Helen Fry
Diamond Mines and Spies

Dr Helen Fry - Diamond Mines and Spies

- So our theme over the next couple of weeks is South Africa and why not have a look at South Africa diamond mines and espionage? Some of this may be slightly familiar to the audience this evening, but I thought it’d be fascinating to bring together some of the discoveries that I’ve uncovered during the course of my research. It’s by no means definitive and some of you may know of other people and connections to South Africa, the diamond trade, and 20th century espionage. It’s such a huge field, but I’m going to pick out some really fascinating nuggets today. And what we’ll find, what’s really interesting, is a lot of the key figures that we’ll look at today, they go way out in a sort of web across the 20th century, primarily for British intelligence. I’m only going to concentrate on British intelligence. And many of the early figures of the early 20th century that had spent time in South Africa, and particularly amongst the diamond mining communities, actually went on to become founding members of British parts of British intelligence, the Secret Intelligence Service, what today we call MI6. Next slide, please. I’m going to come back to some of these photographs shortly. And we couldn’t talk, could we, about diamonds without looking very briefly at Barney Barnato? What we know about him, he died in suspicious circumstances overboard from his yacht as he was on his way back to England, and just as a key point off Madeira. Interesting if you fast forward, it’s allegedly the same spot that Robert Maxwell went overboard for his yacht, again in some would say suspicious circumstances. So Barney Barnato was a business magnate and he died in those mysterious circumstances the 14th of June, 1897. But if we look at his life, it was quite a humble life before he becomes a diamond magnate. Next slide, please. So he originally comes from the Jewish East End of London. Barney Barnato was not his original name.

He was originally Barnet Isaacs. We have some images there so iconic of the Jewish East End in the 1890s. He was born a bit earlier in February, 1851 in Whitechapel. So right there at the heart of the immigrant Jewish community in the 1800s, and particularly from the 1850s. He was born to Isaac and Leah Isaacs, and they had a small business just off Petticoat Lane. And on the right hand side there, that photograph is a photograph, quite an early photograph, one of the earliest actually taken of Petticoat Lane. And he always claimed, ironically, we’ll see there’s quite a rivalry between the other diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes, but Barnet, Barney Barnato as he became, always claimed that he had the same birth date as Cecil Rhodes. So there seems to be a bit of mismatch there between his official birthday and the birthday that he always claimed to have. He was educated at Jewish Free School. Jews’ Free School, apologies. Which of course then was located between Camden and the East End. And he went on to marry Jewish woman called Leah Harris. Next slide, please. And then in the 1870s, this is the start of the diamond rush. There was also a parallel gold rush and many young men would leave in, well, not only United Kingdom but also other parts of the world, America, would come to South Africa in the hope of finding their fortune. They were happy to roll up their sleeves and be involved in the diamond mining and gold mining industries. And Barney Barnato actually followed his brother Henry who’d come out already.

And so they came to a part of South Africa to Cape Colony. He came there in 1873 and that’s when he kind of changed his name. That part of South Africa, Cape Town at this point, was part of the vast British Empire, of which of course it was said, “The sun never set.” Part of Queen Victoria’s vast empire. And he changed his name to sound less Jewish in his view and to kind of assimilate into the world that he was now entering. So that’s why he changed his name to Barney Barnato. Next slide, please. And we’ll move through. So one of the key mines that’s really, really important in this period. You can put it to full screen. That’s lovely, thank you. One of the key- Step back one please. One of the key central areas that are linked to the diamond mining and espionage is the Kimberley Mine. Can we just go back one please? If that’s possible. Yeah, I’m so sorry. We’ve seem to- Bless you. Thank you so much for doing this today. So the Kimberley Mine, Northern Cape, really fascinating because there are a number of central characters, including Barney Barnato, who would actually start to touch on that early diamond mining community and espionage that would have international connections. The diamond mining communities at this time were not only young men trying to find their fortune, but it was a sort of international metropolitan kind of workforce, and they became ideal recruiting ground for British intelligence. It may well be true for other intelligence services, but if I just focus on British intelligence, that with those international connections it would be, as I said, fertile ground. And I’ll come to the political situation in a moment why it was really, really important of South Africa at this time. Next slide, please. So Barney Barnato was actually a story of rags to riches. He and his brother Henry went on to form the Barnato Diamond Company. Within 10 years of them having arrived in South Africa, they were millionaires.

