Agent Provocateur for Hitler or Churchill?

The Mysterious Life of Stella Lonsdale

David Tremain

• Editorial: Pen and Sword History
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526779632
• Categoría: Histoire
• Categoría: Biographies militaires

There have been many remarkable women who served British Intelligence during the Second World War. One whose dubious claim to have worked for them is a fascinating tale involving three marriages – the first, to a spurious White Russian prince; the second to a playboy-turned-criminal involved in a major jewellery robbery in the heart of London’s Mayfair in the late 1930s. After the war she became romantically involved with a well-known British Fascist, but finally married another notorious criminal whom she had met earlier during the war. The descriptions variously ascribed to her ranged from ‘remarkable’ and ‘quite ravishing’ to ‘…a woman whose loose living would make her an object of shame on any farm-yard’. Until now, very little has been recorded about Stella Lonsdale’s life. She doesn’t even merit a mention in the two official histories of MI5, even though she managed to tie them up in knots for years. This book will explore the role this strange woman may or may not have played in working for British Intelligence, the French Deuxième Bureau, or the Abwehr – German military intelligence – during the Second World War, using her MI5 files as a primary source.

Chapter 1

The Beginnings of a Covert Life

On 23 January 1942 there was a knock at the door of Stella Lonsdale’s London flat. Special Branch officers had come to arrest her. She was taken to Holloway prison where she would rub shoulders with a quintet of other women spies – Mathilde Carré, Vera Eriksen, Mathilde Krafft, My Eriksson and the Duchesse de Château-Thierry – as well as others who had been supporters of Sir Oswald Mosley. What had led to her arrest and brought MI5 to charge her under Defence Regulation 18B (hostile associations) was a whole sequence of events, beginning with her life in France before and after the Occupation; her association with various individuals involved in an escape line; her friendship with an Abwehr intelligence officer; and her escape back to England, all of which caused them to suspect that there was more to her than met the eye.

* * *

Stella Lonsdale was born Stella Edith Howson Clive on 9 January 1913 at 42 Lyndon Road, Olton, Warwickshire, a suburb of Solihull, to Ernest Robert George Clive, a confectioner, who died in 1929 when she was 16 of an inflammation of the lungs, leaving her Lithuanian mother, Stella Howson Clive (née Allcock), the ‘usufruct’ of the entire estate for life,1 meaning that Stella was dependent on her for financial support. During the Second World War her brother Dennis served as a Leading Aircraftman (LAC) in the operations room at RAF Bramscote near Nuneaton, Warwickshire, while another brother, John Norman Clive, suffered from dementia praecox. Her younger sister, Norah Janet Clive, lived at home with her mother at 44 Reservoir Road, Olton.

Of medium height (5 feet 7 inches), with dark brown hair and blue-grey eyes, she needed glasses for reading. Given her somewhat humble origins, for most of her adult life she inhabited the demi-monde of the upper-class – a world of Mayfair ‘playboys’, endless parties, loose living and a voracious appetite for sex, possibly bordering on nymphomania (‘she is sex-fanatical’) – and attracted a variety of unsavoury characters. She once told her sister-in-law, the actress Diana Vernon, ‘And if you see your friend, tell him I am still looking for a nice clean man … With French technique.’ Men came and went with the frequency of a revolving door, falling for her sexual charms and tolerating her histrionics, even though her attentions to them were often short-lived and rarely reciprocated in equal measure. She lived for danger and derived vicarious pleasure from the thrill-seeking adventures in which she became involved.

In 1942 MI5’s Legal Section (SLA) prepared ‘a careful appreciation of Mrs. LONSDALE’s character by a person who has had the distasteful task of listening to a great deal of her conversation’:

Owing to the fact that much of Mrs. LONSDALE’s conversation cannot possibly be submitted in a report owing to its indescribably filthy nature, I am giving below a short summary of her character so far as I have been able to study it.

