Churchill's Man of Mystery

Desmond Morton and the World of Intelligence

Gill Bennett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780415481687
• eBook ISBN: 9781134160334
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

The mysterious life and career of Desmond Morton, Intelligence officer and personal adviser to Winston Churchill during the Second World War, is exposed for the first time in this study based on full access to official records. After distinguished service as artillery officer and aide-de-camp to General Haig during the First World War, Morton worked for the Secret Intelligence Service from 1919-1934, and the fortunes of SIS in the interwar years are described here in unprecedented detail. As Director of the Industrial Intelligence Centre in the 1930s, Morton's warnings of Germany's military and industrial preparations for war were widely read in Whitehall, though they failed to accelerate British rearmament as much as Morton - and Churchill - considered imperative. Morton had met Churchill on the Western Front in 1916 and supported him throughout the 'wilderness years', moving to Downing Street as the Prime Minister's Intelligence adviser in May 1940. There he remained in a liaison role, with the Intelligence Agencies and with Allied resistance authorities, until the end of the war, when he became a 'troubleshooter' for the Treasury in a series of tricky international assignments. Throughout Morton's career, myth, rumour and deliberate obfuscation have created a misleading picture of his role and influence. This book shines a light into many hitherto shadowy corners of British history in the first half of the twentieth century.

This book will be of great interest to scholars and informed lay readers with an interest in the Second World War, intelligence studies and the life of Winston Churchill.

1 ANCESTRAL VOICES

Mortons and Leathers

In August 1966, after reviewing the first volume of Harold Macmillan’s memoirs¹ Desmond Morton commented in typically facetious style that he was thinking of writing his own life in nine volumes, ‘one vol for each 8 years, with a tenth if I live to 80’. The first volume, he said, would begin as follows:

I was born on November 13th, 1891 at 11 a.m. precisely. It was snowing hard. Though remembering little of this highly important event, its consequences include such phenomena as a hatred of the cold in all forms ever since, especially cold boiled mutton. That I was born in the house which, a good deal later on, became the property of Sir Winston Churchill, in Hyde Park Gate, may be regarded as a coincidence. I have always understood that this house was hired for the purpose of my arrival from the then owner, since my parents then lived at Windsor (not Windsor Castle). . . .²

Apart from a brief notice in The Times and his birth certificate, confirming his parentage, date and place of birth, this letter, written in his 75th year, is the only documentary reference that has been found to Desmond Morton’s entry into the world. We must take his word for it on the reason why he was born at 9 Hyde Park Gate: it is certainly true that he hated the winter months, and Christmas in particular, all his long life. Very little is known of his parents’ life at the time of his birth, but as the only child of a late marriage he was much wanted and greatly loved. His mother, Edith, had in fact been carrying twins, but the other baby, a girl, died at birth. Morton was fond of saying, in later life, ‘I killed my sister’.³

Desmond Morton’s parents, Edith Harriet Leather and Charles Falkiner Morton, had married in 1887 at the ages of 31 and 44 respectively: late, in those days, for a first marriage on each side. We do not know how, when or where they met, though since Charles – always known as Charlie – was a cavalry officer and travelled widely with his regiment, including periods in Ireland and India, theirs must have been an intermittent courtship. Again, we can only rely on Desmond to explain his parents’ late marriage, though his explanation seems a plausible one. Edith’s father, John Towlerton Leather, a patriarchal figure much attached to his youngest daughter, disliked and distrusted the military and did not want her to marry a soldier. Edith and Charlie had to wait until after his death in 1885. In that year Charlie was still in India, commanding the XIV Royal Hussars, whom he brought home to England in 1886. He and Edith were married on 10 February 1887.

