Mrs Zigzag: The Extraordinary Life of a Secret Agent's Wife (3 page)

‘In a pig’s ear!’ she replied.

Despite her ‘pig’s ear’ remark, she ended up talking with him and having a drink. He said he wanted to see her again. He told her that at that time he was sharing a cottage in Hertfordshire with Terence Young. Young was best known in later years for directing three of the films in the James Bond series,
Dr No, From Russia with Love
and
Thunderball
. In his Wikipedia profile, it says: ‘Terence Young WAS James Bond’. There is little doubt that Young fitted the profile of Bond – the erudite, sophisticated ladykiller, dressed in Savile Row suits, always witty, well-versed in wine, and comfortable at home and abroad. It was remarked that Sean Connery, the first Bond, ‘was simply doing a Terence Young impression’. It doesn’t require too much imagination to believe that so, too, was Eddie. Terence was already flirting with the film business by then, so later when Eddie accounted to Betty for his absences as being related to films, it was entirely credible. That he was involved with a criminal gang and out blowing safes would never have entered Betty’s mind.

Despite Betty’s initial resistance, they started going out together. Gradually, a romance developed and, in late 1938, they began living together. Betty continues: ‘In those days, living together was frowned upon by everyone: by one’s parents, by the Church and, if one were in normal employment, by one’s employers.’ As a safebreaker, however, the normal conditions of employment were a little different for Eddie and, even if he had not been handsome and captivatingly charming, she would still have found the excitement of being with him to have been ‘almost unbearable’. It is also worth remembering that Betty still believed that Eddie was ‘in films’, and as such the ‘normal conditions of employment’ didn’t apply there either. At one point, Eddie revealed to Terence that he was, in fact, a crook and blew up safes for a living. Far from being shocked, Terence saw this as adding to the excitement and glamour of their lives.

It
was
a glamorous time, even though the clubs Eddie took Betty to were on the sleazy side. But as she remarks: ‘they were places of their time’. Eddie himself was a glamorous character, and seemed to know all of the club owners, although why he should was a mystery to Betty. In reality, Eddie moved in the criminal underworld; the clubs he took Betty to were his natural haunts. By the time Betty went to Jersey, she knew this.

Betty takes up the story of the startling events on Jersey, with her and Eddie checked into a hotel as ‘Mr and Mrs Farmer’ of Torquay:

The restaurant at the Hotel de la Plage, right on the waterfront in Havre des Pas, was
the
place in Jersey to eat. I loved it. Restaurants in London were, at this time, normally more hushed and a little stuffy but here, in Jersey, the atmosphere was alive with a buzz of conversation that belied the awful events unfolding across Europe. The decor was distinctly European, the walls were painted a creamy lemon, the colour of syllabub, the tablecloths were crisp, white linen and the menus were handwritten on sheets of cream vellum. There was a loud woman with a ridiculous hat and a tired fox fur sitting at the table next to ours. She’d talked incessantly since she had sat down but, as she spoke in French and as her clothes were different and more stylish than those I was used to, I really didn’t mind. I was 22 years old and in love with the most handsome and charismatic man I had ever seen and I couldn’t remember ever having been happier.

We had been living together for a little over three months – three months of electric excitement for me and three months of evading the law for Eddie. As I had only recently discovered, in those three months, and for many months before, he and his group of friends had carried out a number of audacious safebreakings in London and things had become more than a little difficult, with an unprecedented amount of interest on the part of the Metropolitan Police – the Met.

In the spring of 1938, the Met set up a special squad to hunt him down. Eddie was far from hiding out – he was out nightclubbing with Betty or travelling down to the seaside resort of Brighton to spend the loot. Nevertheless, he had decided that his run of luck was wearing a bit thin – like all career criminals – so he decided to stop breaking safes for ‘a whole year’. His ‘retirement’ lasted less than six weeks. With a sort of sixth sense that the police were closing in, Eddie decided to make his way to Jersey, and from there on to France.

Betty continues:

In an attempt to lie low for a while and to allow the heat to subside, we had come to Jersey to take advantage of the early spring, and the holiday atmosphere that was so different from the relentless worry and anticipation of pre-war London. Even though I was happy in that moment in the bright sunshine, nonetheless for the last three months I had lain awake in the small hours of countless mornings, wondering how I might continue if Eddie were to be caught and wondering what would become of us if that were to happen. On Jersey, we had a lovely holiday; we danced on the beach and I’d enjoyed Eddie’s wonderful sense of humour.

After Eddie had disappeared through the window, other policemen immediately took charge of Eddie’s two ‘friends’, who had lacked the presence of mind to follow Eddie through the window. Later identified as members of his criminal gang, they were handcuffed and taken away. As normal conversation returned to the restaurant – at least as normal as was possible after the startling events of the past few minutes – Betty sat frozen to the spot. The awful truth was dawning on her that she was a girl not long out of her teens, all alone in what was to all intents and purposes a foreign land. She had very little money, as Eddie always paid for everything, and she had absolutely no idea how to find her way home. That night, alone in her hotel room, she resolved to stay in Jersey until she could find out what had happened to Eddie. The Jersey police had other ideas.

The following morning, her plans were rudely interrupted by a visit from the police, who wanted to know the extent to which she could help them and their Met colleagues from London to piece together the details of a string of robberies. Until now these crimes had defied attempts by a number of police forces to solve them. Betty recalls:

I was taken to the police station and I sat there in abject misery, not knowing what to say and fearing that anything I might say might further incriminate Eddie. Worst of all, it appeared that he might be returned to London to stand trial and I was terrified that all the robberies with which he had been involved, and many others with which he had not, would all be pinned on him in court and that it might be many years before I would see him again. Even though I already knew that Eddie was a criminal and wanted man, I still felt that he had let me down and I was hurt and upset.

