The name is Bond…Sexton Bond

From the Peter Haining papers, this typed manuscript  by the great researcher and expert on British comics and periodicals W.O.G. ('Bill') Lofts (1923-1997). It is interesting that Fleming got even close to writing a Sexton Blake, a bit like J.K. Rowling deciding to do a new Secret Seven adventure (actually not a bad idea..)



Sexton Blake and James Bond

I must confess that I greatly enjoyed the James Bond novels by Ian Fleming. Alas, there were only about sixteen of them as he died a premature death in 1964. Since then a number of other writers have penned them, but never read as well as the creator.

The first in 1955 was entitled 'Casino Royal' when the author an ex-M.I.5 man, certainly was authentic in every detail. The films that commenced in 1963 with 'Dr. No'*. I also greatly enjoyed, especially those featuring Sean Connery. Roger Moore his successor was just as good, though even more suitable to the Saint character, with his type of humour.

Likewise I enjoyed all the Sexton Blake stories in my younger days, as this world famous character must have entertained millions in his day, now alas seemingly put on the sideboards for quite some years. I must also admit that probably now doing so much detective work one can see the limitations in this field, by sloppy plots, as well as faulty backgrounds by some writers.

As well known, despite the myth of Leslie Charteris, Sax Rohmer, and Edgar Wallace supposed to have cut their eye-teeth early days of penning Blake yarns (records show they did not) there was once a time, when none other than Ian Fleming was contemplating writing a Sexton Blake story,

Fascists "Uppish" Again (Tom Driberg)

Found - this cutting from the Oxford Mail - Thursday 4th February 1943 detailing an incident straight out of Foyle's War. While World War II was raging, back in England pro-Nazi 'hooligans' were getting 'uppish.' A good demonstration of fair play and free speech - but 'much to be deplored.' Tom Driberg, now the subject of several biographies, was an openly gay, Communist sympathiser and a lifetime opponent of fascism. Churchill said 'he is the sort of person who gives sodomy a bad name..' Peter Wright of Spycatcher fame said he was a double agent...


Fascists "Uppish" Again - M. P.

Mr. Driberg (Ind., Maldon) asked the Home Secretary in the Commons today if he was aware that an organisation which advocated peace by negotiation with Hilter, and distributes pro-Nazi, anti-parliamentary and anti-Semitic propaganda, was proposing to hold a public meeting at a London theatre in the near future, and whether he would take steps to prevent the holding of such a meeting as likely to provoke a breach of the peace.


Mr. Morrison said that while watch was being kept on the activities of this organisation, his present information did not suggest that this meeting was likely to attract so much public interest that serious disorder was to be apprehended, and it would be premature for him to decide at this early date whether there were ground to prohibit the meeting, under Regulation 39E.

Tom Driberg

Mr. Driberg: Will you bear in mind that only last night there was a deplorable exhibition of hooliganism at Finsbury, where a memorial of Lenin was broken up and tarred and placarded with Fascist slogans?
Will you bear in mind that these people do seem to be getting rather uppish again and require a sharp check?

Mr. Morrison: I will certainly look into that incident to which you refer. If true, it is much to be deplored.

Artists as foreign spies

It is a fact that many signposts were temporarily removed, especially in rural areas, during the Second World War, and that countrymen were advised to report sightings of suspicious foreign looking and foreign sounding individuals in their district. What is not generally known, I suspect, is that an artist plying his or her trade as a landscape painter could have come under the gaze of local busybodies, including members of the Home Guard, who may have reported them to the authorities.


This could explain why many of the watercolour sketches executed during the middle years of the War in various locations in the West Country - but mainly in Somerset- by the acclaimed etcher and watercolourist Nathaniel Sparks(1880 – 1956) bear the familiar stamp of the Censor on the reverse. The actual wording on one sketch is : ‘Passed for publication, 21 Jul 1943, No. 34…Press and Censorship Bureau ‘.At this time Sparks, a rather eccentric character with a peripatetic bent, was wandering around favourite locations centred on Wincanton, possibly at times sleeping rough or with gypsies, and invariably looking dishevelled and tramp-like. His appearance alone may have given rise to suspicion from locals, who could have surmised that his role as an artist was excellent cover for a foreign spy. Suspicion may have been further heightened when it was discovered that many of the sketches featured in the distance the Tower in Stourton Park, a famous local landmark.

