Major P G Taylor was the Industrial Adviser of the British Union of Fascists (BUF), a position that he held from 1934 (if not before) through to the bitter end sometime around June 1940. A member of the 'Research Directory' (the movement's Inner Council), Taylor was a man in whom Sir Oswald Mosley placed considerable confidence and, after a major cutback in March 1937, he was reported to have been ensconced in Mosley's office for half an hour while Neil Francis Hawkins, the Director-General, was kept waiting outside.
In the early days, Taylor had been involved in the efforts to bring other Fascist organisations within the BUF fold and, during the phoney war (September 1939 to April 1940), he participated in the discussions on how the BUF could work alongside others (including the British People's Party) to bring about a negotiated peace. Peace initiatives - from both sides - were common currency but of little perceived value during this phase of the war, and beyond.
Critically, Taylor also played a key role in the stream of events that led to the arrests of Tyler Kent (a US citizen who had been employed as a code and cipher clerk at the US Embassy), Anna Wolkoff (a Russian-born dress designer and artist) and Captain 'Jock' Ramsay (the Conservative MP for Peebles and founder of the secret anti-Jewish Right Club). Ramsay was detained from 23 May 1940 to 26 September 1944; Kent (sentenced to 7 years) was inside from 20 May 1940 to 21 November 1944 when he was immediately deported; and Wolkoff (sentenced to 10 years) was arrested the same day as Kent and released on 16 June 1947. Wolkoff’s British nationality that she had acquired in 1935 was also revoked.
The existence of this mythical spy ring was the justification used to persuade doubters in the Cabinet that there was a dangerous Fifth Column within the country and that, following the Nazi successes on the Continent of Europe, there was an urgent need to beef up Defence Regulation 18B. The resulting legislation was directed squarely at the BUF with the consequences that over 1,000 BUF members were interned and the movement itself was proscribed.
Major P G Taylor was a man of many aliases and at the National Headquarters of the BUF it was common knowledge that he was a Government agent, apparently attached to some 'special department' of the Home Office.
It is likely that Taylor authored many of the copious reports on the BUF that have been transferred from the Home Office to the National Archives. These chronicle the ups and downs of the movement, detail the staff salaries, and reveal other titbits of information that could only have been sourced by a privileged insider.
Salary-wise, Dr Robert Forgan (the Director) headed the list in 1934 on £10 per week, followed by Wilfred Risdon (the Director of Propaganda) on £7. William Joyce and Eric Piercy both picked up £5 while Taylor himself got £4.
Another titbit referred to a meeting in July 1934 between Mosley and Rotha Lintorn-Orman. Lintorn-Orman, the granddaughter of Field Marshall Simmons, had founded Britain's first Fascist party (the British Fascisti) in May 1923. Inspired by Mussolini, it was created to counter the Communist threat and, for a time, it could field an impressive team that included Maxwell Knight (who finished up as its Deputy Chief of Staff before joining MI5 in 1931), William Joyce and Major-General Thomas D Pilcher, a former ADC to the King who was described as 'Local Officer, London'. One of Pilcher's sons, Gonne St Clair Pilcher (known as 'Toby' to his friends), was MI5's legal guru before picking up a judge's badge and a knighthood in 1942.
Lintorn-Orman, who was reported to be ill caused by excessive drinking, turned down Mosley's final attempt at a merger even though several of her senior officers (including Neil Francis Hawkins and E G Mandeville Roe) and the bulk of her membership had already voted with their feet. A few months later, Lintorn-Orman was dead at the age of 40.
Some titbits referred to Taylor himself. For example, we learn from a Special Branch report dated 17 October 1934 (copy to MI5) that Mosley had set up a Court Martial consisting of Eric Piercy, Neil Francis Hawkins and Taylor to try Charles Bradford on the charges of uttering threats against Archibald Findlay (the Deputy Chief of Staff). Bradford was also charged with conspiring with five others in a plot to seize the building and then make demands on Sir Oswald Mosley ... The Court Martial found Bradford guilty whilst under the influence of drink and recommended that he should be suspended for three months.
