In last month’s Irish Political Review I focused on the career of J. Arthur Maundy Gregory, who became famous by selling more knighthoods and other titles of honour than anyone else in Great Britain. Previous to that, he was probably involved—under the direction of Basil Thomson, head of Scotland Yard—in forging the ‘Black Diaries’ attributed to Roger Casement. I set out below my reasons for thinking so.
However, I need to make it clear that my argument has got nothing to do with Donald McCormick’s speculations in Murder By Perfection (1970). That book is about Gregory committing two ‘perfect murders’. One of the alleged victims was a man called Victor Grayson. He was once a radical Labour politician, and it is said he was the most electrifying speaker that the British Labour movement ever had.
From 1907 to 1910 he was the Labour MP for the Pennine Constituency of Colne Valley. Unfortunately, the social scene at Westminster was more than he could cope with. He lost his seat at the next election and failed badly when he tried to win another seat. For the next few years he went downwards.
With the outbreak of World War I, Grayson became an enthusiastic pro-War propagandist. It may be that the War saved his life, or at least gave him a few years extra. He didn’t immediately become teetotal, but in late 1916 he was in good enough shape to enlist (which not many would have predicted three years earlier), and he went a whole year in the army without whiskey. He was wounded at Passchendaele and in due course was sent back to England, badly shell-shocked, and discharged.
By February 1918 he was back on the pro-War speaking circuit. He condemned Bolsheviks, pacifists, anti-conscriptionists; he deplored selfish people who went on strike while their country was at war. Always, however, he expressed some kind of socialist commitment also. With some breaks, he kept this up to the end of the war. In his last reported speech, in Hull on 19th November 1918, he was talking about the tasks of social reconstruction. “This was nine days after the Armistice”, his latest biographer says, “and it is apparent that Grayson was set on a return to politics” (Harry Taylor, Victor Grayson: In Search Of Britain’s Lost Revolutionary, p221).
But Grayson never again appeared on a public platform, nor was anything printed under his name. He returned to London and lived mysteriously there for about two years. And then he disappeared and was never seen again.
Or anyhow, no one ever verifiably saw him. He was ‘sighted’ many times—beginning some years after his disappearance, when it became publicly known that he was missing. Grayson’s two most recent biographers, David Clark and Harry Taylor, cannot believe that so many apparitions all add up to nothing, so each of them pursues his favourite sightings, getting nowhere. Donald McCormick says, by contrast:
“An examination of all the claims mentioned in the last chapter by people who believed they had ‘seen’ Victor Grayson quickly convinced me that any clues supplied in these stories only led to blind alleys and false trails” (Murder By Perfection, p66).
To my mind, McCormick got that much at least right.
McCormick, Grayson And Casement
Being murdered is one possible way of disappearing forever, and McCormick says it is the most likely explanation of the Grayson case. He suggests that Maundy Gregory lured Grayson to the bungalow he owned on Ditton Island in the Thames and did away with him there. This was because Grayson had threatened to expose Gregory publicly on two counts. One, he was selling official British titles of honour; and two, he had forged the Casement Diaries.
But how likely is it that Grayson would have felt so passionately about injustice done to Casement, a man who had taken the enemy side in the war? McCormick offers three pieces of evidence, as far as I can see, all of them from unpublished personal interviews conducted decades previously. Two of the interviewees were dead when his book was published, and the third was a New Zealand soldier whom no one has since been able to find in the military records. The first testimony is from the patriotic socialist, Robert Blatchford, whom the author says he interviewed in 1931, when Blatchford was 80 and McCormick was 20:
“Nobody was more vehemently in favour of prosecuting the war than Victor. In 1918 he was as great a patriot as any. But Grayson also had the virtue of compassion and a hatred of injustice. Though he knew that Sir Roger Casement had been indicted for treason and had no sympathy for the manner in which he used the Germans as allies, he admitted that he was an Irish patriot, however mistaken he might be about Ireland’s true friends. But Grayson, who had known Casement slightly, was convinced that Casement had been framed. He told me when he returned from the Western Front that he was determined to track down the men who had ‘forged lies’ and invented calumnies about Casement. He made no secret of this belief, but was remarkably cagey about revealing his evidence. All he would say was that one day the truth would all come out” (Murder By Perfection, pp30-31).
Whatever the merits of this reasoning, it doesn’t sound like Blatchford! The old man spoke for himself in an autobiography published in that same year of 1931, My Eighty Years. He didn’t mention Grayson even once and, when he mentioned Ireland, he did not seem to take Irish patriots and their concerns very seriously.
