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  His family tolerated all this – often it amused them – yet none of them could really understand why these creatures responded to him as they did. This sometimes withdrawn boy appeared to have what naturalists call ‘the gift’. Within a month of finding a female toad, for example, which, for reasons known only to Max, he had christened Ted, he had tamed her. ‘I got her to feed out of my hand, and she would even take hold of an earth-worm suspended from my fingers and try to pull it out of my grasp.’6 Few wild-born toads will feed from a human hand. Fewer still are happy to do this after so little time in captivity.

  ‘He handled them brilliantly,’ a cousin later recalled. ‘They seemed to come to him easily, trustingly.’7 In the way that some gardeners are green-fingered, Max had an apparently intuitive understanding of how to handle animals, a personal magnetism. They trusted him, especially female creatures, it seemed, and throughout his childhood he continued to display this rare gift.

  At the age of twelve, he was paid seven shillings and sixpence for an article of his on animal welfare. In the same year he proudly sewed onto his shirt the naturalist badge that he had been awarded as a Boy Scout. His ambitions at the time were to be either a zookeeper, a vet or a taxidermist. It was clear to anyone who knew Max, or those who saw him handle pets, that his career would involve animals.

  Then came 1914. In May of that year, Max’s father died unexpectedly at the age of fifty-three after a short illness. Hugh Knight’s death seemed to confirm an absence in his son’s life rather than create one. His father had been a peripheral presence, one whose place in the family hierarchy was rapidly assumed by Hugh’s brother, Robert, who was parsimonious, prudish and much less forgiving of Max. He saw his nephew as wayward. Others might have been charmed by Max’s love of animals, or his growing interest in music. Not Uncle Robert. Soon after Hugh’s death, Robert Knight had his nephew dispatched to HMS Worcester, a training vessel for those going into the merchant navy. Max’s mother was by then financially dependent on her brother-in-law Robert and was either unable to intervene or unwilling to do so.

  To describe the regime on board this naval training vessel as Spartan would be unkind to that ancient Greek city-state. HMS Worcester had it all: barbaric initiation ceremonies, arcane traditions, a rigid pecking order, rampant bullying and a rule against boys having more than one bath a week. The food was ‘unfit for human consumption’.8 Cadets were deprived of sleep, and during the winter it was knee-shakingly cold. Yet life on board HMS Worcester certainly had the desired effect of hardening up its teenage cadets.

  By the end of 1914, Max was living in a country that had gone to war, his elder brother was fighting in the trenches, his father had recently died, while he himself had started a harsh new life as a naval cadet. Aged fourteen, he had been fast-tracked into adulthood.

  After several years on HMS Worcester, Max volunteered for the Royal Naval Reserve. Although he emerged from the conflict unscathed, in the last year of the war his brother, Eric, was killed on the Western Front. This left Max, by the end of the war, bereft of the two most important men in his life. He finished his naval career in 1919 and went to live with his mother and sister in London, where he took a lowly job as a clerk at the Ministry of Shipping. With no father or brother to rein him in, he was soon sucked into a subversive new movement. While other men his age worried about the protean political shape of the world, eagerly signing up to trade unions and political parties, Max joined a different kind of party. He got into jazz.

  The jazz scene in postwar London was irreverent and wild, an uncharted, exotic land where it seemed that anything went. ‘You can call off imaginary figures, yell “hot dog” in the midst of some perfectly decorous dance, and make a donkey of yourself generally.9 That is jazz,’ said Paul Whiteman, the so-called King of Jazz, adding: ‘anybody can jazz’. Jazz was a musical movement as much as a youthful provocation. It was rebellious, out of control and for many people in Britain its sudden popularity signalled a breakdown in morality. The nineteen-year-old Maxwell Knight could not get enough of it.