How to become a spy (in 6 easy lessons)

Found in a 1963 Central Office of Information booklet Their Trade is Treachery. Of some rarity and value - a top online bookseller describes it thus:

In the wake of the Profumo Affair the COI "produced a lively booklet as part of their educational campaign to improve the awareness of middle and lower grade officials and members of the Armed Forces of their responsibilities in regard of security matters" (Gladden, Civil Services of the United Kingdom: 1885-1970, p.166). Includes accounts of notorious cases, tricks of the trade, and helpful advice, "Spies are with us all the time. They are interested in everything, defence secrets, scientific secrets, political decisions, economic facts, even people's characters in order to recruit more spies" (from the preface).

Towards the end of the book after a piece called 'How not to become a spy (in 6 not so easy lessons)' they offer this tongue in cheek advice:

How to become a spy (in 6 easy lessons)

1. Let it be known to your friends, casual acquaintances, and strangers that you have secret information, or are in a job where you may be able to obtain it one day.
This should attract treasonable propositions or threats, which it may or may not be possible to resist.

2. Think you are cleverer than you are. Be conceited. Tell yourself that you are capable of handling any regular association with Iron Curtain officials without informing your superior officer or local Security officer. If the Iron Curtain man is a diplomat, convince yourself that it's only your fascinating personality, wit, and friendship that attracts him. If you can believe that, you can believe anything. You're on your way.

3.Develop a few vices, especially abroad, so that with luck you can be compromised and blackmailed.

4. If you cannot manage a vice or two, just be foolish. If you can't be foolish, be incautious.

5. Accept favours and hospitality from Iron Curtain officials… When in return they ask some harmless service in exchange for good money, accept at once. This encourages them, and, if you pursue  the matter to a logical conclusion,  you should land yourself safely in prison one day.

6. If you do not fancy prison especially in cold weather, persuade yourself that if you become a spy you will never get caught. You will, of course, but one must not start with a defeatist attitude.

From the Library of Guy Burgess

Sold on eBay in late 2008 (price unrecorded but circa £180)

Algernon Cecil. British Foreign Secretaries, 1807 – 1916: Studies in Personality and Policy (London: G Bell & Sons, 1927)

This remarkable survival is the copy of Algernon Cecil’s 1927 book about British foreign secretaries owned by the infamous Cambridge spy Guy Burgess. The front free endpaper bears the inscription: ‘Guy Burgess / Eton 1929’. Burgess was seventeen or eighteen and preparing to take up his place at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Inconspicuous enough at first glance – a plain, dark blue hardcover without dustwrapper, a little worn about the edges – the book harbours a wealth of fascinating annotations in the hand of the young intellectual. There are many sentences in the book which Burgess has placed a pencil line under or alongside, such as the observation that Canning, foreign secretary during the Napoleonic Wars, ‘[as] he had a difficulty in understanding the value of a code amongst nations, so he had a difficulty in understanding the obligations of code amongst men’. Elsewhere, Burgess notes well the observation that the Earl of Clarendon (1850s foreign secretary) ‘betray[ed] himself by a kind of fatalism rather than a fund of resourcefulness [so that in the end] he proved somehow unable to take control of the situation, with the inevitable result that it took hold of him’. It is indeed remarkable that the vast bulk of Burgess’s annotations involve criticisms if not outright damnations of character.

There are also, at the bottom of some pages, Burgess’s own thoughts where he is moved to agree or disagree with the author.

Goddesses Never Die (1969)

Goddesses Never Die by George B. Mair. (Jarrolds U.K. 1969) Dust wrapper by Michael Johnson. An espionage thriller with a lot of 1960s references. Rather rare - none listed on web book malls and this copy with a signed presentation from the author...