(a) She is a liar of such convincingness as I would not have believed existed. Unless one had actually heard her make statements that appeared to bear every ring of truth, and then, shortly afterwards, gloating over the way in which she had put them over, one could have sworn that she was sincere. Even knowing her so well, there have been times when one has – against one’s will – believed her, only to learn a little later that there was not a single grain of truth or honesty.

(b) Her histrionic powers are of the first water. On one occasion she indulged in violent bouts of weeping and hysteria for an hour and a quarter that seemed to shake her whole being. When the man for whose benefit they were staged departed, within one minute – in fact, instantaneously – she was laughing and congratulating herself on the success of her act. Her emotions cannot be so much as skin deep.

(c) She has an unshakable conviction that every man on earth finds her completely irresistible. This amounts to a virtual obsession, beside which Cleopatra and Helen of Troy fade into nothingness. That her husband has deserted her for another woman causes her constant and nagging pique.

(d) The sole aim of her life is to amass as much money as possible, and she gives the impression that she would stick at nothing to achieve this. No sooner has she extracted money from one victim than she was discussing plans to get some from another. She is utterly unscrupulous and without loyalty. She probably has a certain careless generosity when it costs her nothing.

(e) Her mind is – simply and frankly – a cesspool. Without going into details, she held forth for 40 minutes on the difference in love-making of a Frenchman and an Englishman in terms that defy description. On another occasion she expatiated on the theme of animals. She apparently knows not the meaning of either decency or reticence. She is sex-fanatical.

(f) Trying to find some point in her favour, one can only say that she has a certain gaiety – though it is all directed to one end. In toto, she appears to be an utterly worthless character – unscrupulous, unbalanced, and wholly selfish.2

In 1930 Stella matriculated from the Royal High School for Girls, Warwick, whereupon she claimed to have been sent to London to be presented at Court. Given that she would have been 17 and considered too young – one had to be 18 to be a debutante and ‘come out’ – this seems highly unlikely.

Her mother made various attempts to marry her off, first to a journalist named Meredith, who may have been the financier and journalist, later RAF Wing Commander, Hubert Angelo Meredith.3 However, this arrangement didn’t suit Stella’s plans; she was indifferent to him and had seen how unhappy her sister Norah was. There were also several alleged engagements, first in 1934 to Lord Cobham’s son, Tony Littleton [sic] and the following year, when she was 22, to Lieutenant Derek McCardie with whom she spent the night before he went off to Suez prior to the Abyssinian crisis in 1935.4 However, there do not appear to be any scions of the Viscounts Cobham branch of the Lyttleton family called Tony or Anthony, and the present Lord Cobham has confirmed that his father was not engaged to Stella Lonsdale.5

Mrs Clive was against Stella studying in London so she opted to spend two years studying commerce at the University of Birmingham before taking the Bachelor’s exam. However, the University of Birmingham’s Alumni office and the Cadbury Research Library have been unable to find any record of her being a student there, let alone graduating.6

With £25 she’d managed to save she bought a second-hand typewriter and set up the Phoenix Bureau, Typewriting and Copying, registered in the name of Stella Clive, at 1 Albert Street, Edgbaston, with the help of the first of a series of shady characters with whom she was to become associated – a 42-year-old Danish architect named Paul Christian Boeg Holme whom she had allegedly met in 1934 when she was 22.

Holme was born in Copenhagen on 10 October 1889 and first came to the United Kingdom in 1916.7 In 1925 he began working as an agent for Danish Provision Merchants of 31 Castle Street, trading as Paul Holme & Co. and living at various addresses in Birmingham. Two other business ventures – a partnership with fellow Dane Henrik Edward Weis Soelberg, and the United Produce Company at 1 Albert Street, Edgbaston, the same address as Stella’s company – both foundered. Since 13 March 1935 he was registered as living with Stella at 16 Beaufort Road, Edgbaston, and apparently engaged to her. But what he hadn’t told her was that he was already married to a British-born woman named Nancy, from whom he was separated, having tried unsuccessfully to divorce her.