McCormick also draws on a dubious interview that he says he conducted in 1936 in Dublin “with Frank Ryan, a former IRA leader who had broken with the terrorists shortly after de Valera had proscribed the IRA”. (This description might give a wrong impression, but it isn’t wildly inaccurate.) Ryan allegedly told him:
“‘I knew Grayson… He visited Ireland after the war more than once… Grayson had made friends among Irishmen in the fighting services. He felt that Britain had let them down. They had fought for Britain against Germany and Britain had failed to reward them with a fair deal. And Grayson had a passion for the underdog and the new underdog to him was Ireland… But there were other things too. Grayson was convinced that the Casement Diaries had been forged and that the man responsible for the forging was Maundy Gregory, the same man who was sent to prison for selling British titles’ (pp74-5).
It is unfortunate that, besides these uncheckable interviews with Blatchford and Ryan and the ghostly New Zealand soldier Walter Adams, there isn’t a breath about all of this from anywhere else. And it remains in the highest degree unlikely that Grayson would have taken up the cause of Casement. Supposing his passion for the underdog made him want to do something for Ireland, in 1920 there was no shortage of current issues that he could have got to grips with.
So what is one to make of Donald McCormick? He was a journalist who rose fairly high in the Sunday Times. We all know that journalists invent some of their sources. In fact, the functional journalistic ethic in the Western world seems to be that you may cheerfully invent your supporting witnesses, but you should not invent the main core of your story, outside of special circumstances (wartime, etc. etc. etc.). The magazine Private Eye has been going for 60-odd years now, and every week it has variants of the same parody that it was doing six decades ago: the unskilful journalist inventing his or her sources. The joke never flags because the real thing never stops happening.
McCormick has been accused of inventing some of his core stories. His most controversial book was The British Connection, in which he claimed that the Cambridge economist, Professor Arthur Pigou, was a key member of a spy-ring working for the Soviet Union. Pigou was safely dead, of course, but the British Labour Establishment remembered him fondly as one of their pet academic exiles from Central Europe.
The equivalent pet economist for the Tories was Friedrich Hayek, who accepted McCormick’s claim about his rival economist with glee. Serious upset was caused in academia thereby. Responding to this, an eccentric multi-volume biography of Hayek gives over an entire book, Volume 3, to denouncing Donald McCormick as a fabricator and falsifier of history (Hayek: A Collaborative Biography, Vol. 3, ed. R. Leeson (Basingstoke 2015)).
According to Nigel West, who was his research assistant on The British Connection:
“Donald was exceptionally well-informed and was a pioneer in writing about the British Intelligence community at a time when convention did not encourage any external interest in contemporary security and intelligence subjects’ (Hayek 3, p74).
That’s a nicely turned phrase, “convention did not encourage…”!
Actually, the conventional Intelligence operatives must have been disturbed by McCormick’s attitudes to some of their community’s involvements, in particular regarding the Casement Diaries.
West goes on to say that the two main sources which McCormick quotes as evidence for his claims about Pigou probably never existed. They were fictional characters, most likely (Hayek 3, pp74-6). Andrew Cook, for his part, thinks that McCormick invented a sighting by his key witness, the since-deceased artist George Flemwell, of Grayson entering Gregory’s house on the Thames. But Cook made a curious blunder when he went to the Metereological Office to check the weather report for the day McCormick had given.
Cook checked the weather for—
“28 September 1919… While reading the report, I noticed that 28 September 1919 was in fact a Sunday, which prompted me to check Hampton Court Palace records. I discovered that Barge Walk, the north bank of the Thames on which Flemwell was allegedly sitting while painting, is owned and controlled by the Palace, and was in fact closed to the public on Sundays—how then could Flemwell have been there? The balance of evidence not only suggests he was not, but points to the whole scenario being fabricated by McCormick in order to knit together two unrelated stories (the death of Edith Rosse and the disappearance of Victor Grayson) to create his ‘Murder by Perfection’ book’ (Cash For Honours. The Story of Maundy Gregory (Stroud 2008), p.78).
Which is all very fine, except that McCormick never said anything about 28th September 1919! He said that Flemwell made his sighting on 28th September 1920—which was, as McCormick says it was, a Tuesday (Murder By Perfection, p87). This odd blunder by Cook is quoted verbatim and presented as clinching evidence in the latest Grayson biography by Harry Taylor (Victor Grayson, p224), which doesn’t say very much for that biographer’s thoroughness.
Nevertheless, I am forced to conclude that I can’t trust anything McCormick says about Grayson and the Black Diaries. He heard too much from his witnesses that they never told anyone else, and their mortality rate is too high! This is much to be regretted, because I think he had picked up from somewhere, probably from old Intelligence hands, a sense that the whole business of the Black Diaries stank. It would have better if he’d simply told what he knew, rather than writing chapters of a historical novel and presenting them as history. His faults are great, but I think he had more historical sense than Grayson’s biographers, of whom more below.