The dust wrapper blurb reads:

Set in the Himalayas, this seventh David Grant thriller has all the narrative power and exotic colour for which the George Mair has been acclaimed in five continents.

Hashish and LSD are the weapons chosen by the Mafia and Cosa Nostra to corrupt western society on a global scale and to promote a world take-over by permissive politicians assisted by hippies, beatniks and flower people. A remote Himalayan village controlled by a woman who was once a living goddess in Kathmandu's Kumari Devi Temple becomes a headquarters for organised world revolt – and David Grant, on leave from his duties as NATO's special intelligence agent, is drawn into one of the most dramatic episodes of his career.

A casual meeting with Harmony Dove – socialite, mystery woman and man-hunter – involves Grant in a fantastic battle of wits in which civilisation itself is at stake.

[Backflap, with pic of the writer aged about 50] George Mair specialises in creating drama from existing situations, and his intimate knowledge of over 70 countries enables him to write with authority – whether his  setting is the West Indies or Chile, the Soviet Union or the Sahara.

His scientific training also enables him to see the potential in weapons ranging from drugs to nerve gases while his instincts as a newsman guide him in choice of plot.

His fantasy is always close to 'what may happen tomorrow' and he is an expert in blending fact with fiction.

Anthony Blunt 'The Mind in Chains' 1937

 In the post on the Victor Rothschild we mentioned that he had been at Cambridge with the art expert and spy Anthony Blunt. It is known that he lent Blunt £100 to buy a Poussin  which was sold for £100,000 50 years later as part of his estate. Anthony Blunt a Cambridge don by the early 1930s, was formally recruited to Soviet intelligence in 1937, according to recently released KGB documents, much later than earlier accounts. This explains the seemingly cavalier act of openly writing left-wing (Marxist) art polemic such as his 1937 essay 'Art Under Capitalism and Socialism' published in The Mind in Chains.

 David Mcknight writes in Espionage and the Roots of the Cold War that- 
'Blunt's left wing articles, and his 1935 trip to the USSR, subsequently almost blew his cover. In 1939, as he took tentative steps toward his goal of penetrating British intelligence by joining in the Field Security Police, he was questioned about them. Again, wartime laxness saved the day. In any case Blunt was accepted into MI5 in 1940 where he soon transferred to his preferred section -- counter-espionage -- enabling him to report on measures against Soviet and German intelligence.'  Obviously no-one had closely read his piece in this red-jacketed book. Blunt writes:

Gargoyle Club Members 2

Two well known members at the Gargoyle Club were the spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. Luke recounts a night of serious drinking where Maclean walked between tables loudly proclaiming 'I am the English Hiss' (i.e the American spy Alger Hiss) and after a few more drinks 'I work for Uncle Joe'. No-one took the slightest interest assuming his behaviour was just pour épater. At the time he was head of the American desk at the Foreign Office.

 Luke is unclear as to precisely when it finished but a rock and roll night in 1956 was considered a sort of death knell. The evidence of there being members like Ginsberg, Corso and Terry Southern indicates that it may have struggled on into the 1960s. Michael Luke,author of David Tennant and the Gargoyle Years (1991) was the son of Sir Harry Luke, friend of Baron Corvo. It is unlikely had Corvo still been around in the 1930s he would have been a member ( 4 guineas a year). More members from Michael Laws roll-call to come..


[Theatre & Films] Robert Newton, Anne Newton, Michael Redgrave, Freddie Ashton, Gottfied Reinhardt, Sylvia Reinhardt, Wolfgang Reinhardt, Anthony Asquith, Peter Glenville, George Minter, Dennis Foreman, Ken Tynan, Adrian Pryce, Sally Anne Field, Hermione Gingold,

[Regulars & Adventurers] Quentin Crewe, Colin Crewe, Sally Crewe, Xan Fielding, William Moss, Michael Alexander, Richard Wolheim, Anne Wolheim, Ran Antrim, Anthony Frere Marocco, Michael Morris, Poldy Loewenstein, Bianca Loewenstein, Werner Alvensleben, Henry Weatherall, Hugh Cruddes.

