Mrs Zigzag: The Extraordinary Life of a Secret Agent's Wife (14 page)

The
Flamingo
had stirred a lot of interest in the British press and indeed Eddie took a
News of the World
reporter on board for some hair-raising activities:

Eddie only told me what he wanted me to know. I never knew for sure exactly what he was doing. It was for my protection. I was thinking that they were just taking gentle trips about the area in the yacht – until the newspapers got hold of it, and then it really became very, very scary, and I could not get away without them following. I was six months pregnant when he first took me to Tangier; I flew in to join him again, surrounded by press that wanted information on him.

Because of the crowd Eddie was mixing with, there was always an element of danger, even if Betty was unaware of it. It was brought home to her on one of their trips back to Tangier from London:

During this time I was once left behind in the hotel in Tangier because he feared that I might be kidnapped. He left a young man behind as a bodyguard, little more than a boy. I thought he couldn’t have knocked over a weed. He hung around the hotel to see that I was all right, that nobody kidnapped me. This was due to Eddie’s supposed attempt to kidnap the Sultan of Morocco. They got me up in the night and drove me to a Spanish airport to have me flown back to the UK.

Whilst in Tangier, we used to spend a lot of time at the yacht club, rather than the beach, which was opposite the Rif Hotel where we were staying. The yacht club had lovely gardens, as did our hotel. One day I wanted something from the pharmacy so I left Eddie at the yacht club and went on my way to find a pharmacy. I passed a man and asked him where I could find one, and so he told me to follow him just a few hundred yards. He went into some big double doors and through a courtyard and I followed him. I wasn’t thinking properly. He told me he just had to pick something up. He went up some stairs into a lounge, and we’d hardly got in before he had me down on the couch and tried to get my clothes off. Fortunately I was wearing very tight trousers. I struggled and got my feet against the wall, trying to get free of him. I said out loud ‘My God, my husband will be looking for me!’ so that set the alarm bells ringing for him. He was caught off guard and I somehow managed to free myself and I flew out of the place and got away. It just so happened that Eddie had come looking for me. I told Eddie and, of course, he wanted to find the man and kill him, but by this time he had disappeared into thin air. It was difficult and not a very nice area. We’d go into a market place and you’d never know what you might find, you could buy anything and meet up with anyone.

We used to go down to Marrakech, where Churchill used to do his paintings. We did sightseeing there, it was beautiful. One day we got an invitation to go to the palace up in the mountains near Tangier, owned by the Woolworth heir Barbara Hutton.
⁴
Alas, she was taken ill so we never did go to see her for dinner. The mountains were very nice in that area. I don’t know if it’d be anything that I would enjoy today, but I did enjoy it then. I remember being in the Rif Hotel when Eddie had gone off in his boat and I was accosted again by a young journalist. He offered me a shilling for every word that I would speak about Eddie and his boat. This kind of set the alarm bells ringing for me. I could always get news of Eddie through the press. Whatever was happening, he was always being quoted in the press.

She continues:

I was highly emotional when I discovered I was pregnant for the second time. I felt joy in one way, despair in another. Life would never be the same. Eddie was over the moon when I told him, but alternated throughout my pregnancy in moods of ups and downs. He drank much more than was good for him and I bore the brunt of the hangovers.

My first pregnancy was hard, and my first child died after a series of medical blunders. I had a gangrenous appendix and, when the child was born, it was strangled and died during birth because of the operation I’d had to have. These things must be why my second pregnancy was so emotional. And because Eddie didn’t have any concept of what a woman’s life was, he had no idea what I was going through, especially after doing so much hard work during the months of my pregnancy. Aneurin Bevan, the English Minister of Health, helped Eddie to find a good doctor to see me through the birth.

Meantime, we had rented a house in Montpelier Square, across the road from Harrods. The person who owned it was a well-known film director, Gordon Parry, and his wife Lucia. His daughter Natasha is married to Peter Brook, CBE, the award-winning director who did
The Lark
. Lucia was a lovely motherly lady of Russian origin and, from the moment she heard I was pregnant, she was kindness itself. Our apartment was on the top floor, good in a way for the exercise, but not for hauling up the shopping. I also had a lot of support from other friends. Rex Harrison
⁵
and Kay Kendall,
⁶
his partner at that time, were very interested in Eddie’s exploits.

Another friend turned up during Betty’s pregnancy: the former Luba Krasin, later Luba Dastier. One of Eddie’s former girlfriends, Luba remained friends with both him and Betty for years after they were married. Before the war her father was Soviet Ambassador to France. Eddie met the beautiful Luba at a party, and within a short time they were living together. A question likely to remain forever unanswered is: how is it that Eddie was moving in the right circles in 1937 to meet an ambassador’s daughter? By the end of the war Luba, still in touch with Eddie, was now divorced from her first husband, and had married Charles de Gaulle’s right-hand man, General François d’Astier. As mentioned, Eddie’s first ever publicity about his wartime activities came in 1946, when he wrote some articles for the French publication
L’Etoile du Soir
. As previously noted, MI5 went mad. What was less remarked on at the time was that the editor was Luba’s son, Lalou. It was Eddie’s connection with her that MI5 wanted to exploit.

The Chapmans and Luba frequently exchanged visits, and Betty says she was a charming girl and a very good friend to them both. In 1954, while waiting for Betty to give birth, and still dodging the press after the
Flamingo
affair, Eddie discovered that Luba was staying at the Ritz. In a typical Eddie Chapman gesture, he bought the entire contents of a flower stall, and had them sent to her. Although thoroughly delighted, when Eddie telephoned her later, she managed to whisper, ‘Eddie, don’t send any more flowers. D’Astier is truly jealous. It’s very awkward.’