Also, we learn that in March 1935 Taylor was a Vice-President of the Blackshirt Automobile Club and a member of the Research Directory. The other members of the Research Directory at that time were Mosley himself, General 'Boney' Fuller, Eric Piercy, William Joyce, Alexander Raven Thomson, John Beckett, William Leaper, George Sutton and Robert Gordon-Canning. Apart from Taylor himself, only Fuller, Joyce and Leaper of this group would escape internment after Hitler had replaced Stalin as Public Enemy No 1.
It is now believed that 'Boney' Fuller had been moonlighting for MI6, which
consolidates his already considerable reputation as a great strategic thinker. Joyce narrowly avoided internment by hot-footing it to Germany a few days before war was declared, after having been tipped off by his old friend Maxwell Knight that he had been listed for internment. William Leaper, a former editor of Blackshirt, probably avoided internment by having left the movement in 1935. However, this didn't save Piercy, the former head of the BUF's Defence Force Control who had left in 1936 following a cutback. Piercy was arrested on returning from Dunkirk in June 1940. Together with a friend, he had joined the armada of small boats that had helped with the evacuation. He had also been wounded by a piece of shrapnel.
P G Taylor's role in the BUF was first revealed to a wider public by Alex Miles, a 'sometime Director of Industrial Propaganda' of the BUF. Miles had decided to go public after resigning his job in 1936. Miles spoke at a public meeting organised by the Southend Anti-Fascist Council in April 1937, and his speech was later published in a pamphlet Mosley in Motley. According to Miles, Taylor was the head of a department within the BUF called ‘Z' Intelligence, although Mosley had denied its existence when challenged during an action for slander that he had brought against John Marchbank, the general secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen in February 1936. Miles' allegation regarding the existence of Taylor's intelligence role is corroborated by a Special Branch report dated 17 October 1934 and the existence of the 'Z' Intelligence Department is corroborated by a Home Office report dated March 1935.
Miles also reported that 'Taylor ... lived at Sloane Street, Chelsea where he had three separate telephone lines ... each listed under a different name, none of which is Taylor ... [He] openly boasts that he was expelled from Soviet Russia for espionage and of his membership of the CPGB (Communist Party of Great Britain) for the same purpose'. Taylor lived in a flat at 144 Sloane Street from 1935 to 1960. (MI5's Maxwell Knight had a flat at number 38 for a couple of years in the thirties.)
Unusually for a senior official of the BUF (but not for a Government agent), Taylor was extremely camera shy and, until recently, no photographs of him had been found. The late John Warburton remembered him from the thirties. According to John, he was ‘40-ish, of average height and was every inch a cultured Englishman, a typical ex-Army major’.
The late Mrs Margaret Bowie who had worked at National Headquarters during the Thirties, also remembered him. 'He was then in his mid-thirties ... and always smartly dressed'. She has also confirmed that Taylor's affiliation to the Home Office was general knowledge and that, when he was in the office, he gave a ready grin whenever he was asked 'if he had caught anyone today'.
Mrs Bowie also recalled seeing Taylor on one occasion when he was leaving a local Catholic church with a woman and a teenage girl whom she assumed to be his wife and daughter. On that occasion, Taylor cut her dead. 'It was as though he didn't want to mix family with business'.
James McGuirk Hughes - the man who posed as P G Taylor - was born in Toxteth Park, Liverpool on 18 June 1897. His father, Arthur Hughes, was a tram owner and his mother was the former Katherine McGuirk.
Hughes married Valerie Julia Taylor Tahan at a Catholic church in Fulham on 19 June 1920. He gave his occupation as 'Political Organiser'. Valerie's father, Zachary, was described as an Oriental Merchant. When their daughter Patricia Valerie Catherine arrived on 29 March 1923, Hughes had become
James Patrick McGuirk-Hughes but Valerie had dropped 'Taylor' perhaps coincident with the creation of Hughes' best known alias.
Over the years, Hughes continually rang the changes on his real name: sometimes, it was hyphenated; at other times, it was double barrelled but un-hyphenated but, in 1940 when Captain Ramsay listed him as a member of the Right Club, he was entered as Captain J Hughes.
Hughes' military background is not supported by the Army Lists or the War Office records but he does appear on the MI5 Staff List as a Lance-Corporal in the Military Foot Police from 18 February 1916 to 6 August 1919.
In 1924, Hughes and some members of the British Fascisti were implicated in a break-in at the London HQ of the Red International of Labour Unions where, he would claim, 'important information' was collected. Between the wars, Hughes served as secretary of the Liverpool branch of the British Empire Union where his main job was to infiltrate and sabotage trade unions and left-wing groups. In this, he collaborated with Special Branch.