  On leaving the navy, right after the end of the war, Max set up a jazz band composed of ex-servicemen. It was, he claimed, ‘London’s first small, hot combination’.10 If they really were ‘hot’, then some credit for their playing should go to the man then giving Max clarinet lessons: Sidney Bechet, the legendary jazz saxophonist who was then based in London, a musician whose playing fell upon the listener, wrote Philip Larkin, ‘as they say love should, / Like an enormous yes’.11 Max later recalled a ‘sort of jam session’ with Bechet in which the maestro played on a soprano saxophone ‘Softly Awakes My Heart’, from the opera Samson and Delilah, while the young civil servant ‘did my best to be with him on the clarinet’ – possibly the same instrument he had just bought from Bechet.12 Max also became friends with members of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, including its leader, Nick LaRocca, who gave him the first pressing of their hit record Rag Tiger. It did not survive. ‘Some ass of a friend of mine a few years later went and put his foot on it.’13

  In these loud and out-of-control months after leaving the Royal Naval Reserve, jazz became a governing passion in Max’s life, but it did not replace the other one. Even as he threw himself into the demi-monde of London’s new jazz scene, making new friends everywhere he went, alive to its possibilities, Max continued to collect animals. Like a young man who refuses to pack away his boyhood train set, and expands it instead, he now had more animals than ever before. As well as mice and a bush baby – a small furry primate with worried-looking eyes and the pointed ears of a bat – there was a parrot living in his flat and several grass snakes. On at least one occasion, his two hobbies collided when he tried to impersonate a snake charmer by playing his clarinet ‘fairly close’ to his pet snakes.14 To his lasting disappointment, the snakes did not respond.

  Just as it seemed that there was no room in his life for another animal, Max acquired a new pet that he called Bessie. Yet few people remembered this animal’s name. They found it hard to see past the fact that Bessie was a bear.

  This particular bear, Max recalled, was ‘the most attractive bundle of cunning and mischief that you could possibly imagine’.15 Bessie the bear caused mayhem wherever she went, knocking over furniture in Max’s flat, rootling around in the kitchen and on one occasion getting her snout stuck in the flour jar. Max would put her in a harness and take her out for walks in the street. Passers-by mistook her for an exuberant and rather large Chow puppy.

  Otherwise, Bessie spent her days inside Max’s flat, in a mansion block in Putney, southwest London, where she seemed to get on well with the other pets, including a bulldog and a young baboon. This list of animals is revealing. Nobody else in London had a bear, a bulldog and a baboon. Max made sure to mention this to a gossip columnist that he had befriended, who made him and his exotic menagerie the subject of a short article. As a boy, Max had had no interest in looking after common-or-garden pets such as rabbits or guinea pigs, partly because he thought they were ‘stupid’ but also because nobody paid them much attention. Max was a watcher at heart, yet it seemed that he also liked to be seen.

  There may have been another reason why he clung on with such tenacity to his childhood hobby. Looking after these animals must have reminded him of that more innocent age he had enjoyed before his life had been upended by war, adolescence, HMS Worcester and the deaths of his brother and father. Max’s childhood was unfinished business. Caring for these pets was perhaps a way of getting back to it.

  Given the jazz, the animals, the drinking and the dancing, his day job at the Ministry of Shipping was for him a distraction as much as anything else, and after no more than a year, he was out. It is unclear whether he resigned or was sacked. A respectable career as a civil servant had stretched out before him, and with it stability, status and security, but it had come too soon.

  Having left the civil service, Max found a job selling paint. Not long after this unusual career move, his uncle decided to cut him off.
Robert Knight was no longer prepared to endure the spectacle of his nephew’s life unravelling like this. He announced that forthwith Max was banned from all family gatherings and would no longer receive his modest allowance.

  This was a heavy, lasting blow. Max had never seen himself as a rebel. He wanted to lead a more unbuttoned life than most of his contemporaries and he enjoyed being the odd man out. ‘In a world where we are all tending to get more and more alike,’ he later wrote, ‘a few unusual people give a little colour to life!’16 Until then, he had imagined that everyone was laughing along with him – but not his uncle, it seemed, who had come to think of him as a pleasure-seeking Peter Pan more interested in jazz and pets than settling down to become a conscientious civil servant.

