last century.

  About the Author

  Henry Hemming is the author of four previous books, including Misadventure in the Middle East which was shortlisted for the Dolman Travel Book Award. He has written for publications including The Times, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, Financial Times, Washington Post and The Economist. He lives in London with his wife and daughter.

  Also by Henry Hemming

  Misadventure in the Middle East In Search of the English Eccentric

  Together

  Abdulnasser Gharem

  Churchill’s Iceman

  The True Story of Geoffrey Pyke: Genius, Fugitive, Spy

  Henry Hemming

  For BB

  ‘The fact is, if I may put the point in a somewhat comical way, that I have been literally attached by God to our city, as if to a horse – a large thoroughbred, which is a bit sluggish because of its size and needs to be aroused by some sort of gadfly. Yes, in me, I believe, God has attached to our city just such a creature – the kind which is constantly alighting everywhere on you, all day long, arousing, cajoling, or reproaching each and every one of you. You will not easily acquire another such gadfly.’

  Socrates in Plato’s The Defence of Socrates

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In what follows direct speech is taken verbatim from either contemporary accounts or memoirs.

  INTRODUCTION

  February 1948

  Mrs Hopkins, the daily help, knew very little about the man who had taken rooms on the top floor, so she was unsure what to make of the note on his door. She could tell you that his name was Geoffrey Pyke. He was just over six feet tall, wore a battered Homburg over his balding pate and walked with the stoop of a man recovering from illness. He was bearded, middle-aged and lean. He had large feet, spoke with a deep and musical timbre and received an unusual amount of post from overseas. As far as she was aware, he was a good lodger, in the sense that he took in few guests, kept to himself and was never late with his rent. But like most of those who encountered this man or heard stories about him – from the fellow residents he passed on the stairs of this boarding house all the way to the King of England – Mrs Hopkins was never really sure who he was.

  By the time Geoffrey Pyke had moved to Hampstead, shortly before the end of the Second World War, he had collected an unlikely set of lives. Over the past two decades he had been described as everything from eccentric genius to war correspondent, jailbreaker, bestselling author, educationalist, speculator, mass-observer, advertising copywriter, political activist, military inventor and scientist, while for those in MI5, the British Security Service, Pyke was thought to be an undercover Soviet agent who had gone quiet in recent years. In each of these descriptions there was, it would later emerge, at least an element of truth.

  The note on his door was brief: ‘Please do not wake me.’

  Given the appalling weather outside this was not surprising. London was caked with snow and, with so many Londoners unable to get to work, Pyke’s decision to sleep in was understandable. But Mrs Hopkins was confused by his curtains being drawn well into the day while his lights remained on, as they had been since her arrival that morning. Something was not right. At around midday she knocked on his door.

  Nothing.

  And again.

  Perhaps she shouted his name before trying the handle, only to find that the door was unlocked.

  As usual his room was a mess, a papery metropolis of maps and journals, newspapers, statistical compendiums, letters stamped with the words ‘Most Secret’ and heaps of notes, many of them on feathery paper topped with a tropical-blue government crest. His bed had been propped up at one end, an attempt to improve his circulation, and elsewhere Mrs Hopkins took in the familiar sight of tabletops, shelves and sections of floor buried beneath strata of sardine tins, biscuit packets, ashtrays, copies of The Times and the Daily Worker, an occasional dunning letter, cups of lapsang souchong, half-empty bottles and more of that notepaper cobwebbed with his spidery handwriting.

  At last she saw him. He was stretched out in a chair by the window, arms loose by his side. His beard had gone and for once he looked indifferent to the world. Next to him there were three sealed letters and a sheet of paper bearing a message.

  Outside, Hampstead remained blank with snow and nothing much moved. In the wider world soldiers were still returning from war while refugees tried to make their way home. Society was rearranging itself after six years of armed conflict, genocide and upheaval; it was starting to rebuild and reconfigure according to new indices of fear and hope, but it would do so without this man. Late on Saturday, 21 February 1948, aged fifty-four, Geoffrey Pyke had taken his own life. As Time magazine put it the following week, ‘it was the only unoriginal thing he had ever done.’
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  This is the story of a man described in his Times obituary as ‘one of the most original if unrecognised figures of the present century’. Geoffrey Pyke was hailed by J. D. ‘Sage’ Bernal as not only a genius but ‘one of the greatest [. . .] geniuses of his time’. Lancelot Law Whyte, who helped develop the jet engine, compared him to Einstein, adding that ‘Pyke’s genius was more intangible, perhaps because he produced not one, but an endless sequence of ideas’. A scientist who worked alongside him felt he ‘stood out among his fellows like the North Face of the Eiger in the foothills of the Alps’. For another this was ‘the sort of man who would have invented the wheel’. Everyone seemed to agree on the quality of his mind, yet few could understand why he had committed suicide. Fewer still had any inkling that he might have led a double life.