Both Desmond’s parents came from large, sprawling families of contrasting orientation. The Mortons – or rather, the male members of the family – were soldiers, lawyers and literary men: indeed, a surprisingly large number, perhaps not inappropriately, combined the profession of lawyer with that of actor, playwright or theatrical producer. Two of Charlie’s great-uncles, Thomas Morton and John Maddison Morton,⁴ were moderately successful Victorian playwrights, while his great-grandfather was the eminent Georgian poet and dramatist Thomas Morton,⁵ who entered Lincoln’s Inn in 1784 and whose works included Speed the Plough, containing the phrase ‘What will Mrs Grundy say?’, widely used long afterwards to comment on potentially shocking or scandalous behaviour. Mortons can be traced back to the 12th century throughout the British Isles and beyond: there was, for example, a family connection to Thomas Morton of Merrymount, known as the ‘English adventurer in America’, who left his law practice in London to found in 1625 a settlement in Massachusetts known as Merrymount, where he scandalised more sober colonists by selling rum and firearms to the natives and dancing round a maypole with Indian women; he came to a sticky end after immortalising his experiences in New English Canaan (1637). Desmond’s branch of the family, however, had its roots in Ireland, with a strong 19th century connection to the Indian subcontinent.

The Leathers, on the other hand, were technical men and entrepreneurs: engineers, contractors, architects, surveyors. The family was firmly rooted in northern England, ranged across Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Lancashire and Yorkshire, though the Leathers’ skills took them far and wide and their tangible legacy can still be seen in bridges, dams and canals across England. Edith’s great-grandfather, George Leather (1748–1818) had been Chief Colliery Engineer to the Yorkshire ‘Coal King’ William Fenton. George had eleven children and at least 25 grandchildren: his three sons that survived to adulthood included a civil engineer, an architect and Edith’s grandfather James (1779–1849), proprietor of Beeston Colliery. With a few exceptions the family remained in the North of England, many in or around Leeds, and Leather daughters married local men (particularly clergymen), the family ties still tighter when Leather sisters chose bridegrooms who were brothers. Edith’s father, the eminent Victorian water engineer John Towlerton Leather, moved a section of the family further north when in 1858 he bought one of the oldest estates in Northumberland, Middleton Hall, fifty miles north of Newcastle upon Tyne. There he adopted readily and conscientiously the responsibilities of lord of the manor, and became a prominent local philanthropist, serving a term as High Sheriff of Northumberland.

Morton’s baptismal name, Desmond John Falkiner Morton, carries within it all the clues to this variegated family background. Desmond was not a traditional Morton forename, and the evidence suggests a choice based on ancestry with a touch of romantic appeal. Three months before Desmond’s birth in November 1891, his mother Edith pasted into her scrapbook a cutting from a magazine concerning Lady Katherine Fitzgerald, the ‘old’ Countess of Desmond, who according to popular legend lived for 140 years, dying in 1604 from a fall while climbing an apple tree at her home in County Cork. Although parts of the story are certainly apocryphal – she was also supposed to have danced with Richard III – there seems no doubt that the Countess of Desmond was a remarkable woman who lived to a great age, possibly over 100. Daughter of Sir John Fitzgerald, Lord of Decies, she became the second wife of Thomas Fitzgerald, twelfth Earl of Desmond, some time after 1505, and bore him a daughter. In widowhood she retired to the dower house, the Castle of Inchiquin, apparently travelling to England with her daughter to present a petition to King James I protesting against the seizure of her estates by English settlers (they had to stop for a time on the way because her elderly daughter was exhausted by the journey). According to the Itinerary of Fynes Morison, the Countess continued to the end of her life to walk daily to the market town three miles from her home in Youghal.⁶

The story of the forceful and charismatic Countess may have attracted Edith, but there was also a family connection. The Desmonds belonged to one of the most ancient of Irish families, the McCartys or McCarthys, whose genealogy, according to Burke’s Peerage, could be traced back to Heber, eldest son of Milesius, King of Spain, through Oilioll Olium, King of Munster, in the third century. The Earls of Desmond, Clancarty and Glencave all belonged to the McCarty clan, and McCarty was the maiden name of Charlie Morton’s mother, Mary Geraldine, another forceful and relatively long-lived woman (1822–1904). Mary was one of the twelve children of the chieftain of the oldest branch of the clan, Justin McCarty of Carrignavar, Co. Cork, and Isabella Falkiner, granddaughter of Sir Riggs Falkiner, MP for Castlemara, thus providing another of Desmond’s forenames. Mary married, successively, two barristers with business connections in India and spent a considerable part of her married life there. She was said to have been an intimate friend of Lord Dalhousie, Governor General of India from 1848 to 1856, and to have counted Thackeray, Trollope and Fanny Kemble among her circle.