  Max was still living in Putney with his sister and mother. Although the two women in his life did not turn on him in the wake of his family excommunication, they could hardly ignore what had happened. When Ada made a codicil to her will shortly after, to reflect the death of Max’s brother, Eric, who was one of the executors, she chose to substitute Eric with a former colleague of her late husband. Clearly Max could not be trusted with this level of responsibility.

  Max’s new career as a paint salesman lasted only a few months, after which he found a job teaching games at the well-to-do Willington Prep School in Putney. Sometimes he filled in for a colleague by taking an English class, hoping, perhaps, that this might lead to more time spent teaching more challenging subjects. But it did not.

  By 1923, Max was stuck. He even tried to become a novelist to escape his predicament, writing short stories in the style of John Buchan, his favourite author, whose amateur spy and all-action hero Richard Hannay from books such as The Thirty-Nine Steps he idolised, and sending these off to boys’ magazines. But if any of them were published, there is no record of it. All the doors in Maxwell Knight’s life appeared to have closed. He had a lot to prove and dangerously little to lose. He was also very short of money.

  The only bright spot in Max’s life was his girlfriend, Hazel Barr, a quiet eighteen-year-old schoolgirl he had met one morning on the upper deck of a bus. He had been going to work, she to school. There was a spark between them. They began to take the same bus each day. Max was soon invited to meet Hazel’s parents, and made a winning impression on her mother. Indeed Mrs Barr began to wonder whether this nice young games teacher was going to propose marriage to her daughter. Although Hazel and Max did not have sex, which was normal for an unmarried couple at the time, they saw a lot of each other. Hazel later described herself as ‘completely enamoured’ of Max, adding, ‘I think the feeling was mutual.’17 Hazel also appears to have taken her beau along to an event staged by the British Empire Union, which was probably how Max came to meet John Baker White.

  Given the dead-end Max had reached in his career, when asked by Baker White in 1923 whether he was interested in part-time, paid work of a patriotic nature, his response would have been emphatic and fast.

  Not long after, he went to see Sir George Makgill.

  What did Makgill make of Max? He was certainly different from the other men Baker White sent to him. Usually, these were bluff ex-officers in the mould of Bulldog Drummond, the fictional soldier famous for his Hun-bashing, Bolshie-baiting approach to life. Max Knight kept mice. He was not terribly interested in politics, and he adored jazz – which for a reactionary like Makgill was a tuneless abomination. Here was a twenty-three-year-old drop-out whose great gift in life, his ability to look after animals, seemed to qualify him to do little more than work in a zoo. Yet Makgill saw qualities in this apparently feckless young man that might be useful to him.

  It was a gamble – every agent recruitment is – but Makgill concluded that Maxwell Knight might be suitable for the task he had in mind. It was probably at this point in their conversation that Makgill began to explain a little more about himself and his organisation.

  2

  THE MAKGILL ORGANISATION

  Sir George Makgill had been on the other side of the world when he heard that his father had died. The elder son of a Scottish baronet, he had taken himself off to New Zealand several years earlier, and had expected to be there for a long time, when he learned of his father’s death and that he had inherited a title, land, property, money and a vast portfolio of shares and industrial holdings. Makgill’s understanding of the world began to change. He returned to Britain, where his boyish patriotism hardened into a more prickly nationalism. During the First World War, he campaigned for a boycott of all German goods. He funded the Anti-German Union and lobbied hard for the expulsion from the Privy Council, which advised the monarch, of two of the country’s leading Jewish politicians, Sir Ernest Cassel and Sir Edgar Speyer, arguing that they were not sufficiently British. But it was only towards the end of the war that Sir George Makgill found what he believed to be his calling in life.

