Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory (8 page)

Finally, Montagu turned in, returned the papers to his briefcase, locked it, and headed to the basement bedroom where he now slept because of air raids. Mabel the maid (“who had been in the family
⁵⁸
for more than 35 years”) had turned down the crisp cotton sheets on the bed.

That same evening, in a grimy, disused warehouse on the other side of London, a young Welshman swallowed a large dose of rat poison, ending a life that could not have been more different, in every conceivable way, from that of the Honourable Ewen Montagu.

CHAPTER FIVE
The Man Who Was

A
BERBARGOED WAS A GRIM PLACE
a century ago, a brooding village of coal-dusted sadness. The colliery opened in 1903. Before the coal was found, there was nothing at Aberbargoed, save the green valleys. With the coal came rows of pinched, terraced streets housing hundreds of miners and their families. Without coal the town was nothing. And when the coal ran out, as it eventually did, there was nothing much left. Even before the First World War, Aberbargoed was suffering and struggling.

Into this bleak world Glyndwr Michael was born January 4, 1909, at 136 Commercial Street. His mother was Sarah Ann Chadwick, his father a colliery hauler named Thomas Michael. What few records have survived of this family give a flavor of their hard, gritty lives. At the age of twenty, in 1888, Sarah had married another coal miner, George Cottrell. She signed their marriage certificate with a cross: Sarah never learned to read or write or had any use for either skill. Although two daughters resulted from her marriage to Cottrell, the relationship did not last, and by 1904 she was living with Thomas Michael in a cramped house beside the railway line at Dinas. They never married. Like his father, who died of tuberculosis when Thomas was a child, Thomas Michael had been a coal miner all his life. A Welsh Baptist, born in Dinas, he worked deep in the pits, hauling coal trucks by hand through the dark and wretched bowels of the earth. At some point before meeting Sarah, Thomas Michael contracted syphilis, which he passed on to her and which apparently went untreated. It is possible that when Glyndwr Michael was born, his parents bequeathed him congenital syphilis, which can cause damage to the bones, eyes, and brain.

When Glyn was an infant, the family moved twelve miles from Aberbargoed to Taff’s Well, next to Rockwood Pit, where another child, Doris, was born two years later. Unable to pay the rent, the Michaels moved from one dingy house to another, each more decrepit than the last, first to 7 Garth Street, and then, a few years later, to 28 Cornwall Road, Williamstown, Penygraig, in the Rhondda Valley, where Sarah gave birth to yet another child, her fifth. There was little food. The children wore shoes once a week, to church. Thomas Michael drank.

Around 1919, when Glyn was nine or ten years old, his father’s health began to decline, probably due to the delayed effects of syphilis, combined with the lung-rotting damage caused by working underground for over three decades. Soon after this, his grandmother died of “senile decay.”
¹
Mental frailty would be a recurrent feature of the family’s medical history. Thomas Michael began to cough horribly and sweat at odd times of day. The right side of his chest began to sink inward.

By 1924, Michael was no longer able to work, and the family was forced to live on charity from the Pontypridd Union, the second-largest Poor Law authority in Britain. For a time, they became homeless and moved into a single room at Llwynypia Homes, a charity hostel. The Pontypridd Union paid twenty-three shillings for a man and wife and two shillings for each child. A family of five was now surviving, barely, on one pound and nine shillings a week. Thomas Michael became “melancholic,”
²
according to a medical report, which described him as “confused and very depressed,”
³
rapidly losing weight, with a racking, rattling cough.

Just before Christmas in 1924, Thomas Michael stabbed himself in the throat with a carving knife. He was rushed to Angelton Mental Hospital in Bridgend, where the wound was cleaned and stitched up. Thomas Michael was a mental and physical wreck, coughing blood and in “deep mental depression.”
⁴
He was fifty-one years old but looked eighty. Percy Hawkins, the mental hospital nurse, described him: “Hair is grey and thin.
⁵
Pupils are somewhat irregular, they react to light and converge. Tongue has a dry white fur. Teeth very deficient and carious. He is thin and poorly nourished. Patient coughs and spits a good deal, and sweats heavily at night.” Both lungs were riddled with disease.