I guess in today’s terms you would probably say they were billionaires. And they inadvertently, if you like, become the founders of De Beers, which of course still survive today. And I’ve given you a little one of their bank notes there. De Beers Consolidated Mines, as it became later, from the Kimberley Mine in July, 1889. Next slide, please. As you can see, very, very wealthy young man, Barney Barnato. But he was a smart businessman as well. Next slide, please. He and his brother found ingenious ways to actually make money. They had to gather money together to get their business venture up and running. They weren’t just going to dig those mines. They actually had visions of owning a mine. So they were quite theatrical, quite dramatic. Barney himself wouldn’t be a miss on a West End stage show. He was very theatrical. They would put on performances, earn a bit of money. And while he was doing that, he was also building up his own knowledge of the diamond mining industry. He was really astute in not just working but actually observing and learning as much as he could. And in a really interesting development that no one else seems to be doing, he bought up those mines with the money he’d saved. He bought up those mines that other people had abandoned, they they’d really been sort of worked to death. And these abandoned mines had these sort of blue heaps of sort of discarded rubble. And he started to aggressively became quite aggressive in his competition, particularly with Cecil Rhodes. And he always had this vision that he would ultimately buy out his competitors. Of course, Cecil Rhodes would eventually win the day on that. Next slide, please. I’m going to link this to the mining and diamonds in a moment. Next slide, please. So others were really forward thinking and they crossed paths with a really interesting geologist.

So we don’t really hear much about him anymore, but Dr. Atherstone. He explained how the diamonds were formed and that they could be pushed up to the surface through pipes. And Barney decided to bet all his money, a bit of a gambler, very risky in that he decided to gamble his money really on buying up all the sort of the trash heaps, the blue heaps if you like, everything that had been discarded by any of the other diamond mining community. And then he started to dig that blue soil with very little result to start with. And you know, he was kind of almost the laughing stock. People just thought he was crazy. But suddenly the brothers hit success and by the end of that year, they’d sold, back then, 100,000 pounds worth of diamonds. I mean extraordinary. These abandoned, what we would call them, like almost like coal slag heaps, they bought these up and started to dig. Next slide, please. And that’s basically how he made his money. So it was a very unorthodox way of making money at that time in the diamond mining community. And he would soon cross paths with the Joel Brothers, Henry Atkins, and he would also cross paths with Baring-Gould family. All three of those, and we will hone in on them in a moment, would work for British intelligence in the 20th century. I find it fascinating if you connect all these figures and that lovely photograph. I actually rather like that, the group of these diamond magnates. They’re pictured in South Africa. So Barnato by 1885 managed to merge his company with Baring-Gould’s Kimberley Mine and the Baring-Gould’s still maintained some shares in the company. So the Kimberley Mine in the end had a number of shareholders and Barnato would be the sort of ultimate chairman, if you like. Next slide, please.

Had the biggest share. Next slide, please. So there does emerge, I don’t want to put in diamond mining because I want to sort of get on to the espionage side, but as we know there was a bitter rivalry between him and Cecil Rhodes. Cecil Rhodes being this mining magnate who, unlike Barnato, didn’t keep just diamonds but was also dabbling in the gold mining industry. Rhodes went on to become the Prime Minister of Cape Colony from 1890 to 1896, so he is very influential. Rhodes had originally been born in Bishop’s Stortford, which is sort of north of London, not so far from Stansted Airfield. So Stansted Airport. So sorry for the analogy on that, but that will give you an idea where he came from. And because his health wasn’t good, he’d been sent out to South Africa at the age of 17 in a hope that the warmer climate would help his health. And he was actually financed to begin the sort of diamond mining aspect of his career by N. Rothschild and Co. And fascinating connections there. And he, with that financial backing, began to buy up and manage some of the mines. So very quickly these two men actually become such bitter rivals for the same kind of areas and each vying to buy out the other. Ultimately Rhodes did finally buy out Barnato for what today would be roughly 2 billion pounds. And so Barnato was no longer, really that was the end of his career in the mining industry, certainly the diamond mining industry, and Rhodes gained control of De Beers Mines. He actually renamed it De Beers Consolidated Mines. Next slide, please. But there was a sort of mysterious death. Next slide, please. Barnato died on the 14th of June, as I said, 1897. He was on route home to England. He had nothing really left in South Africa. He’d been bought out by Rhodes and he was lost overboard from his boat, as I said earlier, near Madeira.

