Mrs Zigzag: The Extraordinary Life of a Secret Agent's Wife (9 page)

One of the rich and famous they had no desire to be away from was the actor Burl Ives,
¹¹
who starred with Elizabeth Taylor in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
(1958):

He came to stay with us in Wilton Place in Belgravia. He was playing at the Café de Paris. He gave us a party there for our wedding anniversary. At the end of the party Eddie was seeing everyone off and Burl closed the door on Eddie, handed him some money and said ‘Go and get yourself a room for the night.’ Then he closed the door on him, leaving me with Burl inside. Of course he didn’t stay out for the night, it was a great uproar, but it was a big laugh, we were all very good chums.

Of course, Eddie was fond of thinking up practical jokes and pranks himself, as well as his more dangerous escapades:

Whilst Eddie was around, he was always being the joker that he was, and once called up the undertaker and asked him to go to the home of Sir Peter Hodge, a well-known man at that time, and a good friend of ours, and measure up the body and prepare him for the burial! Imagine when the butler opened the door; he nearly fell flat on his face! Of course Peter Hodge was still alive. Eddie was always doing things like that, he was described as a loose cannon.

In the late 1940s Eddie went to Tangier where he bought a Beech aircraft with a group of ex-RAF pilots, including Graham Pearson, to transport lobsters to Spanish restaurants. This story began with Dennis Fox, a badly injured pilot who was in hospital with Eddie after the parachute landing where he hurt his back. Dennis introduced him to Graham Pearson who was also a pilot. They would use the plane for spotting. They would send the plane out to sweep the coast to see if everything was clear, checking for customs. They did some smuggling trips to Casablanca with gold, and some to France.

During this period between her marriage to Eddie and their departure for Ghana in 1951, among Betty’s properties was a cafe in Battersea, just across the Thames in south London. She recalls: ‘We had a manager who looked after the property. Eddie’s many pals made it a meeting place, and always left the tab for Eddie. I was glad to pass on the restaurant, because I was having so many problems with staff, late hours, lots of travelling to and fro, and all else.’

She also owned a property in Brighton:

There was a betting shop next door to the furniture warehouse that we owned, and which we rented to a department store in Western Road in Brighton. They kept all of their furnishings stored there. It was a huge warehouse. There was a murder in the betting shop and in order to cover up evidence of the crime the betting shop was set alight. That in turn set fire to the warehouse, and since it was old furniture, it went up like a bomb. The warehouse was completely destroyed, and as it was underinsured I didn’t know what to do. As a consequence, I decided to rebuild it using casual labour. As a consequence, I got a very intense education in building. This served me very well later in life.

All through this time Eddie remained friendly with many of his security handlers. ‘They all kept in touch with him,’ Betty says, ‘though perhaps it was just to keep tabs on what he was up to.’ Even at that time Betty was still not aware of the whole of Eddie’s wartime activities. Eddie was full of stories, but he never divulged anything of consequence. A good line of chat got him through the war; keeping his mouth shut about important things kept him alive through it.

Indeed, much of the contact with MI5 wasn’t just for old time’s sake. ‘They tried to use him when they could,’ Betty adds. As previously mentioned, MI5 wanted Eddie to lift some important papers from the Polish Embassy. ‘He cordoned off the whole of Belgrave Square where the embassy was located. He roped in some of his friends to collect road signs and place them strategically around the square, while he went about his task.’

Finally, at the start of the 1950s, Eddie and Betty (and Eddie in particular) came up against a task truly worthy of their talents: helping to build a new nation.

5

G
HANA

G
hana clearly was a major interlude for both Betty and Eddie. In their many reminiscences about their life together, Ghana is the most often mentioned. In looking back over their history together, it is, perhaps, the time they were most together as a couple, working together for a common goal. It was a time of decolonisation, when the old imperial European powers, drained by the war, were unable or unwilling to exert the financial and military effort necessary to maintain their empires. Even the French, desperately attempting to hold on to their colony of French Indochina, were militarily defeated by the growing power of the native population – to found the country of Vietnam. Eddie would eventually fall foul of the French efforts to hold on to another of their colonies – Morocco. Eddie and Betty were caught in a tug of war between two powerful interests: the Ghanaians trying to extricate themselves from their colonial past and develop commercial relations with other countries, and the British struggling to hold on to a source of national income. Because the British were ready to reluctantly release their dominion over their colonies didn’t necessarily mean they were ready to surrender their
influence
in those former colonies.

The modern country of Ghana is the former British colony of the Gold Coast. The Gold Coast was known for centuries as ‘The White Man’s Grave’, because so many of the Europeans who emigrated there died of malaria and other tropical diseases. Originally a Dutch colony, the Dutch withdrew in 1874, after which Britain made the Gold Coast a protectorate. After the eventual conquest of the large Ashanti tribe at the turn of the twentieth century, the Gold Coast became a British colony. Even under colonial rule, the chiefs and people often resisted the policies of the British. After the Second World War, moves towards decolonisation intensified. In 1947, the newly formed United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) called for ‘self-government within the shortest possible time’. In 1948 the members of the UGCC were arrested, including the future prime minister and president, Kwame Nkrumah.

Nkrumah, born on the Gold Coast, went to the USA, where he received a BA from Lincoln University, Pennsylvania in 1939, and a Bachelor of Sacred Theology degree as well as a Master of Science from the same university in 1942; he received a Master of Arts in philosophy the following year. In the autumn of 1947 Nkrumah returned to the Gold Coast, where he was invited to serve as the general secretary to the UGCC.

Facing international protests and internal resistance, the British decided to leave the Gold Coast. The new Legislative Assembly met on 20 February 1951, with the now-released Nkrumah as Leader of Government Business. A year later, the constitution was amended to provide for a prime minister, and Nkrumah was elected to that post, with the country now adopting the name Ghana. It was during his travels related to the Gold Coast Convention that Nkrumah first met Eddie and Betty.