At first, Thomas seemed to be recovering. He began to speak quite rationally and to notice his surroundings. But on March 13, 1925, he caught influenza, which developed into bronchial pneumonia, with “a hectic temperature,
⁶
copious and foul smelling expectoration, very weak and depressed.” He stopped eating. On March 31, Thomas Michael died.

Glyn Michael, now sixteen years old, had witnessed his father turn from a vigorous coal miner into a diseased husk. He had seen him stab himself and then watched him fall apart in a lunatic asylum. Glyn had been born poor. Now he was a pauper. He may already have been suffering from mental illness. When Thomas Michael was buried in a common grave in the Trealaw cemetery, Reverend Overton presiding, Glyn Michael signed the burial register, in a blotted, uncertain hand, without using capital letters.

The widowed Sarah moved, with her three young children, into a minuscule flat in the back streets of Trealaw, now dependent entirely on alms for survival. The Pontypridd Union, however, was going bust, so great was the demand for charity in the struggling South Wales coalfields. A year after Thomas Michael’s death, Health Minister Neville Chamberlain told parliament that the Pontypridd Union had run up an overdraft of £210,000, and further money would be advanced only “on condition that the scale
⁷
of relief was reduced.” As the Depression struck, the economic situation in South Wales turned from bad to catastrophic. Glyn found part-time employment as a gardener and laborer, but work was hard to come by.

At the outbreak of war in 1939, Sarah and Glyn Michael were still living at 135 Trealaw Road. His two half sisters and his sister Doris had each married coal miners and now had families of their own. His younger brother had left home. Glyndwr was not considered eligible for military service, which suggests that he was unfit, either physically or, more probably, mentally. On January 15, 1940, Glyn’s mother died in her bed of a heart attack and aortic aneurism. She was sixty-six. Sarah had been his only emotional support. On January 16, Glyndwr Michael witnessed his mother’s death certificate, buried her alongside Thomas Michael in the Trealaw cemetery, and disappeared. A country at war had little attention to spare for a man who was homeless, destitute, and most likely mentally ill.

B
ENTLEY
P
URCHASE OFTEN
wondered why people came to the capital to die. More than a quarter of all the cases he examined were suicides, but many of these were not Londoners. What impulse, he mused, “led men and women to London
⁸
to end their lives? Was it because the dead from the provinces hoped that in the vastness of the capital one more tragedy would pass unnoticed? Or did they wish to spare relatives and friends the distress that would arise inevitably if they ended their lives on their own doorsteps?” Purchase was puzzled, in a detached and scientific way: “It still surprised him
⁹
how many people seemed to be utterly friendless and unwanted when they arrived in his mortuary.”

It is not clear how or when Glyndwr Michael got to London. In the winter of 1942, he was staying in “a common lodging house”
¹⁰
in west London, although he also appears to have been sleeping in vacant or abandoned buildings and undergoing some sort of treatment at a lunatic asylum. He was clean shaven, which suggests he owned a razor and was living somewhere where he could use it.

On January 26, 1943, Michael was found in an abandoned warehouse near King’s Cross and taken to St. Pancras Hospital, suffering from acute chemical poisoning. As Sir Bernard Spilsbury’s case notes attest, suicides in wartime Britain found an extraordinary variety of ways to poison themselves: with Lysol disinfectant, camphor, opium, carbolic, hydrochloric acid, alcohol, chloroform, and coal gas. Michael ingested rat poison, probably “Battle’s Vermin Killer,” a paste laced with highly toxic white phosphorus. It was assumed that Michael had killed himself intentionally. His father had attempted suicide, and self-destruction, tragically, runs in families. But it is also possible that the poisoning was accidental. Rat poison was usually spread on stale bread and other scraps: the phosphorus made it glow in the dark, so the rodents would be attracted by both the light and the smell. It is entirely possible that Michael ate rotting leftover food laced with poison, because he was hungry.