In 1934, Hughes was immortalised by Maxwell Knight in his first novel Crime Cargo. The novel is memorable only because of the teasing references that Knight made to his friends. Hughes appeared as 'Baldy McGurk' who was described as a 'pig-eyed Irishman'. Clearly, the reference to a pig was inspired by Taylor's unfortunate choice of initials.
In 1937, Taylor persuaded four BUF members to burgle the home of Major Vernon, a technical officer at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnham and, on this occasion, he claimed to have been working for MI5. Vernon was away on holiday at the time but, unfortunately for the burglars, a neighbour reported the break-in and their car number to the police who caught them while making their getaway. At their trial, the four burglars were found guilty of larceny and bound over for 12 months. However, some of the papers that they had stolen from Vernon were deemed sensitive and Vernon was prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act. He was found guilty, fined £30, and lost his job. One of the burglars, John Preen, who was later interned under Defence Regulation 18B then used the work he had done for Taylor in a plea to secure his release.
Q: There was Major Vernon and P G Taylor? - A: Yes. Taylor led me to believe that he was connected with MI5.
Q: Do you mean that he was connected with MI5? - A: ... I was given the idea he was; and I played darts with him and I have been to his flat once or twice.
Unfortunately for Preen, the brownie points that he may have earned from his efforts on behalf of national security were not recognised by the Advisory Committee.
Thanks to Nigel West, we now have confirmation that Major Vernon was, indeed, a spy employed by the GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence) in a cell run by Ernest D Weiss, a concert pianist. This revelation is in West's book Venona (1999), even though it wasn't culled from any of the Venona material (collection didn't start until February 1943). Thanks to Frank Johnson {The Spectator), we also know that Vernon resurfaced after the war as the Labour MP for Dulwich division of Camberwell (1945-1951). Naturally, it was the late John Warburton who pulled these strands together.
For the record, Wilfrid Foulston Vernon (his first name has often been misspelled) was born in 1882 and died in 1975. He was an engineer with a naval background who was commissioned as a major in the Royal Air Force. According to Who's Who, he quit the Royal Aircraft Establishment in 1937 but, during the war, he worked with Tom Wintringham, training the Home Guard.
Wintringham (1898-1949) was a prominent Communist of the pre-war era whose claims to fame include having been one of the twelve Communists who were tried for sedition in 1925 (he was assistant editor of Workers' Weekly) and in having commanded the International Brigade's British contingent in the Spanish Civil War.
Clearly, MI5 had got the correct measure of Vernon in 1937 and he now appears to have been lucky to have got off so lightly.
On 9 April 1940, P G Taylor - or rather his alter ego James Hughes - played the most important role of his career when, after being introduced to Anna Wolkoff, he asked her if she could send a communication to William Joyce who was then in Germany broadcasting Nazi propaganda. Wolkoff’s family had been dispossessed by the Russian revolution and she was vehemently anti-Jewish. When Hughes told her that the letter contained some 'good anti-Jewish material' that Joyce could use in his broadcasts, Wolkoff said that she would see what she could do.
It was her lucky day – or so she thought – because later that evening Hélène de Munck visited the Russian Tea Rooms that were run by Anna’s parents and she casually mentioned to Admiral Wolkoff, Anna’s father, that she had a friend at the Rumanian Legation who was leaving for the Continent the next day. It was a good card to play because de Munck had some Rumanian blood in her.
The old Admiral trotted off to share the news with Anna who swallowed the bait by rushing across to de Munck and demanding if it were true. On receiving de Munck’s confirmation, she demanded ‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’ She then handed the letter to de Munck.
Of course, de Munck was an MI5 undercover agent and, at her trial, Wolkoff’s indiscretion would be sufficient for her to be categorised as 'an enemy agent' under the Official Secrets Acts. This then ensured that Tyler Kent could similarly be brought within the ambit of the Official Secrets Acts. More immediately, it also resulted in the internment of Captain Ramsay and for the allegation to be made that Mosley and Ramsay were 'in relations' presumably on the strength of a few meetings that they had both attended at which Taylor had also been present.
