Today is the 80th anniversary of the UK’s worst civilian disaster of the Second World War.
On the evening of 3rd March 1943, 173 Londoners (including 62 children) were crushed to death at the Bethnal Green underground station. Another sixty were injured.
Since the ‘Blitz’ of September 1940, Londoners had tended to use Tube stations as mass shelters during bombing raids – so on March 3rd 1943 when the air-raid warning sirens sounded, many East Enders again headed to Bethnal Green station. For reasons that are still unknown, panic and confusion developed on the staircase, causing a devastating death toll.
By a tragic irony, there was in fact no air raid that night. The siren was a false alarm. Nevertheless, until 1977 the essential facts were covered up: it was officially claimed that the disaster had been caused by enemy action rather than civilian panic, and it was not until 2018 that an extraordinary allegation surfaced, made by one of Britain’s most senior diplomats.
Sir William Strang had made his way up the Foreign Office hierarchy since 1919, and by 1943 was British representative (with the rank of Ambassador) on the European Advisory Commission – the liaison committee of senior diplomats from the Allied powers.
Yet we now know something that was kept secret for decades, even after Sir William’s death – he detested Jews and distrusted Britain’s Soviet Communist allies.
We know this because of one of the most secret operations of Britain’s security service, MI5.
Ever since the invasion scare of May 1940, the British authorities had taken special measures to combat a feared ‘Fifth Column’ of German sympathisers within the UK. Among these measures was the deployment of undercover agent Eric Roberts, who under the pseudonym ‘Jack King’ pretended to be the British representative of German intelligence.
The senior officials of Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, as well as leading figures in other pro-German, pro-Italian or anti-Jewish groups, had been interned without trial since the spring of 1940, but it was correctly suspected that other sympathisers with national socialism had escaped the round-up.
All real German agents in the UK had been captured, executed, or turned into double agents, but there was always the chance that ordinary Britons might become disillusioned by the war effort, or ‘radicalised’ by (for example) a perception that Jews were profiting from the black market.
MI5 therefore created their own fake ‘nazi spy ring’ to draw out such people and ensure that any such activities were diverted into useless channels.
This developed into a complex network, manipulated within MI5 by Victor Rothschild (Lord Rothschild), a member of Europe’s most (in)famous Jewish dynasty. Rothschild is now known to have had many dubious connections with Soviet spies, and was perhaps an important Soviet agent in his own right – a story that will be explored in later articles on this blog. He controlled the Eric Roberts / ‘Jack King’ network together with his assistant Theresa Clay, who was also of Jewish ancestry.
The end result, as Rothschild put it in a top secret summary of the case, was the creation of “a network of sub-agents, all of whom believe that they are working for the Gestapo”, when in fact they were working for MI5. Among those drawn into the network was a Norfolk landowner, Ronald Creasy, who was a friend and ally of Sir Oswald Mosley and had been elected to his local council, where he rallied rural support for the British Union of Fascists. (I later met Ronald Creasy several times during the 1990s. He died aged 94 in 2004, and it was a strange experience for me in 2015 to read newly released MI5 files on someone I had known.)
Many of the most active members of the fake spy ring were women – often the wives, daughters or sisters of men who had been interned as security risks. Perhaps the most active was Marita Perigoe, a woman of partly Swedish and German ancestry, whose Australian mother May Brahe had been a famous songwriter.
Perigoe eagerly recruited her own sub-network of friends whom she believed were assisting German intelligence. Among them was a schoolteacher called Tamara Wilson Crowe, who was a friend of the Strang family. One MI5 source suggests that Miss Crowe was having an affair with Sir William himself, but for various reasons I have concluded that she was in fact a lesbian friend of Sir William’s daughter Jean.
For MI5 however, the point was that Miss Crowe was a close friend of the Strang family, and via Perigoe she passed on gossip that she believed would be useful to German intelligence. Had the spy ring been genuine, it would have been a sensational coup for Berlin to have an agent so close to one of the most senior British diplomats.
On 3rd August 1943 Roberts reported to his controllers that Perigoe had passed on the following gossip from Miss Crowe: “Strang said that he personally hated the Jews and regarded the Bolshevists and the Jews as two great menaces to all that was decent.”
Six days later he added from the same source that Strang had “alleged that the Bethnal Green tube disaster was caused by a Jewish pickpocket gang, the ring leader of which netted £200.”
MI5 were completely confident that they were in full control of the operation and that there was no chance of intelligence or careless gossip from Sir William Strang actually reaching real representatives of German intelligence. So they evidently did nothing to warn Sir William (or any of his colleagues at the Foreign Office) about the pro-German sympathies of his family friend Tamara.
In December 1944 Roberts reported that Strang had confided information about Anglo-Soviet relations and had been “derogatory in his views about Stalin and conditions in Russia”. Senior MI5 officer Guy Liddell noted: “I do not see what I can do with this information without jeopardising the sources.’
Liddell and Rothschild believed it was important to protect these sources even after the war, because the Roberts network was used as the basis for MI5 effectively controlling a large part of postwar British fascism. Some parts of the story have been revealed during the past few years in newspaper articles and in the book Agent Jack, by Robert Hutton, but a great deal about undercover infiltration of the British far right has yet to be fully explored. Further details will appear on this blog later this year.
Moreover, we still do not know the full details of what Sir William Strang knew or believed about Jewish criminals being to blame for Britain’s worst civilian wartime disaster – or his wider views on Jewish criminality and connections to Moscow’s agents of subversion.
Partly because MI5 wished to protect the secret of their fake ‘nazi spy ring’, they did nothing to impede Sir William Strang’s career. From 1945-47 he was political adviser to General (later Field-Marshal) Bernard Montgomery, the commander of British forces in occupied Germany. In 1947 he returned to Britain to head the German section of the Foreign Office, and in 1949 took the highest post in the land – Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office and Head of the Diplomatic Service.
Sir William Strang’s career ended in early retirement aged 60, after he collapsed during Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation service. He was raised to the peerage as Lord Strang and lived for another twenty-five years, dying aged 85 in 1978. How many of Sir William’s senior colleagues privately shared his views about Jews is another question that will be explored later this year by this blog.