Phosphorus poisoning is a horrific way to die, as acid in the digestive system reacts with the phosphide to generate the toxic gas phosphine. The pathology follows three distinct phases. Often within minutes, the victim suffers nausea and vomiting, as the phosphorus affects the gastric tract, followed by delirium, cramps, restlessness, convulsions, extreme thirst, and two particularly horrible symptoms peculiar to phosphorus poisoning: “smoking stool” and “garlic breath.” The second phase, some twenty-four hours after the initial poisoning, is one of relative calm, when the symptoms appear to subside. In the third phase, the victim suffers a breakdown of the central nervous system, jaundice, coma, kidney, heart, and liver failure, and finally death. It took poor Glyndwr Michael more than two days to die, but he appears to have been sufficiently lucid in the second phase to tell the nurses at St. Pancras who he was and what he had eaten. He was pronounced dead on January 28, 1943.

At the age of thirty-four, Glyndwr Michael had simply slipped through the cracks of a wartime society with other concerns: a single man, illegitimate and probably illiterate, without money, friends, or family, he had died unloved and unlamented, but not unnoticed.

As soon as the body of Glyndwr Michael reached St. Pancras Morgue, Bentley Purchase informed Ewen Montagu that a candidate for the project had arrived in his jurisdiction and would be “kept in suitable cold storage
¹¹
until we were ready for it.”

Purchase carried out a swift inquest with a foregone conclusion. In a suspected poisoning, the coroner would normally have held an autopsy, but none was ordered in this case, for obvious reasons. Purchase listed Michael as “Lunatic,”
¹²
which suggests that he had been certified insane and was undergoing treatment. The death certificate, based on the coroner’s inquest, describes him as “labourer, no fixed abode,”
¹³
and gives the cause of death as “phosphorous poisoning.
¹⁴
Took rat poison bid kill himself while of unsound mind.” Purchase informed the registrar that the body was being “removed out of England”
¹⁵
for burial. In private, the coroner gave Montagu a more detailed account. The dead man, he explained, had taken “a minimal dose”
¹⁶
of rat poison. “This dose was not sufficient
¹⁷
to kill him outright, and its only effect was so to impair the functioning of the liver that he died a little time afterwards.” The human body normally contains traces of phosphorus, the coroner explained, and “phosphorous is not one of
¹⁸
the poisons readily traceable after long periods, such as arsenic which invades the roots of the hair, etc., or strychnine.” The rat poison would leave few clues to the cause of death, “except possibly faint
¹⁹
traces of chemical action in the liver.” Determining how the man had died after immersion in water would require “a highly skilled medico-criminal
²⁰
-chemist who would have to weigh all the chemical compositions of every organ before he could come to any conclusion.” Purchase liked to gamble, and he was willing to “bet heavily against anyone
²¹
being able to determine the cause of death with sufficient certainty to deny the presumption that the man had been drowned or killed by shock through an aeroplane crash and then been immersed in water.”

For a second, even weightier opinion, Montagu turned once more to Sir Bernard Spilsbury, the world’s foremost medico-criminal-chemist. They met again at the Junior Carlton Club. Sir Bernard’s verdict was as dry as his sherry: “You have nothing to fear
²²
from a Spanish post mortem; to detect that this young man had not died after an aircraft had been lost at sea would need a pathologist of my experience—and there aren’t any in Spain.”

Spilsbury’s answer was typical of the man. Typically self-assured, typically laconic, but also (and this was increasingly true of Sir Bernard’s lofty pronouncements) typically open to question. For Sir Bernard Spilsbury was not the forensic oracle he had once been; far from infallible, he had started to make some terrible mistakes. Today, even his evidence in the Crippen case is open to doubt. Utterly convinced of his own rectitude and adamant in his prejudices, Spilsbury helped to send 110 men to the gallows. Some, in hindsight, were plainly innocent. His theories and opinions increasingly took precedence over the facts, most notably in the case of Norman Thorne, sentenced to death for killing his girlfriend. The woman had almost certainly committed suicide, and the evidence was at best contradictory, but Spilsbury’s testimony was unwavering, despite a rising tide of protest at the way one man’s “expertise” was sending a possibly innocent man to the gallows. “I am a martyr to Spilsburyism,”
²³
said Thorne, shortly before his execution. By the 1940s, Spilsbury’s reputation was fading, his marriage collapsing, and his mind starting to fail. His fabled sense of smell had deserted him. He was overworked and in 1940, he suffered a small stroke. The death of a son in the Blitz affected him deeply. His answers to Montagu’s questions bore all the hallmarks of the last days of Sir Bernard Spilsbury: emphatic but questionable, and potentially extremely dangerous.