  During the Second World War, without any military background or relevant qualifications, Geoffrey Pyke was appointed Director of Programmes at Combined Operations. As one of the ‘right-hand men’ of its buccaneering chief, Lord Louis Mountbatten, he was responsible for a stream of schemes, feints and military inventions including the idea, known as PLUTO, for an oil pipeline under the English Channel and another proposal whose advantages, for Prime Minister Winston Churchill, were ‘so dazzling that they do not at the moment need to be discussed’. Of another plan Churchill wrote, ‘Never in the history of human conflict will so few immobilise so many.’ Both had at their heart an ingenious use of ice. It was also around this time that King George VI heard about Pyke and became known for his impersonation of Mountbatten’s most colourful boffin, which involved exaggerated strokes of the royal chin (at the time Pyke wore a goatee).

  That he was the subject of lively stories told by Dickie Mountbatten to his cousin the King hints at a bright and unbuttoned personality. To look at, Pyke was certainly distinctive. Friends described his ‘immense natural dignity’. One man compared him to ‘a Russian princeling’. For the Nobel Prize-winning playwright Elias Canetti, he was ‘like a figure on a Byzantine icon’. By the end of the war there was a rich folklore of stories about Pyke and his various wardrobe malfunctions – it might be his flies getting stuck open, his preference for no socks whatever the weather, or his use of a shoestring instead of a tie. He was capable of standing out in any setting, a fluorescent thread on a hessian sack no matter where he went, and in many ways he cultivated this image of himself as the odd man out. But these tales told to the King were built up around more than the way Pyke conducted himself or his sartorial idiosyncrasies. At their heart was his extravagant ability to solve almost any problem put to him. Stranger still, his solutions seemed to work.

  Geoffrey Pyke had a genius for innovation. He was one of the great innovators of the twentieth century, both in the staggering range of his radical ideas and in his technique. He was involved in the birth of – to name just five – a revolutionary kindergarten based on Freudian psychoanalysis, the Mass Observation movement, a pioneering charity, the NHS and the ‘Devil’s Brigade’ – the maverick American-Canadian Commando unit to which today’s US and Canadian Special Forces trace their origin, and which provided the inspiration for Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 film Inglourious Basterds about a band of Allied guerrillas wreaking havoc behind enemy lines. He brought into the world a galaxy of ideas without having any particular expertise or even a university degree. He relied instead on an intuitive and crystal-sharp understanding of what mattered, why it mattered, and what he as a private citizen could do about it.

  Thoughout his life, Pyke arrived at the cutting edge of the great issues of the day and, as a consequence, his career – if career is the right word – can be seen as an alternative chronicle of the first half of the twentieth century, an age of extremes in which the possibilities of politics and science seemed to stretch further out to the horizon than ever before. Pyke lived according to the spirit of these times; indeed, he strove to embody within himself the bold idea that it was possible to rewire human society and to produce a world without war or want in which the future and everything it stood for would be embraced like an old friend.

  Original, eccentric, ambitious, Pyke liked to get the measure of his audience by making them laugh. He was a gadfly: a perpetual outsider with a nose for what he called humbug. His response to solemnity was to look for the joke, and more often than not this was where he found the seeds of his solutions; or, as he put it, ‘It is the concealed truth that makes the jest.’ He could be infuriating as well as funny, and at times his company was sobering: indeed, the US Deputy Solicitor-General, Oscar Cox, likened Pyke to ‘the voice of Conscience in Spring’.

