Daughter of an Australian songwriter was duped by MI5 into thinking she was a German spy
WHEN two young women in Britain agreed to help recruit people as Nazi spies they never realised that their Gestapo spy handler was actually an MI5 agent
ON November 17, 1942, two young women walked into an apartment in London’s East End. They were there to chat with a man called Jack King who claimed to be a Gestapo agent. Over a cup of tea the women blithely discussed ways they could help the Nazis defeat the British.
One of the women was Marita Perigoe, a fascist convert and daughter of famous Australian songwriter May Brahe. Perigoe’s usual trade was restoring artworks, but with little call for that during the war, she had taken a secretarial job. Now she was looking to moonlight as a Nazi spy.
She didn’t trust men to do the spying. “The male population of this country is more or less dead,” she said. “They’re no use whatsoever. You could exterminate the lot and find it would be a better world. They’ve got the guts of lice, and they’re absolutely without brain or reasoning power.”
Little did she realise the man she was talking to was not King. Instead he was MI5 operative Eric Roberts, who was recording their conversation. Roberts had recruited Perigoe to make sure that she didn’t pass secrets to the Nazis. His story and Perigoe’s are recounted in a new book Agent Jack by Robert Hutton (Weidenfeld & Nicolson).
Roberts was able to fool Perigoe and hundreds of others during the war into being fake spies. But his story remained a secret — even from those he duped — until 2014 when the file detailing his remarkable career was released by the National Archives in the UK.
Taking a job at Westminster Bank as a cover in 1925, Roberts worked for MI5 infiltrating communist groups and, in the 1930s, fascist groups. But in June 1940, with the country at war and an invasion by Germany seemingly imminent, he was released from his bank job to concentrate on a special mission.
It was widely believed that if Germany invaded, fifth columnists (a secret group of saboteurs working inside Britain for the enemy) would come to the assistance of the invaders. The most likely suspects were members of outlawed fascist groups; the most prominent of which was the British Union of Fascists (BUF) headed by Oswald Mosley. Although Mosley had been arrested in May 1940, there were still people operating in the name of his organisation or British fascism, and MI5 needed to do something to keep tabs on them.
One of them was Perigoe. She was born in England in 1912 when her songwriting mother, best known for Bless This House, moved there from Australia to further her career. She had studied art, hoping to make a living as an artist, but when that didn’t work out she took work restoring paintings. She came into contact with the fascists in 1939, when she was living with Eileen Gleave who was closely involved in the BUF. Both women became known to MI5.
When restoration work dried up in 1940, she became a secretary. Earlier that year she married Bernard Perigoe, also a committed fascist, but at the end of that year he was thrown into prison for organising fascist meetings.
She first met Roberts, or King as she knew him, in 1941. He had been trying get fascists to recruit him in order to infiltrate their organisations, but when that tactic failed his boss, Baron Victor Rothschild, suggested a different method. Roberts was to present himself as a Gestapo agent working in London looking to make contact with British sympathisers. That way he could draw out Nazi supporters, including those previously unknown to MI5, and make sure that if any of them wanted to pass on intelligence it wouldn’t be passed to a real German agent, or through any channels that might actually reach the Nazis.
His first assessment of Marita Perigoe was that “She is a masterful and somewhat masculine woman. Both in appearance and mentality she can be described as a typical arrogant Hun”.
Despite some lingering doubts Perigoe came to trust Roberts, she introduced him to other potential fifth columnists including Gleave, who gave him her nod of approval leading to the meeting in the flat in November 1942 — the first of many. Perigoe was one of nearly 500 people recruited by Roberts. At the end of the war she continued meeting with him and Rothschild even had a fake Nazi medal minted as a reward for Perigoe and Gleave.
Although Mosley, released from prison in 1943, tried to revive his plans for a fascist Britain, in 1949 Perigoe left England and headed for Australia. She married again in 1950 and became a costume designer for theatre.
After marrying two more times she died in 1984, never learning that she had been fooled by the MI5 in WWII.
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