And the family always rejected any idea that there was any suicide. Next slide, please. But interestingly, somebody was on that boat at the same time as Barnato went missing. Next slide, please. And that was Solly Joel. Solly Joel who was at the heart part of the Joel Brothers, also Jewish family who was at the heart of the diamond mining industry, but also involved at the heart of British intelligence. Next slide, please. We don’t really know, as Joel didn’t leave any memoirs. We have no idea. We have no eyewitness account of Barnato’s death. But fascinating, he wasn’t on there alone. So now there were rumours of murder. Was it suicide? Was it murder? And I think today we still have that mystery. We have no idea whether it was an accident, suicide, or possibly murder. In rejecting the idea of suicide, the family were really keen for him to be buried in Willesden, the Orthodox cemetery. And you can now see his grave in Willesden Cemetery in North London. Very theatrical. Barnato once said, “Always wind up with a good curtain and bring it down before the public gets tired or has time to find you out.” Fascinating character. Next slide, please. So what happens to his fortune? A number of members of his family actually inherited his fortune, including his son Woolf Barnato. He’s only two years old. I thought you’d be fascinated by this. He becomes later one of the Bentley Boys that pioneer in racing driving and his nephew Woolf Joel. And Woolf Joel was actually shot and killed whilst in his office. It was a politically motivated killing in Johannesburg by Karl Kurtze in 1898. And there were rumours that Joel, Woolf Joel, was actually being blackmailed at the time. Next slide, please. So at the trial, Kurtze himself hinted that he’d planned to kidnap the President of the Transvaal and that he’d been backed by Joel and Barnato.

Joel being linked to British intelligence. Kurtze was actually acquitted in the end and it was thought at the time, possibly generally in South Africa because of the anti-British feelings, but Solly Joel inherited Woolf’s share of Barnato’s money after the murder. Fascinating. Next slide, please. So what do we know about Solly Joel and his links to British intelligence? So they were effectively millionaires, we would say billionaires today, who’d cut out their fortune in South Africa. But later, by the 1930s, certainly by the 1930s, both brothers were actually working for what today we call MI6. And they ran their offices the cover of their offices from this building here on the right, Broadway buildings. Very famously the former headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service just around the corner from St. James’ Tube Station. Next slide, please. But they also crossed paths with another fascinating character. Next slide, please. Thomas Joseph Kendrick. And some of you will have heard me talk about the importance. He goes on to become one of the most significant, if not the most important, intelligence officer’s commanders, I believe of the first half of the 20th century. He’s pictured here in Vienna in the 1930s, but he was born in Cape Town and he goes on to become one of the founding members of the Secret Intelligence Service. So he’s born in Cape Town to a local mother, local African mother, but to an American Jewish father who’s a businessman. So fascinating. We don’t know much about his father, John Francis Kendrick, but I hope we might uncover a bit more. So he has an American father who, not dissimilar to Winston Churchill, who had an American mother, had a kind of international perspective.

It’s really interesting if you look at these key characters that have one parent who’s British or South African and one that’s American, they tend to have a less parochial view and have a more international perspective on politics, on the worldview, on sort of mixing. Now he served in the Boer War in 1901, but his father had already purchased the Hotel Metropole in Cape Town in the 1890s for just, well, then I think it was quite a lot of money, 16,000 pounds. And it was the centre of high society. It was the sort of Ritz Hotel of Cape Town and it became a microcosm of intellectual musical circles. All the intellectuals, musical actors, businessmen would pass through and they would attend cocktail parties. It was kind of a forerunner to something out of a “James Bond” scene really. These cocktail parties where the high society mixes with intellectual society and it’s a pattern of life that Kendrick would inhabit, if you like, all through his life. Next slide, please. And already at the end of the Boer War, so his father’s really influential in Cape Town as the owner of this hotel. There’s a photograph, the only photograph I could find actually, from one of the newspapers. It was a pretty grand five-story hotel actually designed by the architect de Witt. And Kendrick, there at the top, who went on to marry in South Africa Norah Richter. Norah Richter’s father was a businessman who owned the le- Or sorry, he was the manager of the Lace Diamond Mine. And in that period between 1901 and around 1911, 1912, Kendrick started to move around the diamond mining community. He worked as a stockbroker but also worked in the community and he basically ended up marrying his boss’s daughter, pictured here. Beautiful she was, Norma Norah Richter. And they would again have these sort of parties, mix in interesting circles. And what Kendrick was doing was working undercover, collecting intelligence amongst the diamond mining communities.

That was his cover. And some of those he recruited would go on to be agents right across the world, primarily for him across Western and Eastern Europe. But it all started for him and for some of the other characters around him in South Africa. The Joel Brothers too all starts in this melting pot of the diamond mining industry. Next slide, please. And at this time, after the Boer War, things aren’t stable in Africa. There’s the German occupied parts of Africa and the Transvaal and he goes to work in the Lace Diamond Mine, which is, as I put there, about 200 kilometres southwest of Johannesburg. So a fair distance from what he’s known, from his roots in Cape Town. And operations there had spanned at least back to the 1890s. And this was another one of those that was acquired by the De Beers Consolidated Mines. So what Kendrick was doing as his base from the diamond mining communities, not only making contacts, international business contacts, but also it meant he could travel and he had a reason to travel and no one would really notice that he was travelling. And he could observe some of the parts of German occupied Africa and observe what troop movements there were, what sort of occupation, industrial espionage, working out what the Germans were sort of developing in terms of armaments. And there were rumours in this period, this was before the First World War, when the early sort of British intelligence, it wasn’t formalised until 1909 in London, but these early intelligence officers, and he’d done intelligence in the Boer War, number of others coming up as well. They’re sort of there beginning these international connections, and they would go on to form a more formalised British Intelligence Service in 1909 with others.

But at this time Germany was perceived as a threat, not right on the doorstep of 1914, but Germany was actually emerging as a potential threat even throughout the 1910s. Next slide, please. And working with Kendrick in South Africa at that time was this chap we’re going to see now. So a bit more about him shortly. Yeah, a number of them. Alexander Scotland looking a bit older. He wasn’t this young when he was in South Africa. We’ll come back to him shortly. Claude Dansey. Claude Dansey there in uniform on the right. Claude Dansey spent time in the police in South Africa around the time of the Boer War. He’s working in and around, near the diamond mining communities crossing with English figures like Alexander Scotland. Incidentally, Alexander Scotland was a nephew of George Bernard Shaw. Fascinating. So he had quite a bit of charisma. His unpublished memoirs are written with quite some flair. Not exaggerated, but you can just see he’s come from a family, a creative family. But Claude Dansey who is doing some interesting potentially intelligence work in South Africa in the 1910s, actually goes on by the time of the Second World War, he’s risen to become the Deputy Head of MI6. And he’s had a career at the early First World War with MI5, the British Security Service, which point he’s back in Britain. So fascinating that these characters all knew each other in South Africa at this time. I’m going to come on to Henry Atkins and Max Rosenberg, his son. Max Rosenberg, who starts out his diamond mining career and also his espionage in South Africa goes on to link way beyond and into Romania, including spying along the Danube. Fascinating Jewish family. Next slide, please. So we have Henry Atkins, we have his son, Max Rosenberg, at various points changed their names for a number of complicated reasons, whose daughter was Vera Atkins. So Henry Atkins is the grandfather, he’d come from the Russian pail of settlement.

He’d settled in South Africa. Vera was his granddaughter, the daughter of Max Rosenberg. She’d actually been born in Romania by the time Max has left South Africa and was working in Romania. And he’s actually a key agent, a key spy for Thomas Kendrick that I talked about recently. So Max Rosenberg definitely worked for British intelligence. And Vera had a British Jewish mother. Henry Etkins, he was born, actually sort of anglicised his name to Atkins and they were in and out around Western Europe, decided to sort of have a more anglicised name than to keep Rosenberg. So that’s why they kept to the mother’s maiden name. Next slide, please. So Vera Atkins, interestingly, famously goes on in the Second World War to become Deputy Head of F Section of the French Section of the Special Operations Executive. And some of you will have heard me talk about that before. So we have three generations unusually. We have Henry Atkins, as I said originally Etkins, he’s Vera Atkins’ grandfather. He is quite wealthy now, he’s to flee Pale Settlement. And he made his money in South Africa actually selling goods to the British Army during the Boer War. He then very exotic export trade in ostrich feathers. At one point, for a time, he owned the Lace Diamond Mine and he at one point became one of the largest and wealthiest property developers in the Cape. He actually had a sort of shipping business in the port in Cape Town, and so did Kendrick’s father. He had some sort of shipping interests and we think that they had sort of far more international connections. And we certainly know that Henry Atkins was working in some aspect of intelligence. Next slide, please. And his son, so Max Rosenberg. Next slide. Yeah, so Henry Atkins.

Sorry, go on to Max in a moment. Was connected because of the Lace Mine was interestingly connected to the Solly Brothers. Solly… Sorry, the Joel Brothers, it should say. Solly and Joel and Barney Barnato, and Cecil Rhodes. So you’ve got this sort of mix. In spite of the rivalry between Barnato and Rhodes, you’ve got this very interesting mix of those diamond magnates who knew each other. They almost certainly visited the Hotel Metropole, were part of that social circle. And the daughter Hilda married Romanian emigre Max Rosenberg. But they reverted, as I said, to a more anglicised surname, to Hilda’s maiden name Atkins. And there was another daughter, May, and she married into a wealthy Romanian Jewish family, the Mendls. And Charles Mendls, again, went into work in British intelligence. He was in and out of the British embassies in Paris in the 1920s and ‘30s. He’s a fascinating character. He went on to be knighted, but he also had a really important career in British intelligence. And so the family ties of this particular family ran really deep. And what they were doing, certainly after the First World War, having made all their connections in South Africa in that interwar period, Max Rosenberg had moved with his family back to Romania. And of course that’s where Vera was born. And what they were doing was actually monitoring the shipping along the Danube and along the Rhine because 1919, the Treaty of Versailles, actually limited German re-armament, it limited the German troop numbers. Germany was no longer allowed a functioning air force. But of course the rivers across Europe were one way that things could be smuggled. It could be weaponry, parts to make weaponry.

And certainly by the 1930s and when the Adolf Hitler comes to power, we know that all kinds of armament programmes were being escalated. And so one of the key roles of Rosenberg was to actually monitor that. Fascinating! In the backdrop. For British intelligence, he was one of those that was monitoring what the rise of Nazi Germany was doing in terms of armaments and potentially using that artery of the rivers across Europe to actually secretly smuggle things into Germany. Next slide, please. We got next slide, please. Yeah. So Rosenberg actually wasn’t as successful as his father in South Africa with money and he lost a lot on various speculations, and that’s why he ultimately returned to Romania. And he had this vision that he was going to restore his personal fortune. And he returned to Romania at a point where unusually it was going through quite an economic boom and he becomes a really powerful businessman in the ship lot, sorry, at the Shipyard at Galatz. And he runs this whole merchant fleet along with Danube, it’s called the Dunarea Company. And that gave him those connections. He’s using those connections, he’s working, or certainly we know for the British Intelligence Service. We know he’s monitoring what kind of goods are coming, hopefully trying to monitor what kind of goods are being transported through Europe. He’s actually monitoring the threat from Nazi Germany and that gives him a gateway into all kinds of society in Europe, including in Budapest. Next slide, please. And it’s fascinating because here he’s doing all kinds of things in terms of mixing in high society. It’s not dissimilar to the life that these, I call them spies for want of a better word. These spies that originally mixed in those diamond mining communities were actually now across Europe mixing in high society.

And in the 1930s his daughter Vera was now part of that. Well, in a loose way. Because she also started to attend some of these high society cocktail parties and dinners. There was opera and theatre. I mean I think she had a pretty good life in Budapest in the 1930s. But they also mixed with aristocratic families across Europe. They all had connections and friends. I’m not saying all of these were spies for them, I’m not saying that at all. But they had a very interesting overview, if you like, of society. They could also keep an eye on any political instability. And Vera went on to become fluent in a number of languages. So don’t forget English is not her first language, but she’s fluent in her mother tongue, Romanian. But she becomes fluent in English, French, which is why she goes on to become Deputy Head of the French Section that drops agents behind enemy lines for us into Europe, into France. And she’s also fluent in German because she does spend some time in Vienna. And when she’s in Vienna, she goes to stay with Thomas Kendrick and his family. So that was sort of very common for them to mix amongst those circles. She was completely at ease and she would often accompany her father on business trips. Now we don’t know whether they were all genuine business trips or some of them were part of his espionage life, but she often acted as translator for him. And as I’ve put there, to me it seems that that sort of glitzy life that she led, that she mixed with her father, actually provides the foundations later for her to make a brilliant intelligence officer in the wartime. And the same is true for Thomas Kendrick and his wife.