Even while Betty sat in the police station, Eddie was still on the run in Jersey. Back in London, a couple of weeks earlier, he had been told that the police were looking for him. ‘A man I knew said that if we could reach Monte Carlo,’ Eddie later remembered, ‘he could get us on a boat for South America.’ He decided he could fly to Jersey, just a few miles off the French coast, and then make his way south to Monte Carlo. He had decided to take Betty with him. Once through the window, and despite being recognised and nearly apprehended by the police, he still believed he had a chance to escape.

After his dramatic exit, he found a place to temporarily hide out in an unoccupied school. He found an old mackintosh to cover his distinctive and colourful clothing – yellow-spotted tie, blue sleeveless pullover, grey flannels, brown sandals and no socks – and eventually made his way to a seedy boarding house, run by a suspicious landlady. He told her he was a marine engineer, but when his picture – to his consternation – was splashed over the front page of the newspaper the next day, the landlady called the police. She reported that her lodger fitted the description of the escaped criminal.

The police told the local populace that caution should be exercised in his apprehension, because he was, they claimed, ‘dangerous’ – despite never having used violence, or even (his specialty was burglary) encountered another person in the course of his ‘activities’. Eddie was away from the boarding house at the time the police were called. Having had the shock of seeing his picture all over the newspapers, he realised the game was up. So, in typical Eddie Chapman style, he decided to go out with a splash. Arriving at a nightclub – presumably after ditching the grubby mackintosh – he ordered champagne. Also in typical Chapman style, he slipped down to the basement and broke into the club’s safe in order to pay for it. Arriving back at the boarding house at 2 a.m., he was immediately arrested, the landlady having phoned the police to report his return.

Betty was all over the papers as well. The
Jersey Evening Post
reported the next day: ‘She is stated to have denied all knowledge of the alleged activities of her companions.’ Although the Jersey papers were full of the story, they were sympathetic to her plight. The tone of the stories was that she was an unwitting victim of the situation, which was true enough in many respects. She had committed no crime and hadn’t been an accomplice to any crimes. As Eddie had made it perfectly clear to the authorities upon his arrest, Betty knew nothing about his activities or why they were on the island, other than for a holiday. But suddenly she was alone in Jersey, ‘I didn’t know what to do, I was in shock. The people of Jersey rallied around and came to my rescue, collecting enough cash to get me back to London. Eddie was in custody, and there was nothing more I could do’. Eddie was being held in Jersey, and because his last crime was committed in Jersey, he was to be jailed there. Little was she to know that even though he was to be held in St Helier, it would still be nearly six years before they would be together once more.

With Eddie incarcerated and incommunicado, the shocked Betty returned to London to decide what to do next. Still very young, she had no real training or skills, except, inadvertently, evading the law.

When I got back to London, there was the question of ‘now what?’ I contacted Charles Hawtree, to whom I had previously been introduced, and was offered the opportunity to go to the Isle of Man to learn the hotel trade in one of his hotels. Meanwhile, my family had heard about the goings-on in Jersey. None of them thought I should be mixing with someone who was a criminal and they considered him to be not good enough for me. Other friends thought I ought to try to get in touch with him but although I attempted to contact him I was not able to. It wasn’t too long after this that the war broke out, and the Germans invaded Jersey. I remember wondering what we all would do and where we would go and what would happen to us. And that was the end of any attempt to either contact Eddie or, for that matter, even find out what had become of him. Of course, he managed to get in with the Germans once they arrived and occupied the island, and he had this notion of offering to work for them. I didn’t know anything about this at the time.

Finally, word got back to Betty that the Germans had executed Eddie. A German newspaper clipping of the time shows a man identified as Eddie tied to a stake ready to be shot. This was part of the German cover story as they turned Eddie into ‘Agent Fritzchen’. A close examination of the man in the photo reveals that he bears only superficial resemblance to Eddie. Who this unfortunate was, and whether the picture is of a genuine execution, is unknown. Little did Betty know, or could even have imagined, what was really happening …

2

S
PITFIRES, SABOTAGE
AND SERIAL KILLERS

O
n 1 July 1940, German troops poured into Jersey, where Eddie was still in jail. The island was essentially undefended, and within a few weeks life settled into a routine for both the islanders and their occupiers. For the most part, in the early days the Germans were on their best behaviour. Little changed for Eddie and his fellow prisoners. Surprisingly, perhaps, the Germans honoured the decision of the courts made prior to the invasion and, with some delay, Eddie was released from prison at the beginning of October 1941. There was no chance of communicating with the outside world, and thus Betty had no idea that he was still alive.

But what was alive and well was Eddie’s fertile mind. He soon was involved in black market activities – with the tacit approval of the Germans. Shortly after his release he also contacted the German commander and offered his ‘services’, citing his hatred of the English and a desire for revenge. Despite this being a clever ploy to get off the island, the Germans apparently took his offer at face value. But by November Eddie was in trouble with the authorities – apparently. He was arrested for sabotage and sent to the French mainland. He was never certain, but it always appeared to him that it was a ruse to get him out of Jersey and into the hands of German Intelligence.

Once in France, Eddie was incarcerated in the prison at Romainville, where he seemed to be in some danger of being shot. Even so, Eddie had been very inventive whilst in prison and had actually managed to copy keys to the neighbouring ladies’ prison, and indeed spent many very pleasant nights with them. All of this changed abruptly in April 1942, when he was released into the custody of German Intelligence and began a reasonably comfortable period being trained as a German spy. Although watched closely, he maintained his all too believable story of having a grudge against the English. In the meantime, his training in sabotage, communications, and other skills necessary for the role of a spy and saboteur continued.