Grayson in 1919-20
Victor Grayson’s last two years on record, 1919-20, are very puzzling. Information about him comes mainly from the manageress of the apartment block where he was staying, who spoke to the biographer David Clark. She was describing the life that Grayson led about sixty years previously, but her story seemed coherent as far as it went.
Grayson had a luxury apartment in ‘a most prestigious block of flats, Georgian House in Bury Street in the vicinity of St. James’s Palace’ in London. The rent was considerable, and he lived expensively. He was drinking heavily, often starting on the whiskey before breakfast. Each weekend he took the train to Bolton, travelling first class, to visit his young daughter, who lived with her grandparents (Grayson was a widower).
He liked to dress up for the theatre and often took the manageress with him. Once he proposed marriage to her, but she turned him down because of his drinking. Much of his time was spent in his room, at his desk writing—she did not know what. He had regular visitors, all of them men. There were four especially, all of them colourful types: Robert Blatchford; the Seamen’s Union leader and splinter party Labour activist, J. Havelock Wilson; the newspaper owner, Liberal MP and fraudster Horatio Bottomley; and Maundy Gregory.
“This was an unlikely collection of visitors with patriotism, real or assumed, being the only obvious link”, Clark says (Victor Grayson, Labour’s Lost Leader (London 1985), pp.125, 128-9).
Grayson was never stressed for cash. “His rent was automatically paid for him”, but the manageress did not know by whom (p129). Every two weeks a package was delivered to the apartment block for Grayson by two uniformed men; indications were that the package contained money. The manageress thought the delivery men were Government employees, but Clark and Taylor dismiss that possibility:
“No government would so blatantly pay Grayson. It is much more likely that they worked for Maundy Gregory, who dressed his attendants in uniforms similar to those of government personnel to give the impression that he himself was part of the official machine” (Clark, p129).
Such is the intriguing picture of the thirty-eight- or thirty-nine-year-old Victor Grayson, drawn by the manageress of the Georgian House. That may have been the real picture. Or perhaps it was not entirely the real picture?… Clark and Taylor give complete credence to the manageress’s story and try to build on it by speculation.
How did Grayson get the money to live such a high life?
“It seems that the money was not paid to Grayson for services rendered for, apart from a brief period in 1918 and early 1919 when he might have been able to help in the formation and establishment of a competing political party to the Labour Party, he does not appear to have done anything constructive. Grayson, therefore, received his finance for other reasons. Of these the most likely was blackmail. One of the traditional targets for blackmail has been homosexual activity” (David Clark, Victor Grayson, Labour’s Lost Leader p154).
– and Grayson had some acquaintance with this, as he was bisexual.
Clark thinks it is probable that the blackmailed individual, whoever he may have been, financed two years of comfortable living in Bury Street. And not only that, subsequently he enabled Grayson to disappear comprehensively and to establish an alternative life somewhere else! —It sounds like a fairytale of successful extortion.
Whoever was then being bled by ‘Labour’s lost leader’, he’d have needed to be quite a fat cat, and Grayson would have needed to keep a tight hold of him.
Indeed, Clark goes so far as to suggest that Grayson might have been blackmailing “Lloyd George himself or the Conservative Party”, by threatening to expose the sale of honours (p155). My own feeling, however, is that anyone who tried something like that with Lloyd George or the Conservative Party would be doing something highly unsafe. It was not the best passport to a comfortable life!
Harry Taylor understandably cannot stomach this theory (which he doesn’t even mention), so he tries to come up with another:
“That he was missing from the revolutionary activities of 1919 demonstrates that Grayson now saw his role as lying on the other side of the political divide. It seems more likely, then, that Grayson was in fact informing on his former comrades and being paid handsomely for his efforts and possibly also for the propaganda he may have been writing. (The manageress of the apartment house) recalled men dressed in livery, almost certainly employees of Gregory, delivering packages for Grayson every fortnight. It seems probable, then, that with Gregory acting as intermediary, Grayson was feeding information to Basil Thomson of Scotland Yard and the recently established MI5. There is no other way to explain Grayson’s income” (Taylor, pp227-8).
True enough, if the manageress’s account of Grayson’s regular visitors is accurate, then Basil Thomson was not far away. And Basil Thomson, like Winston Churchill and many others, was indeed very worried about the possibility of revolution in Britain in 1919 and even later. But the Intelligence branches did not have infinite funding and they wanted value for money. How could they have justified supporting Victor Grayson? His rent alone would have cost 260 guineas a year; apart from that, there was high expenditure on food, clothing, train fares, theatre tickets, and whiskey!