Mary’s first marriage, to Thomas Charles Morton, produced two sons: Desmond’s father, Charlie, and Gerald, born in Calcutta in 1843 and 1845. Very little is known about Thomas Morton: his practice was based at Belgrave Square, in London, but he appears to have had business and possibly professional interests in India and Ceylon. Thomas died in 1855, and three years later Mary married another barrister, William Brownrigg Elliot, grandson of the first Earl of Minto, who had gone out to India to sort out the affairs of his father’s Bengal Indigo Company. He and Mary had two sons, Cyril and William, born in India in 1858 and 1861, but on the death of his father he took his family back to Scotland. There William purchased in 1862 the mansion house of Benrig, on Tweedside, and settled down with Mary to fulfil his duties as Laird; also playing a prominent part in Liberal affairs during Gladstone’s 1868–74 Administration. Their son Cyril died young, in 1868, but in the best family tradition the younger William became both a barrister and an actor, recording his career in In My Anecdotage published in 1925. ‘Willie’ Elliot was a prominent figure in the world of Liberal politics, but was known more particularly as a ‘clubman’ and raconteur in the London literary and social scene during the 1890s; he took a keen interest in the young Desmond, who recalled him fondly in later years as a favourite uncle.

When Mary Morton married her second husband in 1858 her two Morton sons, Charlie and Gerald, had already returned to England to be educated. Both boys attended Eton and Sandhurst before entering the Army. Gerald Morton⁷ had the more distinguished military career, becoming ADC to the Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab in 1871 at the age of 26, and achieving great distinction during the Afghan campaigns, fighting alongside Lord Roberts during the siege of Kandahar in 1879. At the time of his sudden death, in 1906, he was about to relinquish command of the 7th Division of the Irish Command at the Curragh, though he had recently been more in the public eye as President of the Court of Inquiry into a notorious case of bullying at Aldershot among the Scots Guards.⁸ Described by the Irish Times as ‘a perfect type of the thoughtful, kingly [sic] gentleman, yielding no part of his duty to courtesy, but still retaining courtesy in all his duties’, one newspaper also noted a nice sense of humour: commanding the Lahore district during the Boer War and alarmed by losing all his best troops to the front, Gerald returned the following response to a wire from HQ asking how many more men he could spare: ‘the ten men under my command are at present playing football; I might spare one of the goalkeepers if urgent.’⁹

Charles Falkiner Morton’s career was perfectly respectable though less exalted: his passion was for horses rather than staff work. Entering the First Royal Dragoons as cornet of horse in 1862, he remained with the ‘Royals’ for the greater part of his career, eventually reaching the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. During this period the Royals were stationed all over England, rarely staying more than a year in one place apart from serving in Ireland from 1867–73 and again from 1880. It is not known where or when on his travels Charlie met his future wife, Edith, but it is likely to have been before 1883 when he was transferred to command the XIV King’s Hussars, then stationed in India. Promoted Colonel in 1885, the following year he brought his regiment home to England. In 1887, the year of his marriage, he was appointed Assistant Director of Remounts, a post chosen by him in preference to another command in order to indulge his passion for horses. Charlie was an enthusiastic sportsman who had owned and raced horses in India, Ireland and England, both on the flat and in steeplechases. During his final three years in India Edith collected press reports of his sporting exploits: a report in The Fusee dated 13 August 1884, for example, records Charlie riding five of his own horses in eleven races over three days, and winning five of them.* Though forced to resign his commission through ill-health in 1892, cuttings in Edith’s scrapbook show that he continued to take a keen interest both in horse racing and other forms of sport, including cricket and angling; Desmond recalled being taken as a boy to Thurston’s billiards hall by his father.