The work at the Phoenix Bureau came from solicitors and architects and before long Stella was making a profit of £30 a week, employing five people and three shorthand typists. This enabled her to move the business to 73 Colmore Row, but many of their suppliers of typewriters had difficulty in getting paid, which also became apparent when the business was sold in July 1935 for £300 and money was owing on them. One supplier even had to get a warrant of committal in default to get his money,8 although another, while not always getting paid for goods supplied, found Holme to be ‘honest and straightforward’! Stella later told the Abwehr that the reason she had sold her typing business was because it was affecting her eyesight too much and that she’d sold it for £2,500!

Stella’s mother didn’t approve of her daughter’s relationship with Holme, so in 1936 she decamped to London, according to a statement given to Detective Sergeant Rhodes of Special Branch at New Scotland Yard on 10 January 1942. Prior to 1936 she had been living in an expensive boarding house at Bexhill-on-Sea, Sussex; exactly why or whether it was with Holme is unclear, but it may have been to escape their creditors. SLA’s 1942 summary of the case noted, ‘Though HOLME has maintained an interest in Mrs. LONSDALE down to the present time, it does not appear that they have lived together since 1936 at latest.’9 In the meantime, Stella continued to have affairs with other men.

In 1937 Holme was still taking care of her debts and living at 32 Belsize Avenue, London NW3, working as the London manager for Eli Pearson & Company of Coventry, listed in 1929 as contractors of 33 King Street, Coventry. But by then the company was on the verge of bankruptcy. An advertisement appeared in the Coventry Evening Telegraph on 10 July 1937 offering for sale a variety of building materials, and a notice appeared in the London Gazette on 17 August dissolving the partnership. Holme told the police that he had known Stella Clive for many years and had become engaged to her, but then she’d gone off to Monte Carlo. At this time, he had incurred a debt on her behalf and was due to appear at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court.

In March 1936 (later changed to September) Stella met the second of her ne’er-do-well men friends – a stateless White Russian named Nickolas Sideroff @ Sederoff @ Warner @ Nicholas @ Prince Magaloff – at a seaside resort where she had gone to convalesce after receiving a kick in the stomach from a horse while out riding. Susan Barton, the cover name for Austrian-born Gisela Ashley, who worked in MI5’s B1a, stated in 1941 that the couple were in Casablanca at one time, although no specific date was given, and a report from the Chief Constable for Warwickshire’s office also stated that she had met Sideroff there.

Sideroff was born in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) on 21 or 31 August 1914, the nephew of Vladimir Bashkiroff of the stockbroking firm Shields and Co. of New York founded in 1923.10 Stella claimed that her mother knew his family as she was also Russian (some sources say Lithuanian). The Sideroffs were actually of Georgian nobility named Maghalashvili. This period of his life is full of inconsistencies. For example, at the age of 4 he accompanied his parents to America, and then in 1937 to France. However, this date cannot be correct for reasons which will shortly become apparent, and is possibly meant to be 1927 because on 24 February 1934 he was expelled from France.

The young Nickolas ran away from every school that he attended, resulting in his being sent to a reformatory school to mend his ways. Such was his bad behaviour that his mother refused to have anything to do with him. While in France he befriended a Roman Catholic bishop at Chambéry and stole several thousand francs from him,11 resulting in a conviction and prison sentence. On his release he tried to travel back to America as a stowaway but was discovered and repatriated to France.

In December 1935 he allegedly stole a gold watch from a ship’s captain, but to avoid being caught he stowed away on a ship at Cherbourg and travelled illegally to Southampton where he was refused leave to land by the immigration officer and failed to register with the immigration authorities as an alien. Somehow this illegal entry into Britain didn’t come to the attention of the police until September 1938 when they received an anonymous tip-off, leading to his being charged in November with landing without the permission of an immigration officer and sentenced to two months’ imprisonment. On 21 August 1939 he was fined twenty shillings (£1) for failing to notify the authorities of a change of address. Stella’s file records that while he was in England he worked as an assistant to his uncle, L.W. Smith, who owned Irfé, a ‘scent shop’ at 45 Dover Street, in London’s West End.