Eddie and Betty came to Ghana through an introduction by Lord Jersey’s secretary. He rang Eddie one day and said that there was something he might be interested in from the Gold Coast. He said that there had been a revolution and a man called Kwame Nkrumah was in charge. He said that Nkrumah’s representatives were talking about wanting houses, property and hospitals, and asked if Eddie could help. Nkrumah’s representatives turned up at Betty and Eddie’s flat, and said what they wanted. Then before they left, they asked if Eddie would speak to Nkrumah on the telephone, which he did. There was a great emphasis on getting the British out of the emerging nation of Ghana, Eddie was told. Nkrumah felt there had been massive corruption with building works that had already gone ahead by British firms. Despite having won a huge share of the popular vote while in prison for the cause, Nkrumah was hedged with the restrictions imposed by the former colonial masters, and was eager to break the economic stranglehold that Britain had over the country. Eddie Chapman was one of the means of doing this. Ghana was the first nation to emerge into self rule, and in successfully doing this the myth generated by Europeans – and believed by many Africans – that white dominance was part of some natural order, was blown apart.

For his part, Eddie knew of some concrete manufacturers and builders in Holland that were working with a revolutionary new process for forming concrete. He got himself introduced to the company, and went to Holland to visit them. Eddie outlined to them what Nkrumah had told him. ‘When I saw their factories, they were huge,’ he reported. ‘They had rebuilt the whole of Rotterdam and Amsterdam.’ It was all to be prefabricated, shipped out from Holland, and just bolted together when it reached Ghana. Once the components arrived in Ghana, they could build a house in about two days. The Dutch company, Schokbeton, was sold on the idea, and so was Nkrumah. Eddie was to go to Ghana to oversee, and was in for a good percentage of the huge contract.

The British were very opposed to the scheme because they did not want the Dutch in Ghana. Eddie remarked: ‘There were only two British companies down there when we went there. There was Taylor Woodrow and Wimpy, and they shared all the building and contract work between them on a cost plus basis. Usually, cost plus quite a lot.’ They did everything to keep the Dutch out. Eddie later reported: ‘I had only been there a fortnight and they offered me £30,000 cash to leave the country.’
¹
A point that Eddie and Betty failed to take into account was that Austerity Britain was still reeling from the Second World War, and was determined to hold on to commercial interests by any means, fair or foul. Historian Stephen E. Ambrose in
The World at War
remarked that Britain had nearly as much trouble recovering from victory as Germany did recovering from defeat.

But, Eddie had already got the bit between his teeth, and had finally found something worthy of his prodigious talents and abilities. As events would prove, Eddie and Betty made a small but nonetheless important contribution to the founding of a new nation. But at first, Betty wanted nothing to do with it: ‘He [Eddie] came back one day and said “I’m going to Africa.” I said, “Jolly good. I hope you don’t expect
me
to go to Africa.” “Oh, yes,” he said, “Of course”.’ Eddie would later say of her: ‘Betty covered herself in glory down there.’

Betty says of the time:

When Eddie was motivated, as he certainly was about Africa, nothing would deter him. He left and I joined him three months later. But even before I left I had had second thoughts. Before I went to Ghana I met a man who was a tea planter in Assam, India. He was home on leave and he was looking around for a wife to take back with him. We had a little bit of a romance, but I decided not to go with him and leave everything I knew, and instead to follow Eddie. I always had to be involved, although Eddie was often unaware that I was a woman, and how women fared in Ghana! At first I felt it was a mistake to have followed him, especially after I had made lots of money on my property and beauty ventures, but Eddie wanted me there for Christmas – romantic, perhaps; wise, maybe not. So, I left for Africa for the first time on Boxing Day 1951.

So started the saga of Ghana:

It took 23 hours to get to Lagos from London in a propeller plane. We had two stops: one in the desert at Dakar and then Lagos. As our plane touched down in late afternoon in Dakar for refuelling, the steps went down and in rushed several coloured fellows with sprays who proceeded to furiously fill the plane with foul-smelling fumes. I rushed out for the toilet and some water, close to collapsing, but when I got the only water that was available, it was warm. It was early morning and we were taken into a field to a wooden construction, which I suppose was meant to be the restaurant, for breakfast. Sitting there on the roof of the building was about a dozen vultures. I didn’t want to get out of the bus which had taken us there, I was afraid they would attack me. When I did get into the hut, the sickly smell of paraffin (kerosene) was overwhelming, which did not fit well with breakfast! Paraffin was used to kill the bugs.

In fact, from the time I arrived it was nothing but bugs and beetles. If you had a drink you had to keep your hand over the top of it so that flying ants didn’t land in it. The night I arrived in Lagos, Eddie and I and a couple of other men sat on a terrace near the airport watching other planes coming and going. I was wearing a fairly low-cut top, and when a big shiny beetle, a couple of inches long, flew at me it went straight down into my cleavage! Eddie was desperate to try and get this thing out. All the men were fumbling over me and I ended up being turned upside down and shaken. I had exactly the same experience when I went to Ashanti. At least my Ghana adventure
started
on a humorous note.

When we first arrived we lived in a hotel built by the government to service the traffic coming through the airports. It was called The Lisbon Hotel. It belonged to the airport, Pan American Airways used to come in there. We lived in huts behind the hotel’s main building, it was gravel to get to the huts, and you needed Wellington boots if it had rained. The windows on the huts were just mesh. That was where I met the rat, Albert – he used to scare the stewardesses that stayed there. Albert was on the edge of my bed one time and Eddie threw his shoe at it and nearly scared me to death. It was a fearsome place. We lived in those huts for about six months until our company built and rented us a house.