Betty returned to England slightly before Eddie, preparing to give birth. When Eddie returned, he arrived surreptitiously, and Betty met him on a road outside of London – all to dodge the ever-present press. The birth of their daughter was certainly a happy event, but was not untouched by drama. Because Betty had already lost one baby, they were taking all precautions. Betty had engaged a Swiss nurse and had organised the nursery. The press were still on Eddie and Betty’s trail after the affair of the
Flamingo
and had camped outside the hospital. It was almost like watching a royal birth.

Totally unlike a royal birth, however, was the visit to the hospital of the Swiss nurse who felt it her duty to inform Betty that Eddie had moved a young lady into Montpelier Square and that his friend was also entertaining female company in the nursery! Betty discharged herself and took a taxi home. When she arrived, the nurse was running out of the flat screaming for help and for the police. Eddie had apparently found out that she had told Betty and had threatened to murder her. She evidently believed him, as she refused to come back to their employ and in fact took refuge in the Swiss Embassy. However, the marriage still survived: the nurse left; the baby came home; some degree of normality returned.

Betty says of the event:

Our daughter was born in The London Clinic in Devonshire Street in October. She was quite ill when she was born and was left in intensive care for about three weeks. When I finally left the clinic I had to be smuggled out of the back door because the press was around to get information. When she was well enough to come home, I wasn’t able to take her home myself because of the hovering press; a nurse brought her to me. Just before my daughter arrived, I remarked to a friend that I felt I’d already lived a couple of lives. With Eddie, life was lived at fever pitch, the adrenalin working overtime. You were never sure what country would be next or what scheme was coming up. I guess after such a war he never ceased to look for excitement – and often of the dangerous kind.

Immediately after his daughter’s birth, Eddie made a comment to the press that was widely reported, and widely criticised. His frustration with press harassment was only too obvious to anyone who knew him, but it looked bad in print. Eddie tells the story:

After our daughter was born, a reporter I knew said to me ‘Eddie…’ I cut him off there, since I had told him ‘no interviews, and no photographs’. He said, ‘Well, what is it?’ I said, ‘It’s a little baby girl.’ He said, ‘What is she like?’ I said, ‘Well, like any newborn baby, she is like a pink skinned rabbit!’ I mean, it was the first daft thing that came to mind. What did they do? They printed ‘Eddie Chapman thinks his newborn daughter looks like a pink skinned rabbit’.

The press didn’t stop there. Katy Ryan was a friend of Betty’s, and she came to stay with Betty and was staying at Montpelier Square. Eddie had taken her to Les Ambassadeurs one night, and the press were there taking photographs, and they printed the headline ‘Whilst Eddie Chapman’s wife is in the hospital giving birth to their daughter, Eddie is seen at Les Ambassadeurs dancing with the glamorous actress Katherine Ryan’.

As the press saying goes: never mind the facts, just get the story.

The press were constantly after any story in which Eddie played a starring role. After Eddie had left Tangier to fly back to the UK, his yacht had been blown up, allegedly by French forces. Once, out to sea on the
Flamingo
, they encountered trouble with the engine so they entered a port and found a shipping repairs service. The manager said he would go and take a look at it, so he went on board putting a notice up in his office saying ‘gone to lunch’. He got the boat going, and they kept on going until he got to Tangier, at which point he reported himself kidnapped! Eddie had also been asked (by someone with a political interest) to remove the Sultan of Morocco from the island of Madagascar,
⁷
but they could never get near to picking him up – so it seemed rather a coincidence that the yacht had been blown up. Eddie always blamed the French Security Services, but he was never certain if MI5 might have been behind it, although he didn’t directly blame them. His exploits were international news. The destruction of the
Flamingo
even made it into the small-town American newspaper in Texas, the
Lubbock Evening Journal
:

Eddie Chapman, retired safeblower, wartime spy and a gentleman who likes to keep the record straight, said Friday it wasn’t true he planned to kidnap the deposed Sultan of Morocco. ‘My mission to the Mediterranean was to pick up a few honest dollars as a smuggler. That’s all’, he said. ‘Wild rumors preceded the arrival of the yacht,’ he recalled with relish. ‘We were there to rob banks … we were going to burn the boats of the other smugglers. We had come to murder someone.’

While there was a large degree of buccaneering in Eddie’s exploits in Morocco, there was also a touch of menace. Eddie tells the story:

The local bank manager had been reported to have said that he was going to run those English bastards out of here, and I got fed up with hearing this so I said to the crew, ‘Look, we will all go down to see him.’ So we went down to this international bank. His name was on the door. We just opened the door and walked in. I said, ‘Look, I am Eddie Chapman, this is Billy Hill and George Walker. This is my crew. What is all this rubbish about running us out of town?’ I said, ‘Any more nonsense from you, and we will get rid of you.’ He said, ‘No, I want to be friends.’ I said, ‘In that case we can do some business.’ He called a meeting of the other smugglers and we agreed that we should have some of the business, otherwise we threatened to blow up all of the other boats.

Still, like many of Eddie’s stories, this might be taken with a grain of salt. On a more down-to-earth footing, Betty continues:

Soon after our daughter’s birth, Robert Jacobs found a lot of property in London and Brighton, for me, Eddie and Terence Young. We had a house with a restaurant and living accommodation in Hammersmith. We let out the upper part and we owned the restaurant, getting people to run it for us. We had terraced houses in Fulham (south-west London), about twenty of them.

With a young child, life was a hard grind for Betty, with relatively little support from Eddie:

He was really a semi-invalid. He was always on some sort of treatment for his back. He wasn’t able to do any physical work at all. When we had all of the properties, I’d get up early in the morning and go round to some thirty-eight different flats, and they were spread out all over the place. I dealt with very heavy repayments for mortgages, and heavy rents. There was always something I had to go down to Brighton for.