Until his marriage in 1887 Charlie had apparently devoted his life to horses and the Army, though what little evidence survives indicates a lively and sociable personality. In keeping with Morton tradition, both he and Gerald seem to have been involved in amateur dramatics: as early as 1860 they had played leading parts in two farces written by their great-uncle, John Maddison Morton, Box and Cox and The Rifle and How to Use It (Edith later pasted the programme in her scrapbook). Charlie was also willing to sing in public, performing ‘On the Steamer’ and ‘The Old Brigade’ at a concert held at Middleton Hall in December 1887. It would seem, therefore, that he was well able to cope with the large and gregarious Leather family. For in marrying Edith, he was joining forces not with a spinster emerging from a long subjugation to her elderly father, but with an attractive, strong-minded, relatively wealthy and well-travelled woman whose family background had made her independent and self-reliant. While she was close to her father and may have deferred marriage to please him, in adulthood she had divided her time between Middleton Hall and her father’s London residence, 19 Carlton House Terrace. She travelled widely in the United Kingdom, visiting friends and members of her large extended family, and appears to have made regular trips to Europe as well.¹⁰

Edith was the youngest child of John Towlerton Leather, who gave Desmond his other forename. ‘JTL’, an interesting character who undoubtedly passed on some of his qualities and independence of mind to his youngest daughter, repays some study. Born in Liverpool in 1804, he came from a family of notable engineers, though his own father James had in fact been an accountant and colliery proprietor in Liverpool and Leeds.¹¹ JTL left home at nineteen with £5 in his pocket to apprentice himself to his engineer uncle George Leather in Bradford, working with him on the Aire and Calder Navigation and Goole Docks. By the age of 25 he had set himself up as a civil engineer with offices in Sheffield, where he designed and built seven dams for the Sheffield Waterworks Company, six of which are still in use.¹² Known as ‘Contractor Leather’ (the ‘contractor’ in major construction projects of this period assumed financial responsibility for the entire undertaking, including engaging labour and plant at his own expense), JTL enjoyed a long and successful career until well into his seventies as civil engineer and entrepreneur, his major projects including the Portland Breakwater and Spithead Forts and extensions to Portsmouth Harbour, as well as reservoirs, bridges and railways across the country; he also founded the Hunslet Steam Engine Company and owned a colliery.

Despite his involvement in high-profile projects that attracted a good deal of public interest (and public money), Leather seems to have remained a surprisingly low-key figure. A serious, rather austere and somewhat diffident professional, meticulous in fulfilling his responsibilities, he was undoubtedly ambitious though seemingly ill at ease with social, if not with financial success. JTL was, perhaps, disinclined towards the networking and self-promotion that would have brought greater recognition of his achievements; he never quite rose to the public heights of his profession, unlike, for example, his apprentice, John (later Sir John) Fowler, who spent five years with Leather in the 1830s and went on to become President of the Institute of Civil Engineers. Nevertheless JTL enjoyed considerable financial and social success. During the 1850s and 1860s, at the peak of his career, he was able to buy two paddle steamers, the Princess and the Contractor, and a steam yacht, Ceres; he owned large houses in Yorkshire and in Northumberland, where his estate of Middleton Hall extended to nearly 7,000 acres; and as a London base he bought 19 Carlton House Terrace (where his neighbours included the future Prime Minister, William Ewart Gladstone, and the Duke of Newcastle), installing a housekeeper and servants. In 1859 he was also granted his own coat of arms, with the motto Nil Nisi Quod Honestum.*

One wonders, however, whether he had much time or opportunity to enjoy these fruits of success, since his projects required him to spend long periods on site or travelling; certainly, there was not much opportunity to spend time at home with his family. His personal life, which undoubtedly suffered from the demands of his professional responsibilities, had been touched by loss and disappointment. In 1832 JTL had, much against her father’s wishes, married his first cousin, Maria, daughter of his uncle and mentor George Leather. Just twenty-one and pregnant at the time of her marriage, Maria bore JTL six children, four of whom survived childhood, but she died from pneumonia in 1849, having spent considerable periods of time living with her family in Leeds when JTL’s work commitments took him away from home; in 1844 he bought Leventhorpe Hall, just south of Leeds, to please her. Despite his prolonged absences, Leather was much affected by Maria’s death, which was followed a month later by the death of their youngest daughter, Catherine Rosa; within a year, both his parents were dead too. His reaction was to seek a change of scene by bidding, successfully, for the contract to construct Portland Breakwater.