[Politburo & Mainstream Regulars] David Tennant, Hermione Baddeley, Virginia Bath, David Tennant Jr., Pauline Tennant, Sabrina Tennant, Georgia Tennant, Henry Bath, Daphne Fielding, Tony Vyvian, Robert Boothby, Patrick Kinross, Angela Culme Seymour, Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, Clair Bell, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Paul Roche, Diana Mosley, Nancy Mitford, Jessica Mitford, David Herbert, Augustus John, Philip Toynbee, Victor Rothschild, Richard Wyndham, Roland Penrose, Lee Miller, Anthony Powell, Violet Powell, John Sutro, Gillian Sutro, Ivan Moffat, John Hayward, Phillip Dunn, John Strachey, Isabel Strachey, James Strachey.

[Mainstream Regulars] Derek Jackson, Gotfried von Hoffmanstahl, Lisa von Hoffmanstahl, Iris Tree, Auberon Herbert, Michael Young, Peter Watson, Norman Fowler, Brian Howard, Sara Langford, Rodney Phillips, Monica Phillips, Mark Culme Seymour, Robin Campbell, Mary Campbell, Clarissa Churchill, Michael Harrison, Maria Harrison, Poppet John & Pol, Joy Craig, Dennis Craig, Robert Heber Percy, Pauline Gates, Sylvester Gates, Igor Vinogradov, Claud Cockburn, Ralph Partridge, Francis Partridge, John Young, Ray Parsons, Alan Peile, Freddie Ayers, Nancy Cunard.

Answering Machine Hacking and other papers (late 1980s)

An odd and weirdly topical collection. [Beadle collection- paranoia, revenge and general weirdness] called Alternative Inphormation Unlimited (USA). 45 loose printouts hole-punched and contained in a store-bought plastic ring binder. Publications from the late 80s and early 90s by an organisation called Alternative Inphormation Unlimited and concern wire tapping and other forms of telephone exploitation and subversion.

Each paper is several pages in length and many are illustrated with technical diagrams. All publications state that they are sold 'FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY'. Alternative Inphormation Unlimited's slogan was 'Keeping You Informed of Big Brother.' Contents read thus:



Answering Machine Hacking - How it's done and how to stop it; AT & T & BOC Routing Codes!!!; Beige Box - How to build and use a lineman's handset; Black Box - Complete schematics and instructions; Blue Box - Uses and applications; Blue Box - C64 home computer; Brown Box - Why pay Ma Bell for extra services such as a 3 way calling and touch tone service?; Bug Detection on Home Telephones; Bull Shitting the Operator; Call Forwarding Box; Call-Waiting Phone Tap; Cellular Telephones and Tapping Cellular; Clear Box; CNA List - Customer name & address no's used by Ma Bell. Those secret No's revealed; Converting a Tone Dialler into a Red Box; Dial 900 §'s For Free - How to; Free Phone Calls to Any Point in the World!; Gold Box; Illegal Access Code and How to Get Them!; Infinity Transmitter; Legendary Ether Box! - Snatch phone calls out of thin air! The ultimate wireless phone tap!;Listening In!!; Miniature FM Transmitter; Monitoring Phone Calls with a TVRO; Obtaining Unlisted Phone §'s; Pay Telephones; Phantom Phone Phucker!; Phone Phucking - The art of; Phone Phreaks Guide to Loops; Phone Utility for the C64/128 - The amazing rainbow box program!! the only program you'll ever need to make free long distance phone calls; Poorman's Voice Changer! - $30 device better than $250 units; Red Box - Complete guide to; Red Box - Build a; Remote Pay Phone Phreaking; Silver Box Phone; Snooper Extension Phone; Taping Telephone Conversations; Telephone Ear Piercer! The ultimate defence tactic for obscene fone calls!; Tons of Tones - The complete guide as used by Ma Bell!!; Two Minute Bug; Voice Controller; Voice Paging - Free; War Games Autodialler; Watergate Surveillance Package! Taps and Bugs.