What kind of information could Grayson have provided, to justify such an income? He was not equipped to be a high-level informant, because he had no strategic position within the Labour Party or any other relevant organisation. If he wasn’t being paid to further the counter-revolution, the contribution he made must have been something else, and it must have been something very important.
Not to be outdone, though, Taylor comes up with a blackmail theme of his own. Grayson’s intimate letters to one of his homosexual lovers somehow ended up in the possession of J.H. Thomas, a key supporter of Ramsay MacDonald and a Labour Party Cabinet Minister. What do we conclude from that? Taylor’s conclusion is that persons close to MacDonald were blackmailing Grayson (p236). This was the explanation of why he had not re-entered politics after the war: he was warned that if he did so, he would be ‘outed’ as homosexual. He was forced to live quietly in London, and afterwards even forced to disappear.
Neither Clark nor Taylor mentions Roger Casement even once! This is not because they regard Donald McCormick’s arguments as beneath discussion. Clark, in fact, treats McCormick’s book quite respectfully, though he says it “cannot be the definitive account” (p142). My guess is that Clark thought he couldn’t handle the Casement issue and decided to make things easy for himself by ignoring it. And Taylor, I suppose, concluded: if Clark could ignore this issue, then so can I !
The Irish Connection
Taylor ignores Ireland completely. Clark gives Ireland a single paragraph, acknowledging it as a place that Grayson conceivably might have disappeared to in 1920, though this was improbable:
“Ireland was another possible destination. He was known to have an interest in its affairs but it seems unlikely that he went there. In the 1920s the country was in a frenzy of political turmoil with hatred of the English being the only uniting factor among the warring groups. It is hard to envisage any Englishman, whatever his anti-establishment record, being accepted… If Grayson had gone there the British government would certainly have known, for the main efforts of the young secret service were concentrated in Ireland during the early 1920s. It is unlikely that he went there as a member of the secret service, which would have been another possibility” (Clark, p148).
But now we must consider an interesting item that McCormick unearthed. This time it isn’t a quotation from an interview that might be fictitious, and which no one can possibly check! It is a statement printed under the name of its author, Herbert Eastwood, in the Empire News of 13th September 1942.
Grayson’s sister, who was living in Canada, came to England in 1942 and made a fresh appeal for information about her brother. She asked Scotland Yard to undertake an investigation, and apparently this was done. On 6th September 1942 the Empire News carried reports, which can be found online, of the new search for Grayson. Eastwood, who was General Secretary of the Amalgamated Society of India Rubber, Cable and Asbestos Workers, had his response in the next issue of the paper a week later, as follows—
“In Yorkshire I was chairman of many of Grayson’s meetings, also during one of his tours of South Wales. While I was in London in 1919 I met Grayson by sheer accident in the street. I took him to a restaurant and we talked. He unburdened himself to me considerably.
“To cut a long story short, when he came to London as Private Grayson, he was on his uppers and had to do lecturing and hack writing in order to live. He told me he was fed up and intended ‘getting out of it’ as soon as he could.
“In 1920 he went to live with his mother in Liverpool and I met him there on one occasion near the docks. He told me that he was making enquiries about a boat for Ireland. He spoke of trying to get to Dublin as soon as he could and he did not want anyone to know where he was going. A few weeks later I heard from a mutual friend in Liverpool that he was ‘missing’. That was the last officially heard of him. All other assertions are wrong.
“Whether he went to Ireland or not nobody seems to know, but my view for what it is worth is that he told his mother he was going to Hull, but that he walked down to Liverpool docks, got a boat, went to Ireland and then cut himself adrift from everybody.
“I am afraid that his death must be presumed, that he was in Ireland under an assumed name. This would help to account for no one knowing what became of him finally” (Murder by Perfection, p.69).
I have not been able to check the Empire News for 13th September 1942, but I don’t believe the above is McCormick’s fabrication. (McCormick says it confirms that Grayson was “interested in helping the Irish”, but it doesn’t. The reason why he wanted to go to Ireland is not stated.)
Neither Clark nor Taylor makes the least reference to this statement by Herbert Eastwood, and I can think of reasons why. First of all, it complicates the attractive account by the manageress of the apartment house. And secondly, it brings the nuisance called Ireland into the story!
I can shed no further light on the fate of Victor Grayson, beyond suggesting another way he might possibly have disappeared. Surely, all who have made that memorable crossing on the old boats will agree that it would have been possible, on a really dark and wild night, to wander onto an outer deck while extremely drunk, fall awkwardly against the railings, and slide unnoticed into the Irish Sea? Of course, there’s no evidence. . .
John Minahane
