Amazing & Extraordinary Facts About Great Britain (22 page)

A controversial figure, he attracted the admiration and support of people as diverse as General Allenby, John Buchan and George Bernard Shaw.

B
ritain’s first spymaster was Sir Francis Walsingham (1532–1590) who ran Elizabeth I’s secret service. His most notable triumph was to unmask the conspirators behind a plot to murder Elizabeth and replace her with Mary, Queen of Scots. Walsingham and his codebreakers knew that the most commonly used letter in the English language is ‘e’ so, having intercepted Mary’s enciphered correspondence, they started by substituting ‘e’ for the most commonly used letter in the correspondence. They then worked through the alphabet using further common letters until they had enough to make sense of the messages. The penetration of the plot led directly to the execution of Mary in 1587 and that, in turn, to Philip of Spain’s decision to launch the Spanish Armada a year later.

In October 1909 a naval officer, Commander Mansfield Cumming, and an army captain, Vernon Kell, occupied some premises at 64, Victoria Street, opposite the Army and Navy Stores in central London. The two men became, respectively, the heads of MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service or SIS) and MI5, the domestic counter-intelligence Security Service. Cumming adopted the habit of writing in green ink and was referred to as ‘C’, both of these practices being followed by his successors, though in the James Bond films 007’s boss is referred to as ‘M’ rather than ‘C’. Cumming had a wooden leg and would alarm potential employees of MI6 in interviews by sticking a knife into it while they watched. Those who flinched were rejected by the service. He attempted to recruit the writer Compton McKenzie to the service, telling him that it was ‘capital sport’. A worthy forebear of 007. In the early days spying was terribly gentlemanly. In September 1910 Lieutenant Siegfried Helm was arrested on suspicion of spying for his native Germany. Fortunately Helm was both thorough and naïve and had kept a pocket book with sketches of Portsmouth’s military defences, complete with details he had gleaned by looking through a large public ‘penny-in-the-slot’ telescope on Portsmouth seafront. Spying was then regarded as an act of patriotism and Helm wrote, while in prison awaiting trial, ‘The officers here are very kind to me. So comfortable a time I never had’! The judge at his trial gave him a discharge and commented, ‘I trust that when you leave this country you will leave it with a feeling that, although we may be vigilant yet we are just and merciful, not only to those who are subjects of this realm but also to those who, like yourself, seek the hospitality of these shores.’

Francis Walsingham was a graduate of King’s College, Cambridge as was the most eminent of the Bletchley Park codebreakers, Alan Turing (1912–1954). The ‘bombe’ machine designed by Alan Turing was perhaps the most important invention of the war. At times it enabled German Enigma codes to be broken daily, within minutes, so that British commanders were sometimes reading Hitler’s instructions to his generals before the Germans had decoded them. Bernard Montgomery sometimes claimed to be reading the mind of his German opponent Erwin Rommel. In fact he was reading his mail! It was long believed that the sinking of the formidable German battleship
Bismarck
was due to a chance sighting by a British aircraft, a belief reflected in the 1960 film
Sink the Bismarck
. This belief was held at a time when the existence of the codebreaking achievements of the Government Code & Cipher School (known as GCHQ today) at Bletchley Park were known only to a few. It was revealed much later that a German naval officer, knowing that the
Bismarck
, damaged, was being pursued, was concerned for the welfare of his son who was amongst the crew. He radioed to the ship to ask how far the ship was from port. The
Bismarck
replied reassuringly, giving her position, believing that the Enigma codes in which the message was sent were unbreakable. This told the Royal Navy where she was and led to her destruction. Alan Turing was persecuted for his homosexuality and died in 1954 after taking a bite from an apple laced with cyanide. The symbol of Apple Computers is an apple with a bite-sized piece missing. Is this a tribute to Alan Turing, the father of modern computing, combined with a play on the word ‘byte’? Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, will neither confirm nor deny this suggestion.

T
owards the end of World War I British politicians became concerned about a series of articles in the popular newspaper
Daily News
which were favourable to Lenin’s Bolshevik regime in Russia. The author was Arthur Ransome. His pro-Bolshevik articles were a cover for the fact that he had infiltrated the inner circles of the Bolsheviks, befriending Leon Trotsky, the commissar for foreign affairs, with the aid of Trotsky’s secretary, Evgenia Shelepina whom Ransome eventually married. There followed a game of cat and mouse in which Evgenia supplied Ransome with information about Bolshevik intentions while exposing herself to the risk of suspicion and the execution which would inevitably follow.

The Foreign Office denounced Ransome’s ‘dangerous Bolshevik’ sympathies which so impressed the Bolsheviks, that, in Ransome’s words, ‘I even got a letter from Lenin authorising all the commissars to give me whatever information I asked for.’ Ransome and Evgenia continued to work for the Secret Intelligence Service until the Bolsheviks asked Evgenia to go to Britain, smuggling in 1 million roubles worth of precious stones to fund European Communist parties with whom she was to liaise, all her actions of course being monitored by the Security Service. In 1924, having divorced his first wife and married Evgenia, Ransome settled in the Lake District, writing children’s books including
Swallows and Amazons
, for which he is best remembered. He died there in 1967, his mysterious past remaining a closely guarded secret. Other equally famous authors also became spies. Somerset Maugham was sent to Russia in 1917 by the Secret Intelligence Service to collect information about the Bolshevik threat. Maugham correctly judged that the government of the moderate Alexander Kerensky would be unable to resist the Bolshevik threat and later used his experience in his series of short stories about the fictional spy
Ashenden
which influenced Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond. Graham Greene spent much of World War II as a bored and not very effective spy in Sierra Leone where he set his novel
The Heart of the Matter
and he drew on his experiences to satirize the profession of spy in his comic novel
Our Man in Havana
.

S
urely one of the greatest honours that can befall a British citizen is to have a pub named after him, or occasionally her. It’s not too difficult if you are royal or a war hero (Queen Victoria, Lord Nelson and the Iron Duke being particularly prominent in the field) but it’s quite tricky if you start and end life as a commoner. However, a few have made it, mostly local heroes.

The Robert Kett, Wymondham, Norfolk

Robert Kett (1492–1549) was a wealthy inhabitant of the small town of Wymondham, who led a rebellion against the enclosure of Common Land and Open Fields. He was captured, tried for High Treason at the Tower of London and hanged but remains a hero in Norfolk.

Sexey’s Arms, Blackford, near Cheddar, Somerset

Hugh Sexey (1556–1619) was born in Bruton, Somerset, taught himself law and in 1599 was appointed as royal auditor to the Exchequer of Elizabeth I. When he died the trustees of his will set up Sexey’s Hospital in Bruton to care for the elderly. Part of the site is now occupied by Sexey’s School which was founded in 1889 and has the unusual distinction of being a state boarding school. So Hugh Sexey has the most unusual distinction of having a school, a hospital and a pub named after him.

The Alice Lisle, Ringwood, Hampshire

Alice Lisle (c.1614–85) was condemned to death by the notorious Judge Jeffreys for sheltering a supporter of the Duke of Monmouth after his defeat at the battle of Sedgemoor in 1685. Jeffreys sentenced her to be burnt at the stake but she was spared this ordeal and beheaded a few days later at the age of 70. She is one of very few women not of royal blood to have a pub named after her. Another is: