free troops hitherto employed on the Russian front, who is now assisting the Germans to enslave the Poles & Ukrainians etc.’20
After demobilization in 1919, Slocombe returned to the Daily Herald as news editor. ‘He was a timid and anxious man,’ recalled Francis Meynell, ‘until he grew a beard to hide his receding chin. The change was immediate and remarkable: he became master of his scene.’ In the spring of 1920 Slocombe went as the Daily Herald’s special correspondent in Paris, which he loved as the capital of rumour. His work took him roaming in Europe: everywhere he resisted standardization and vapidity. The suicide of millionaires and dethroning of monarchs enlivened him. He liked to meet currency smugglers, concession-hunters, bankers-condottieri, political grafters, stock-exchange tipsters, swagger beaux, faithless men with awkward principles, and idealists who uttered only flippancies. He savoured the furtive exiles found in every European capital, ‘nursing midnight dreams of liberty, power and martyrdom’ and conjuring vengeful conspiracies.21
A Home Office warrant was issued in 1921 to intercept letters to Slocombe’s house at Sutton in Surrey on the grounds that he was bringing Bolshevik literature into Britain and communicating with ‘leaders of the Red Trade Union International movement’. In 1922 a major international conference was held at Genoa to promote the economic stabilization and revival of central and eastern Europe, and to reconcile European capitalism with the Bolshevik economy. Shortly before the conference convened, Ewer sent Slocombe ‘hints about Genoa for your private ear’ which he intended to be passed to Soviet contacts. These hints comprised information from Edward Wise, a civil servant who was Lloyd George’s economic adviser during the Genoa deliberations and sympathetic to Bolshevism, that London hoped to use the Genoa meeting to parlay an agreement between the Soviet Union and the other European powers. The French embassy in London reported in 1923 that Slocombe had visited Lausanne under the alias of Nathan Grunberg. The French tied him to Clare Sheridan, who was reputed to have been his lover. His expulsion from France was contemplated in 1926 after he was seen in regular meetings with a Bolshevik agent.22
Slocombe’s sister-in-law Fanny Karlinsky was the object of further suspicions. She won a scholarship to St Paul’s Girls’ School in Hammersmith, and read modern languages at Somerville College, Oxford in 1913, but fell ill and spent much of 1914 in the French Pyrenees recuperating. During 1916–19 she worked as an Anglo–Russian translator and interpreter. In 1919 she became a telegraph coder and decipherer for ARCOS, and worked in its offices for twelve years. She was anonymously denounced to Special Branch in 1924 for her alleged association with Edith Lunn, wife of Andrew Rothstein. There were two separate code-rooms in ARCOS offices, one for purely commercial traffic and the other for political messages: Fanny Karlinsky claimed to have worked only in the first room. She was present during the police raid of 1927, was listed for possible expulsion to Russia by the authorities and had her application for British citizenship denied. She continued working for ARCOS until 1931, when she refused orders to return to Russia and was stripped of her Soviet passport. Guy Liddell, then still in Special Branch, noted in 1928: ‘although she is not a full member of the Party, she is in close touch with party circles and ready to assist in any way she can’. MI5 suspected her of being a sub-agent of Lenin’s State Political Directorate, the GPU. Later she ran a boarding-house, but in the 1950s needed an allowance from Slocombe in Paris to keep her from privation.23
The Zinoviev letter and the ARCOS raid
The Ewer–Hayes network first attracted MI5’s interest in 1924 in the aftermath of the Zinoviev letter scare. The background was this. A Scottish communist named John Ross Campbell, acting editor of the Workers’ Weekly, was arrested on 5 August on the instructions of Sir Archibald Bodkin, the Director of Public Prosecutions. He was charged under the Incitement to Mutiny Act of 1797 with seducing members of the armed forces from their allegiance. He had done this, Bodkin alleged, by publishing ‘An Open Letter to the Fighting Forces’, expressed in terms similar to Cecil L’Estrange Malone’s speech of 1920 at the Hands Off Russia meeting. Campbell urged ‘soldiers, sailors and airmen, not merely to refuse to go to war, or to refuse to shoot strikers during industrial conflicts’, but also to join with urban proletariat and rural labourers ‘in a common attack upon the capitalists, and to smash capitalism forever, and institute the reign of the whole working class’. Bodkin’s motives were mixed, according to A. J. P. Taylor: ‘perhaps stupidity (and the director of public prosecutions is usually a stupid man); perhaps also to embarrass the government’. Certainly Campbell was arrested on the same day that Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government reached terms for an Anglo-Russian trade treaty, which communism’s adversaries were determined to thwart. When the government withdrew the prosecution on 13 August (on the pretext that Campbell was a decorated soldier, who had been crippled by war wounds), its opponents protested at political interference with the law. A general election was called when on 8 October MacDonald’s government opposed and lost a parliamentary motion calling for an independent tribunal to inquire into the handling of Campbell’s prosecution.24
Amid the furore over the proposed Anglo-Russian treaty and the Campbell case, a message was supposedly sent from Moscow, dated 15 September 1924, from Grigory Zinoviev, the head of the Comintern, to the CPGB’s general committee. The message conveyed Comintern orders to prepare for revolution by subverting the armed forces and by duping Labour party leaders. It was obtained by the SIS station in Riga, which sent it to SIS headquarters in London on 2 October. SIS circularized copies to the Foreign Office, Admiralty, War Office, Air Ministry, MI5 and Scotland Yard (which failed to pass it to Special Branch). The letter was spurious, probably concocted by White Russian forgers in Riga, and possibly planted by die-hard intelligence anti-Bolshevists, but it differed little from genuine Moscow messages to the CPGB. Lakey told MI5 that the CPGB gave Ewer a categorical denial that it had received any such letter. As both the army and MI5, even without the Campbell case, feared subversion of troops, MI5 on 21 October sent copies of the Riga letter to General Officers Commanding in Britain. A copy certainly went to Conservative Central Office (most probably by the hand of Sir Joseph Ball, head of MI5’s investigative branch); Desmond Morton of SIS may have meddled alongside Ball; and another copy of the letter was, according to Morton, given by Stewart Menzies of SIS to the Daily Mail. The Daily Mail, which doubtless received a confirmatory copy from Conservative Central Office, published the forgery four days before the general election on 29 October. Publication did not swing voters against socialism: the financial terms of the doomed Anglo-Russian treaty aroused more suspicion. Labour got 5.3 million votes, compared with 4.3 million in 1923; but the collapse of Liberal support since 1923 gave a majority of seats to the Conservatives, and created a bitter Labour feeling that they had been cheated out of power by the Daily Mail’s Zinoviev stunt.
In the final meeting of the Labour Cabinet after their defeat, Lord Parmoor, Sir Charles Trevelyan and Josiah Wedgwood voiced their suspicion that ‘Crowe and Gregory had stooped to a mean political trick in order to damage the Labour Party,’ reported the official taking the minutes, and ‘were quite prepared to blow up the F.O. if they could get rid of the spy system’. (During the 1930s Trevelyan was one of the most gullible of fellow-travellers to Bolshevist Russia, who described Stalinist penal colonies as a ‘grand method of human regeneration’, while Parmoor was an apologist for Stalinist slave labour and religious persecution.) In fact Gregory had opposed publication, and Crowe was so mortified by his mismanagement of the letter’s distribution that he broke down in tears as he apologized to MacDonald for contributing to the election defeat. ‘The Zinoviev letter killed Crowe,’ MacDonald said in 1928. ‘He never lifted up his head after that.’25
Generations of Labour activists nurtured festering