In November 1936 they travelled first to Paris, she as Miss Stella Clive, then on to Monte Carlo as Prince and Princess Magaloff, a name Sideroff claimed he’d borrowed from his mother Tania’s second husband, Prince Magaloff. He also claimed to be the son of Prince Nikita Magaloff and Barbara Bachkiroff or Bashkiroff.12 Travelling under this alias might help to explain how after his deportation from France in 1934 he was able to return there in 1936. While in Paris, on 21 November 1936 they stayed at the ‘Hôtel Basle’ (most likely the Hôtel Basile, 23, rue Godot de Mauroy in the 9th arrondissement) where Stella claimed to have met a German whom she would refer to as RENÉ, who would later play a significant rôle in her life. In December 1936 she and Sideroff were married in Monte Carlo on a boat just outside the three-mile limit. However, the marriage was later declared invalid since there had been only a religious ceremony, but no civil one, mandatory under French law.

As with everything in Stella’s story, there were more inconsistencies: when they were both interrogated on 10 January 1942, she told that she had gone through a religious ceremony as Stella Clive and he as Prince Magaloff, whereas Sideroff told Rhodes that they were married in a church, not on a boat. She claimed that a man named Adamoff had first introduced her in Monte Carlo to RENÉ, but Sideroff said he’d met RENÉ in a bar on the Champs-Élysées the day after he’d arrived in France in 1936, along with his friends Adamoff and Jacques Chatelain. He also said that Stella had been secretary to the Hon. Arthur Wentworth Roebuck, KC, Attorney-General of Canada [sic] when he came to the UK for a meeting of the Privy Council, whereas Roebuck was actually Attorney-General of the province of Ontario from 1934–7.

As well as supposedly working for the Encyclopedia Britannica, from about February 1938 to May 1939 Stella claimed to have been the secretary to a Member of Parliament referred to in her file as ‘Major Graham Gill...

Índice

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and Acronyms
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The Beginnings of a Covert Life
• Chapter 2 The Mayfair Playboy
• Chapter 3 ‘Some Interesting Work’
• Chapter 4 Capture and Recruitment
• Chapter 5 ‘Pat O’Leary’
• Chapter 6 The Gifted Liar
• Chapter 7 The Man in Grey
• Chapter 8 Flight from France
• Chapter 9 The RENÉ Enigma
• Chapter 10 ‘Keeping the Lady on Tap’
• Chapter 11 Telegrams and Telephone Checks
• Chapter 12 Major Masterman’s Report
• Chapter 13 ‘Damn the Torpedoes!’
• Chapter 14 Jean Castelain
• Chapter 15 A Parting of the Ways
• Chapter 16 Declarations of Love
• Chapter 17 ‘A Person of Hostile Associations’
• Chapter 18 ‘Well, There is Only One Lie …’
• Chapter 19 Aylesbury or Bust!
• Chapter 20 ‘A Very Cheap Specimen of a Human Being’
• Chapter 21 The ‘Pot Calling the Kettle Black’
• Chapter 22 Stella’s Circle
• Chapter 23 The Advisory Committee
• Chapter 24 ‘If I Had Been a Nasty Piece of Work …’
• Chapter 25 ‘A Fog of Falsehood and Misrepresentation’
• Chapter 26 The Advisory Committee’s Report
• Chapter 27 ‘The Woman Who Laughs Like a Horse’
• Chapter 28 Stella’s Statement to the Abwehr
• Chapter 29 The Sunday Express Affair
• Chapter 30 ‘A Champagne-loving Brunette’
• Afterword
• Appendix I: Mrs Lonsdale’s Secret Ink & Code
• Appendix II: The ‘Siegfried’ Letters
• Appendix III: Notes for Purposes of Investigation in France
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Plate Section