The Spy Who Painted the Queen (28 page)

I
N MAY 1933
De László wrote to his friend István Bárczy, permanent under-secretary in the Hungarian prime minister's office, regarding a court case pending against him in Paris brought by one Frederic Decseny. He wrote:

[Decseny] is a miserable specimen of humanity who tried to blackmail me. I have never seen or heard of him … Now that he cannot get money out of me, he continues to be unpleasant. You can imagine what it means to me to be dragged through the French newspapers associated with such a scoundrel.

De László's French lawyer was looking for some official Hungarian documentation confirming the reason Decseny had been imprisoned, and De László asked Bárczy for help in obtaining it. Whether he did or not is unknown, but De László definitely thanked him for his efforts and, as his biographer says, ‘the matter was definitely closed on 2 June 1933'.

On 22 April 1933 the
Daily Mail
had run a short story headed, ‘Mr P A De László – Lawsuit sequel to spy case'. It read:

Mr P A de László the famous painter who lives in London, was sued yesterday for £36 compensation by Frederic Decseny, said to be a Hungarian, who alleged that he had been imprisoned for two years during the war as a British spy following his denunciation by Mr de László.

Decseny, a one-armed man, waved his remaining arm excitedly when the judge asked him his nationality. Dashing up to the Judge's dais, he shouted ‘I am a man without a nationality.'

Mr de László's counsel, Maitre Yvonne Menjaud, a pretty woman, asked that the case be adjourned for a fortnight, to which the court agreed.

Frederic Decseny (sometimes spelt Decsenyi or Deczeny) had been born in Volocz, Hungary, in 1885, emigrated to the USA in 1902 and, having lost his arm in an accident while working for the Erie Railroad Company, took up work as a clerk in New York where he became naturalised on 1 June 1907. He had left the USA in 1909 and spent some time in England and then in Belgium and Hungary. He applied for an American passport at the United States consulate in Budapest on 25 August 1914 with the intention of returning to America within six months. As an American and therefore a neutral he was capable of travelling more or less freely around the continent and was even able to visit and leave Britain.

In 1924 he applied to the US consul at Coblenz for papers, asserting that he had been imprisoned in Germany during the First World War. As the
Daily Mail
report confirms, this, he asserted, was because De László had told the Hungarian authorities that he was a British spy.

Prior to the court case, it's known he had approached the British Embassy in Paris and been rebuffed, because he wrote to the Home Office complaining about its attitude to him. It, in turn, approached the Foreign Office seeking further information and specifically saying, in its request, that his visit to the embassy had been to ‘give some information about Mr De László's activities during the war'and asking that the embassy provide more information about the allegations.

The Foreign Office, in answer to a Freedom of Information request, confirmed that its file (reference C 5659/3359/21) had been destroyed during its normal weeding process, but provided a copy of its file summary, which confirmed the story as given above. The Home Office file reference number on the summary proved to be De László's naturalisation file, which has clearly been weeded (section 113 was noted as ‘Confidential – This sheet and the dummies for the subnos. to which it refers must not leave the registry' has been removed and the Home Office claim no record of it). The register of correspondence (HO 46/286) for 1933 confirms that a copy of the unspecified allegation against De László, which was received on 31 March from Decseny himself, was passed by the Home Office to MI5. It was also, presumably, passed to the Foreign Office for its comments on the allegations against the Paris Embassy. MI5 replied to the Home Office on 21 April, but the surviving note reads, ‘Report unable to find any trace of a (the next word is unclear but seems to read) liaison.' Liaison presumably means meeting, so Decseny seems to be suggesting that, at some stage, he and De László had met.