Curiously, even though MI5 had carried out their sting on 9 April 1940, they waited until 20 May before arresting Wolkoff and Kent. According to Robert Bruce Lockhart, who was then Lord Beaverbrook's sidekick and therefore in the know, the truth of the matter was that Winston Churchill, who had become Prime Minister on 10 May 1940, had promised the Labour Party that 'the Government will deal ruthlessly with the Fifth Column' if they supported his bid to become Prime Minister. Naturally, Churchill did the honourable thing and fulfilled his election pledge. The move went down well with the media and with the CPGB both of whom equated the mythical Fifth Column with the BUF.
One man, Aubrey Lees (not to be confused with Arnold Leese, the leading light of the Imperial Fascist League) had particular cause for grievance because he was arrested and interned on 20 June 1940, even though he had never been a member of the BUF.
Lees, who was vehemently anti-Jewish, had attended meetings of The Link and the Nordic League, both of which closed down on the outbreak of war. Later, when Lees was interviewed by the 18B Advisory Committee, he told them that he had come across a man whom he considered to have been an agent provocateur.
Q: Was the man's name Hughes? - A: No, Sir.
Q: Taylor? - A: No, Sir, but I am coming to him.
The man whom Lees fingered was E G Mandeville Roe, formerly a senior member of the British Fascists who had joined the BUF at the same time as Neil Francis Hawkins. In 1937, Mandeville Roe had been named as the prospective British Union candidate for Balham and Tooting.
It is extraordinary that the Committee should have prompted Lees in this manner but Lees then went on to tell the committee that he knew 'this fellow Hughes' and that he also knew him to be an agent of the Home Office. He said that they had become 'quite friendly' and that, on one occasion, he had asked him: 'By the way, aren't you a Home Office agent, or expert, or something?' Hughes replied, 'I was'.
Another person with a real grievance was Anna Wolkoff. She had wanted to call Hughes as a witness at her trial but, according to the Earl Jowitt, who published a summary of the trial in 1954, the man who had handed her the letter 'was never identified ... [and] ... could not be called as a witness'. In 1940, Jowitt had been the Solicitor-General and he had prosecuted both Kent and Wolkoff and, as no transcript has ever been published on Wolkoff’s trial, his was the definitive explanation, however implausible in view of Wolkoff having been kept under close surveillance by MI5.
In 2000, however, following a relaxation of policy, I was granted privileged access to the Home Office files on Anna Wolkoff. These had been marked 'closed for 75 years', so they were not due to be opened until 2015. Although the files had been heavily 'weeded', a report on the revocation of Wolkoff’s British nationality in August 1943 had survived and this shows that she had wanted to call a number of witnesses to the hearing, including 'one Hughes'. The Committee reported that:
We did not consider the evidence of these persons ... would be of sufficient importance to justify the postponement of the hearing before us. The matters of the attendance of Hughes and the nature of the evidence which he might have given were fully considered at the trial at the Central Criminal Court.
So, at last, here was corroboration that the Earl Jowitt had fudged the issue.
Elsewhere in the files, Anna Wolkoff also went on record as saying that the man who handed her the letter had three aliases, one of which may have been 'Cunningham'. Moreover, she believed that he was working for MI2, whereas the woman who had offered to put the letter in a diplomatic bag (Hélène de Munck) was working for MI5.
In summary, therefore, Anna Wolkoff s crime was to take a letter from one agent provocateur (Hughes) and then to hand it to a second agent provocateur (de Munck).
Winston Churchill was duly apprised of MI5’s machinations and he was reported as having said that he was ‘very grateful’ and that he had shown the story to members of the War Cabinet.
For the record, James McGuirk-Hughes who died in 1983 had also written a novel Spying in Russia which was published in 1929 under the name of John Vidor. The uses to which he put his other aliases continue to remain mysteries.
Bryan Clough
Author of State Secrets: The Kent-Wolkoff Affair
Acknowledgements
J A Booker (Blackshirts-on-Sea); Mrs Margaret Bowie; Robert Bruce Lockhart (Diaries); John Warburton (Friends of Oswald Mosley); Stephen Dorril (MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations); David Hooper (Official Secrets); John Hope (Article in Lobster); Frank Johnson (The Spectator) the Earl Jowitt (Some Were Spies); Nigel West (Venona); and members of James McGuirk-Hughes’ family who have shared their memories and photographs with me.
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