His wife wasn’t a spy by the way, but that kind of ability to move at ease in those social circles that are developed in South Africa, that now stretched way beyond South Africa with pivotal moments or moments in European history, that whole period between 1914 and the end of the Second World War. I’m not saying that’s the only important part of European history, but for our characters that we’re discussing. Next slide, please. Next slide. Thank you. Yeah! So amongst that I want to come back to another character. You can see in the bottom corner there, he’s Alexander Patterson Scotland. It’s very confusing when someone’s surname is actually Scotland, but he was actually born in Britain. He, as I said, was the nephew of the author and poet George Bernard Shaw. He actually decided that he did want to spend some time in South Africa, which he does. And he’s been there for a few years. When in 1908, or a few years after the Boer War, he’s posted to Keetmanshoop and he’s on a visit to Cape Town one day. Alexander Scotland happened to cross paths with a chap called Major Wade. Major Wade was at British Intelligence Headquarters in Cape Town. I haven’t actually managed to find out which address Major Wade operated from. But during the Boer War, various intelligence officers in uniform, like a young Kendrick, he was just 19 years old, was part of the bicycle brigade. And they would cycle behind enemy lines and collect intelligence on the German army, weapons, guns that are being used, all kinds of things, that basic espionage. And all that material would be sent back to British headquarters in Cape Town. And Major Wade in 1908 crosses paths, or should I say Alexander Scotland crosses paths with Major Wade and Major Wade says to him, while he’s in South Africa, “Learn all you can about the German army because you will become a very valuable man for your nation.”

And how true that was because Colonel Scotland, as he later became in the Second World War, from South Africa, he undertakes espionage in South Africa, intelligence gathering, from 1908 until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 when he’s posted eventually to France on intelligence duties for the British in uniform. In this period in South Africa, he’s not in uniform. So he’s in a civilian role. His task is to spy on German re-armament. Very much the same brief as his colleague there on the left, Thomas Kendrick. And of course they cross paths because Colonel Scotland is in and out of the diamond mining communities. He’s travelling on horseback, sometimes to some very, very remote areas like Ramonsdrift. He’s also travelling in what is now the Namibia, a diamond mining region there, not only with the international connections, but he is investigating corruption and those rogue diamond traders. He’s crossing paths and cementing a friendship with Thomas Kendrick. And Thomas Kendrick would go on in the First World War to work. He was attached in uniform to the intelligence call, as was Alexander Scotland, and the two men, by 1918, when they were involved in intelligence duties in France, parts of France that were not occupied by the Germans, and they were involved in interrogation of German prisoners of war that had surrendered. So by 1918, the two men are actually interrogating around 5,000. In just a couple of days they’ve got 5,000 surrendered German troops. And what Captain Wade, or Major Wade should I say, said to Scotland way back in 1908, it was so true of Kendrick as well. These two men had learned so much about Germany, about the German mindset. In fact, Colonel Scotland is actually in South Africa until July 1915, because the moment that the First World War breaks out and we’re at war with Germany, he is arrested in South Africa, or in the German occupied part of South Africa, should I say, occupied part of Transvaal area and he’s taken to prison.

He spends a nearly a year in prison at the hands of the Germans, “Living daily,” he said, “With the thought that he could be shot.” With the reality, he heard other prisoners being shot, he lived for nine months and in that time he was in solitary confinement. He used that time to understand the German mindset of his captors. Fascinating. So it was true what Major Wade had said to him, “Learn all you can.” Well, not only about the German army, but the way that the Germans were interrogating. And when the sort of truce was signed in July 1915 in that area, of course the war in Europe went on for a lot longer, Colonel Scotland, as was to become, Scotland comes back to the UK and he goes on to become a senior intelligence officer who is one of our senior by the end of World War I, one of our most senior interrogators. And during the 1930s it looks like he’s doing a bit of espionage work, potentially intelligence work out in South America. Kendrick at that point is in the 1920s and '30s working undercover for MI6 in Vienna, running spy networks right across Europe. These men are absolutely fascinating. But they cut their teeth in intelligence in South Africa in that early part of the 20th century. And they’ve met in those diamond mining communities of South Africa. And in the Second World War, as many of you will know from work that I’ve done on this particular area, Thomas Kendrick goes on to lead the largest deception against Nazi Germany on British soil. He goes on to run the whole eavesdropping programme that bugs thousands of German prisoners of war for intelligence at three secret sites outside London. Subject of my book, “The Walls Have Ears,” and that provided war winning intelligence in the Second World War. By now, and as his colleague, Colonel Scotland, actually runs a secret interrogation centre known as the London Cage, which was secretly in one of, well, three of those millionaire houses in Kensington Palace Gardens, 6, 7, 8 and 8A. 8A was sort of joined, so they’re kind of seen as one building.