If Decseny and De László had met (which De László categorically denied), when might it have been? In his interrogation of 15 August 1917, he did mention meeting an unnamed Hungarian in 1914. He said:

When the war broke out a Hungarian who I had never seen before came over to England because he thought it was the safest place for a Hungarian to be. He brought me a letter of recommendation from an old friend of mine. I was so pleased to learn from this letter that my mother was still alive that I gave him a letter to take back, which was, however taken away from him. He was the very man whom I invited to lunch with me. He went home and made a big story out of it. He asked me what my position was and I said ‘I am a British subject.' (This was not then known in Hungary, it came out afterwards.) Then this man went back to Hungary and made a terrible row in the papers …

Later in the interview, De László said that his visitor was ‘Sbenenyei' (presumably the journalist Szebenyei, Hungarian correspondent for the
Morning Post
whose name appeared in his address book), but in the second interview he said the man was ‘Professor B', whose name he could not remember. It seems unlikely a Hungarian could have travelled freely between the two countries once they were at war. Britain had declared war on Austria-Hungary on 12 August 1914. De László's application for citizenship had not been made until 15 August and wasn't granted until the 29th. He didn't take the oath of allegiance until 2 September. Decseny was in Budapest on 25 August as he applied for an American passport at the US consulate there on that date. With such a passport (passports were rarely required before the outbreak of the war but rapidly became necessary), Decseny could travel across Europe, enter Britain and return. He certainly fancied himself as a journalist, describing himself in later life as a correspondent for both the London
Daily Mail
and the
Detroit Free Press
. He is surely the same person referred to in a letter from Adrienne van Riemsdyk dated 19 October 1914, which said, ‘Your Hungarian friend has not been to see us so far – perhaps he went straight through to Pesht.'

If it was blackmail that Decseny was attempting, it seems curious that he had gone to the British Embassy with his allegations before launching his claim through the courts. The Foreign Office file summary sheets say that he had written complaining about his treatment there on 29 March. The sum of £36 (worth £2,250 today) seems trivial and more like a token sum designed to get the case into a court for publicity purposes.

The curious thing is that De László seemed to think that the story was well covered in the French press, but searches of the online versions of
Le Figaro, L'Echo de Paris, L'Humanit
é
, Le Matin, L'Ouest-Éclair, Le Petit journal, Le Petit Parisien
and
Le Temps
make no mention of it. It doesn't even receive attention in an article in
Le Temps
of 2 May 1933 (while the trial was supposedly taking place), which mentions De László's art briefly in a general article.

Decseny knew something about De László's wartime activities – that seems clear. Unfortunately it has not (yet) proved possible to discover what it was.

W
ITH DE LÁSZLÓ'S
death, MI5 would normally have closed its file on him. It has not been released, despite files on other better-known suspects (W.H. Auden, Jacob Bronowski, J.B. Priestley and George Orwell among them) having been opened in recent years. It's possible that it has been destroyed as part of MI5's routine weeding and destruction policy, but another intriguing possibility remains.

John De László, Philip's fifth son, had an affair in the late 1940s with the wife of Group Captain Peter Townsend, the Battle of Britain hero and equerry to King George VI. The couple divorced in 1952 and John married her in 1953. The divorce hung over Group Captain Townsend and, in the atmosphere of the time, he was not allowed to remarry within the Church of England. When he and Princess Margaret fell in love and there was talk in the press of them marrying, the matter reached as high as the prime minister, Winston Churchill, then aged 79 and in his final term. The couple, who seem to have had a real and genuine affection for each other, were forced apart by the attitudes prevalent in the upper echelons of society at the time. The princess could not, quite simply, be allowed to get married outside the Church of England, and the Church of England was not going to change its view on remarrying a divorced man.