  Although a man of supreme gifts, Pyke was not a household name at the time of his death and for many Britons today the first Pyke who comes to mind will be his cousin Magnus Pyke, the amiable 1970s scientific populariser. Geoffrey Pyke remains, as he was at his death, one of the most original yet unrecognised figures of the twentieth century. His genius was for coming up with radical ideas, not for seeing them through to completion. He had no interest in his legacy, hence there are many parts of his life that have remained unexplored since his suicide. Only now, following the release of previously classified documents by MI5, can this man’s extraordinary story be told in full.

  In August 2009 most of MI5’s material on Pyke entered the public domain. This hoard of documents offers an entirely new perspective on his life. MI5 suspected him of being a German spy in the First World War and, during the next war, while in the employ of Combined Operations, he was thought to have been a senior Comintern official working undercover for the Soviet Union. MI5 even discovered his Soviet code name – ‘Professor P.’ – and after his death found evidence of a connection between him and Soviet agents Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt.

  The case against him was detailed and substantial. It was based on intelligence drawn from MI5 informants, scraps of overheard conversations, intercepted letters and the results of Special Branch and MI5 observations of Pyke in which he was shadowed through the streets of London. His career in Combined Operations was curtailed, yet at no point did he understand the extent of MI5’s suspicions, no charge was ever brought against him and until now the truth of these allegations and of Pyke’s real identity have remained a mystery.

  This book is as much about whether Geoffrey Pyke was a Soviet agent during his time working for the British government – and, if so, why, how and to what end – as it is an account of the way he thought. Only by combining these sometimes disparate strands of his life can we get a sense of his beguiling, self-destructive genius and the extent to which it was a product of the society that he inhabited. Here was a man who saw the world into which he had been born as a kaleidoscope of challenges, problems and questions, many of which had not yet been asked. For this reason, what follows is arranged around MI5’s efforts to understand who he was as well as the great problems he took on during his lifetime, problems which obsessed him, motivated him and ultimately defined him.

  In the throes of adolescence Pyke began to believe that he was capable not just of identifying the most urgent problems faced by his generation but of finding solutions to them. Whether it was the design of a new motorcycle sidecar, how to make a fortune by trading copper futures or finding a way to avert the outbreak of war, Pyke was convinced that he could come up with an answer if he came at the question in the right way. It was an approach which he refined throughout his life, and one which he felt could be learnt by anyone. We can all think like geniuses, he insisted, but only if we are prepared to look foolish now and again.

  His outlook was particular, bold and exacting and it was not without risks. One of the first problems he set out to solve very nearly led to his death. It was the summer of 1914. The world had gone to war. Geoffrey Pyke was a twenty-year-old Cambridge undergraduate who found himself drawn irresistibly to the impossible.

  PART I

  HOW TO BECOME A WAR CORRESPONDENT

  ON 1 SEPTEMBER 1914 Geoffrey Pyke left the offices of one of the country’s best-sell
ing newspapers in something of a daze. What he had just suggested to the News Editor of the Daily Chronicle was so outlandish, so apparently silly, that he had given little thought to the possibility that it might be taken up. Now, as he made his way through the hurly-burly of Fleet Street, with bodies brushing past and the hum of horse manure buffeting up around him, he broke into a sweat. The thought jammed in his head was simple enough: that as a result of the conversation which had just finished he might be taken outside a foreign jail before the end of the month and shot. Gazing up at the soot-streaked palaces on either side of him, buildings which no longer impressed him as they had done earlier, Pyke wondered if he had made a terrible mistake.

  It had begun two months earlier, in July 1914, soon after he had finished his second year at Cambridge where his ‘abilities made him conspicuous’ and he was thought to be ‘extremely clever’. Pyke was taller than most and gangly, with a mat of dark hair set above a playful expression, someone who thrived under pressure and exuded the hard-won confidence of a boy who had been bullied at school before blossoming at university.

  After the excesses of May Week – the dancing, the shows and the sunny evenings spent ‘ragging’ about – he had set off with a friend on a walking tour of Norway and Sweden. Like most of their contemporaries, neither one saw the recent assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in distant Sarajevo as a reason to call off the trip.

  His companion was fellow Cambridge undergraduate Philip Sargant Florence, breezy and broad-shouldered, who was three years older than him, half-American and had grown up in an eccentric household. Generally he was hardened to the quirks of others, yet at an early stage in their journey Sargant Florence detected a change in his friend. If some people become a more cautious version of themselves in a foreign setting, Pyke seemed to do the opposite, and in this case Sargant Florence was partly responsible.