  ‘The whole of Europe is filled with the spirit of revolution,’ warned the Prime Minister David Lloyd George in 1919.1 By then, Russia had fallen to Communism. Germany looked set to follow. The Austro-Hungarian Empire had collapsed. The Ottoman Empire was on the brink, and Bavaria and Hungary had just become Soviet Republics. The Communist threat to Britain in the immediate aftermath of the First World War was real and it was different. In 1920, the Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon complained that the Soviet Union ‘makes no secret of its intention to overthrow our institutions everywhere and to destroy our prestige and authority’.2 In the past, Britain’s enemies had endangered particular trade routes or far-flung colonial territories. Yet Communism and the Soviet Union imperilled the British ruling class, capitalism as an economic system and the entire British Empire. Although the British government tried to suffocate the Bolshevik experiment at birth, supplying arms and assistance to White Russian rebels in the years after the establishment of the new Communist regime in Russia, it failed. The Soviet Union emerged triumphant and was now stronger than ever. Moscow had both the resources and the will to succeed, as well as a recruiting tool of explosive potency. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 demonstrated beyond any argument that a speedy socialist revolution in an ageing autocracy, like Britain, was not just fantasy. It was realistic, and surprisingly easy to carry out.

  Most worrying for a man like Makgill, and so many others within Britain’s social, industrial and political elite, was the growing sympathy for the Soviet Union among large chunks of the newly enfranchised working class. Between 1914 and 1918, the size of the British electorate had more than doubled. For many of these new voters, the Bolsheviks had the noble appeal of the underdog. Trade union membership in Britain had rocketed. Unemployment would soon be on the rise, leaving the country hamstrung by industrial action. In 1920 alone, twenty-six million working days were lost to strikes. Even the police had gone on strike. The promise of Communism, or the threat of it, depending on your perspective, was without precedent. Sir George Makgill was one of those who became convinced that the British government had not recognised this danger for what it was. So, the baronet decided to take matters into his own hands.

  With the help of fellow industrialists, landowners and politicians who belonged to the British Empire Union, of which he was Honorary Secretary, Makgill set up a private intelligence agency. It was run, according to MI5, ‘somewhat on Masonic lines’, and would be known by various names, including the Industrial Intelligence Bureau and Section D (possibly after ‘Don’, its chief agent-runner).3 Yet the ‘Makgill Organisation’ is most apt, for, like so many intelligence agencies, its activities came to reflect the fears and private obsessions of those in charge, which in this case meant Makgill himself.

  Some of the principal customers for its intelligence product were factory owners and right-wing industrialists from the Coal Owners’ and Ship-Owners’ Associations or the Federation of British Industries. They wanted timely information on forthcoming strikes and the names of prominent Communists and trade unionists. But these were not the only people interested in its intelligence. Makgill planted a
gents inside the Communist Party and the more militant trade unions as well as pretty much any other group he did not like the sound of or was intrigued by: Anarchists, Irish Home Rulers, women traffickers, Occultists; everything from the Rudolf Steiner Anthroposophical Society to the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Yet there was never any hesitation or doubt in Makgill’s mind that the principal threat came from the Soviet Union.

  With so many groups to investigate, Makgill was almost constantly on the lookout for new agents. He used talent-spotters like Baker White to send him potential recruits, which was how he had come to be interviewing Max.

  Makgill sought two qualities in his agents. The first was an almost Masonic emphasis on secrecy. ‘If you talk,’ Makgill had told Baker White, ‘you’re out.’4 The second was more idiosyncratic. He would only take on agents who shared his political outlook. This was the ‘unique feature’ of the Makgill Organisation that ensured that ‘every man and woman working in it could be trusted’.5

  It is hard to say whether Makgill felt that Max lacked one of these qualities, but the first job he gave him was certainly unusual. Max was not asked to join a trade union or become a Communist. Instead, his instructions were to penetrate a political group that posed no apparent threat to the country, to Sir George Makgill or to any of his cronies. Max’s target was an organisation that was conservative, patriotic and staunchly anti-Communist, the kind of group Makgill himself might have set up.