A few years ago I mentioned the De László case as part of a talk I was giving. At the end I was approached by a man I had known vaguely for many years who said that the name De László was one he had known well, but that he hadn't heard it in fifty years. As a young man he had worked as a telephone engineer and was based in south-east England. The new Mrs De László and her husband lived in his area at the end of a country lane and shared a party line with the other houses. This meant that a single line ran up the lane and every house had a telephone connected to it. One bill was issued for the whole line and, of course, only one telephone could be used at a time. According to my friend, this posed a problem for the other line users as Mrs De László spent hours on the phone and would only pay a set percentage of the bill rather than the amount equivalent to her usage. The other line users made repeated complaints to the GPO, who always replied that this was a matter the line users had to sort out between themselves. Eventually, however, the complaints became so persistent that my friend's boss sent him to examine the line to see if there was any way the De Lászlós' telephone could be connected separately. On opening the junction box at the end of the lane he was confronted by something that, while in training, he had once been shown and told, ‘You will never see one of these but, if you do, you are to report its presence to your manager and immediately forget that you ever saw it.' His manager turned pale on being advised of this item, and repeated the advice that, as my friend had signed the Official Secrets Act, he was never to mention it. He hadn't mentioned it to a soul until we spoke about it over fifty years later. Though the exact nature of ‘it' was not specified, I think we were both clear that ‘it' was a tap on the telephone line – and the fact that he had been shown one and recognised it means it was an official one. As far as he knew, the problem with the party line was never resolved.

Whether it was an MI5 tap, or perhaps one from the police or another agency, we will probably never know – or, indeed, quite why the calls were being listened to. But someone official considered there was a good reason. Though Philip De László had been dead for twenty years, there may be cross references on his MI5 file that will reveal things that, even now, the powers that be do not want us to know.

T
HERE'S AN INTERESTING
question relating to the French secret service reports. Did they, in fact, exist or could they have been fabricated by MI5 itself on the basis of other, even more secret sources?

The biography of Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett, written by Roland Wild and Curtis-Bennett's son, tells how, concerned that plots were being fomented in Paris by the Russian intelligence service, an attempt was made to access documents being carried by a Russian official travelling from Paris to Russia via London and Scotland. It seems far-fetched: it involved the drugging of the Russian in Edinburgh and the rushing of his bag on an express train to London, where it was opened, the contents photographed and the whole bag (which had to be retied in exactly the same way) rushed back to Scotland before its carrier awoke. However, it's not utterly impossible. Almost exactly the same story is given in
Private and Official,
the biography of Sir Ronald Dockray Waterhouse, though in this case it names the head of the Russian intelligence service as Ignatieff. Waterhouse served as an MI5 officer between May 1915 and the end of April 1918 as head of the Military Permit Office in Bedford Square, which issued travel permits to the military zone in France between 1915 and October 1917, a job described as ‘a very responsible position, as in addition to dealing with questions of permits to France for British subjects who are frequently of high rank, he has to maintain very close and cordial relations with the French passport office'.
He left the Permit Office in October 1917 to become head of MI5 G3. Included amongst G3's duties were ‘Special investigations into the cases of suspected persons in diplomatic, financial and political circles'.
It's quite likely, then, that if investigations were being carried out into material passing through the country via the diplomatic bag, he would at least have been aware of it. The biography was written by his widow, Nourah Waterhouse, and in fact describes what appear to be two attempts to access diplomatic material, the other being an attempt to get into the Chinese bag.

Oddly enough, though it makes no mention of attempting to break into the bag, there's a file on Ignatieff in TNA, dated 29 November 1917, which describes worries about his contacts with the German secret service. There were actually two Ignatieff brothers: Alexis, the military attaché and Paul, head of the secret service in Paris. Paul had taken over in Paris in 1916 and, the French said, the information he had been providing to them had gone from excellent to bad, then, recently, to dangerous and probably false. The French had him and his agents followed and came to the conclusion that he was working with the new Bolshevik government in Russia and possibly co-operating with the Germans. The officer compiling the report, Major Claude Dansey, a former MI5 man now working for SIS, concluded, ‘in order to guard our own interests we should not neglect the possibility that Ignatieff is willing to assist the Germans'. Given the facilities the British granted the Russians in terms of travel, a Foreign Office official commented, ‘we agree that the matter is one of considerable importance and would be glad to consult the French as to the expediency of allowing these Russian couriers the facilities they have hitherto enjoyed'. Since the Foreign Office had not been told officially about the matter, it specifically requested that Kell ask the director of military intelligence to raise the matter with them. Presumably the break into the bag happened after this.