But this was a secret interrogation centre, a bit harsher than Kendrick’s unit, but it also gained intelligence for the war effort. That vast stretch, well, it goes way back to South Africa days. You know, the influence of their experience in South Africa was extraordinary. Because between 1945 and 1948, Colonel Scotland goes on to run the London Cage, becomes known as the War Crimes Investigation Centre. And he goes on to gather and he interrogates some of the worst die-hard Nazi war criminals that couldn’t be dealt with at Nuremberg. Not many people know this story. Fascinating. He’s got his whole experience of Germany, of the German psyche, which he uses not only in the First World War but also in the Second World War. And he brings to justice some of those SS Commanders, including evidence against some of the concentration camp commanders as well. And more recently, some of you may have seen that Lord Pickles and his team, he’s now the new sort of Director of the International Holocaust Association, IRA. It’s Britain’s turn at the moment, has literally last week bought out this report on the war crimes in Alderney, the Channel Islands, that was investigated at Colonel Scotland’s unit. So this vast heritage in espionage that has its roots there in South Africa. Next slide, please. And in the last five or so minutes that I’ve got, I just want to tell you about another very interesting character. I don’t have a photograph of him. Last slide, please. Yeah. And that’s a man that I don’t know if any of you will have heard of, Henry Landau. He later becomes Captain Landau and he also spent time, grew up in South Africa. He becomes a key intelligence officer in the early parts of the 20th century. He’s in the same branch of military intelligence as Kendrick and Colonel Scotland. I’m doing a little bit more on Henry Landau at the moment, not him, but his network. So in the First World War.

So having gathered some experience like the others did in South Africa in espionage, in the First World War, he is posted in the middle of the war around actually 1916 to Holland. Holland is neutral in the First World War and it becomes, Rotterdam becomes, particularly a centre of espionage. So those South African links spread not only across Eastern Europe but also into Western Europe. And Landau from Rotterdam was the key guy for the Secret Intelligence Service that was running a network behind enemy lines in occupied Belgium. Fascinating. And it had several thousand very brave Belgian agents, quite a lot of them women, at least 1/3. It’s very hard to tell, but at least 1/3, possibly even ½ of whom were women doing extraordinary espionage work for Landau. And he was reporting back ultimately to British intelligence, the Secret Intelligence Service in London. And this network was called La Dame Blanche, the White Lady Network. And it was based on this myth, if you like, that if you saw the image of a white lady, the Holzer and the German entity would actually fall and Germany would fall. And so they called it after that in the hope, in a belief, that this network could provide enough intelligence to ultimately bring down the German occupying forces. And that’s precisely what happened. Extraordinary. So Landau would cut his teeth, again, like the others in South Africa and his network in the First World War in occupied Belgium, went on to deliver, this is officially recognised and this is officially given, it went on to provide 70% of all intelligence from any source right across the First World War. So 70% of the intelligence that the British ever received during the First World War came solely from this network in Belgium. That’s extraordinary. And in the final stages of the war, when the Germans were having their last push, their March 1918 offensive, which did ultimately fail, this network provided over 75% of the intelligence the British were getting about the enemy.

And so you see the ramifications, and this is I think what I would want to say in ending. And it is I suppose always exciting, rather sexy to think of diamonds and diamonds are forever, the kind of spy world, and it’s very sort of exotic. But actually I think it might be glitzy and glamorous and the kind of “James Bond” kind of view of espionage, spies, cocktails, diamonds, you know, all that kind of fast cars. But to think that so much of this was cut in South Africa and South Africa moulded in a way, gave the experience, particularly because we were spying on the German forces there, that it gave so much. It’s really, could you say it’s a birthplace, ironically, of British intelligence? I don’t know because the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, never releases any of its files. But if we look superficially at what we’ve covered today, it’s, I think, utterly fascinating that who would’ve ever believed that those roots, that some of the greatest spies, spy masters of the 20th century, started their career there in South Africa. I think it’s amazing. Thank you.