JTL’s second wife, Harriet Spencer Page, Edith’s mother, was co-heiress to her father Isaac Spencer Page’s estate at Shirland in Derbyshire, and the two families had known each other well for some time. They married in 1852 when she was thirty-three, but their evident happiness was short-lived. Their first child, a boy, lived only eighteen months; Edith was born in 1856. On 18 May 1859 Harriet was killed in an accident while driving a pony and trap with JTL’s grown-up daughter Annie, three-year old Edith and two of JTL’s small nieces (all unhurt). Leather was devastated: he had ‘now lost two wives in their prime and four of the eight children born to him’.¹³ His grief and despair are evident in a ‘Christmas Box’ letter written to Edith in December 1859, seven months after the death of her mother:

My little darling Edith,

The earnest prayer of thy poor bereaved father, my sweet little darling, is that you may grow up by the grace of our Lord in all goodness in the likeness and after the example of thy sainted mother – who altho’ lost to us in this life, let us hope that we may meet her hereafter in that world where neither sin nor sorrow can be known.

We may one and all wish you my darling a ‘Merry Christmas’ for happily it is far beyond thy young mind to comprehend the bitterness of the affliction which the loss of thy dear mother inflicts upon her unhappy husband.

That every blessing of this life may be extended to you my sweet darling and that you may be received into the Kingdom of Heaven hereafter is the sincere and hopeful prayer of your Father,

J. Towlerton Leather¹⁴

At the time of Harriet’s death JTL’s youngest child by his first marriage, Arthur, was thirteen and attending Rugby; the eldest, Ellen, was already married, and Frederick, JTL’s somewhat feckless heir, was twenty-four. It therefore fell to Annie, at the age of twenty, to take over the care of little Edith. Since JTL’s reaction to the loss of his second wife was to throw himself into another major construction project that took him away from home, this time to Portsmouth and Spithead, Annie brought Edith up, first at Middleton Hall, and later accompanying her to London. As both grew older the relationship was more one of close friends than mother and daughter. Annie never married, but lived in Kensington until her death in 1910.

John Towlerton Leather died in 1885, leaving an estate with a net value of over £250,000 – the equivalent of at least £15 million today. As a prominent local landowner and man of substance, he had taken his responsibilities seriously and was well respected. A local memoir described him as a ‘friendly and hospitable neighbour, a considerate and generous landlord ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• CHURCHILL’S MAN OF MYSTERY
• WHITEHALL HISTORIES: GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL HISTORY SERIES
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• ABBREVIATIONS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 ANCESTRAL VOICES
• 2 PROPHESYING WAR
• 3 MAJOR MORTON OF SIS: 1919–22
• 4 THE OCCULT OCTOPUS, 1923–26
• 5 ‘GOD SAVE THE KING AND HIS AGENTS PROVOCATEURS!’: 1926–28
• 6 LOOSE ENDS: 1929–31
• 7 THE BEGINNINGS OF INDUSTRIAL INTELLIGENCE, 1927–31
• 8 A ‘GENTLEMANLY FORM OF SPYING’: THE INDUSTRIAL INTELLIGENCE CENTRE, 1931–37
• 9 PLANNING FOR WAR WITH GERMANY: 1938–39
• 10 THE FIREPROOF CURTAIN: 3 SEPTEMBER 1939–15 MAY 1940
• 11 THE MORTON MYTH DOWNING STREET, MAY 1940–July 1945
• 12 INTELLIGENCE LIAISON, MAY 1940–JULY 1945
• 13 TREASURY TROUBLESHOOTER: 1946–53
• 14 ENERGETICALLY AWAITING DEATH: 1953–71
• EPILOGUE
• ANNEX
• NOTES
• SOURCE NOTE AND BIBLIOGRAPHY