Mrs Zigzag: The Extraordinary Life of a Secret Agent's Wife (2 page)

Many readers will ask themselves as they progress through the book: ‘Why on Earth did she stay with him?’ The answer is as complicated as their relationship. Because both Eddie and Betty were extraordinary people in their own right, their relationship cannot be judged by the standards of ‘normal’ relationships. Eddie was more like a force of nature: the torrent of water flowing around the rock that was Betty – each in their own roles.

The counsellor and therapist Lilian Verner-Bonds, a long-time friend of the Chapmans, adds: ‘Betty was never Eddie’s victim. She had the same strength and steel as he did. That is why they were perfectly suited, and she was able to give him the support she did. They were two peas in a pod.’

Some readers may be tempted to make judgements about Eddie Chapman based on Betty’s experiences related in this book. My advice is: don’t. There is no doubt that Eddie was a difficult man, but from everything I know about him, and from the brief time I spent with him and Betty before his passing, he was not a
bad
man. Indeed, there will be more than one reader of this book who is alive today because of him, and at considerable risk to his own life. The total number is likely to run into thousands.

Betty herself is a deeply spiritual woman, and has always had the feeling that no matter how it came about and whatever experiences resulted, she and Eddie were
meant
to be together. This has been emphasised to me time and again by Betty during the preparation of this book, and I have not the slightest inclination to dispute it. She views their life together as their mutual karma. Karma has many definitions, but the only one that really matters for Betty is this: ‘I just felt like his life was his karma, so my life was my karma. Your karma means that it’s what was meant to be, what you were fated to do. Because if you believe that you have lived before, this is the continuation. This is something you’ve come back to do, whether it’s pleasant or unpleasant.’

One of Eddie’s biographers went to the heart of the matter: ‘How Eddie and Betty got together is one of the more implausible stories in a lifetime of unlikely happenings. That she stayed with him – as Eddie faced up to his demons – is the most extraordinary thing of all.’

It is hoped that this book will shed light on that very thing.

Dr Ronald Bonewitz

Rogate, England, 2013

P
ROLOGUE:
A
GENT
Z
IGZAG

Z
igzag was the name given by British Intelligence to one of the most audacious double agents of the Second World War – Arnold Edward ‘Eddie’ Chapman.

Eddie had been born in Sunderland to a middle-class professional family but his father, a marine engineer, had spent most of Eddie’s childhood away at sea, and his mother had struggled to bring up her two boys more or less alone. When Eddie was young, he was an apprentice in the shipping industry with Thompson’s shipbuilders. Whilst he was there he saved a young man from drowning. Yet when he was interviewed about the incident he denied having saved the man, as he thought his mother would beat him for not being at school. Later he was given a medal for that act of bravery.

Eddie grew restless, bought an old bicycle and rode the 200 or so miles to London. He lied about his age and enlisted in the military – the elite Coldstream Guards, one of the most prestigious regiments in the British Army. In one of history’s great ironies, he wound up at the Tower of London, guarding the Crown Jewels. Within a short time he had absconded from the military and taken up a new career – as a safe-cracker. He and his gang were successful enough at their new enterprise that Scotland Yard set up a special task force just to track them down.

In 1939 Eddie went to the island of Jersey with his girlfriend, Betty Farmer, intending to go on to France to escape the authorities. Here, the police caught up with him. He was arrested and sentenced to a jail term in Jersey. While he was incarcerated, the Second World War broke out, and Jersey was occupied by the Germans. He offered his services to Nazi Germany as a spy and a traitor, whilst intending all along to become a British double agent. Germany eventually accepted his offer. He was given the name Fritz Graumann (to the Germans Agent Fritzchen) and was trained by the
Abwehr
(a German spy network) in explosives, radio communications, parachute jumping and other subjects, before being dispatched to England in 1942 to commit acts of sabotage. He immediately surrendered himself to the police before offering his services to British Intelligence, MI5. Thanks to top-secret Ultra intercepts, MI5 had prior knowledge of Agent Fritzchen’s mission, which corresponded in every aspect with the story Eddie told them. Convinced he was genuine in his offer to be a double agent, MI5 decided to use him. MI5 faked a sabotage attack on his target, the de Havilland aircraft factory in Hatfield, Hertfordshire, where the Mosquito bomber was being manufactured.

Now acting for the British as Zigzag – a code name assigned to him by MI5 – he made his way back to his German controllers in occupied France (after being questioned by the Gestapo), and was awarded the Iron Cross for his work as a saboteur. He was then sent to Norway to teach at a German spy school in Oslo. Immediately after D-Day he was sent back to Britain to report on the accuracy of the V–1 weapon, which was just being launched against London. Back in contact with MI5, he passed on information about the Germans that he had gathered at great personal risk in Oslo. He also consistently reported to the Germans that the bombs were overshooting their central London target, when in fact they were regularly landing in the city. The Germans corrected their aim, with the end result that many bombs fell short in the Kent countryside, doing far less damage than they otherwise would have done, and saving a great many lives.

Eddie was reunited with Betty in 1945, and they eventually married in 1947. After the war, Chapman remained friends with Baron von Gröning, his
Abwehr
handler, who was a thoroughly decent man, and who was later guest of honour at the wedding of Betty and Eddie’s daughter.

Fanny Johnstone of
The Guardian
newspaper wrote in 2007:

Spies have always been romantic figures, and the idea of having a love affair, or even a marriage, with one, has inspired a host of stories and characters … But these stories rarely tell us much about what it’s really like … a life we assume to be glamorous, and know to be precarious, but which has never been accurately described.
¹

Perhaps this book goes some way to describe the experience, for the wife of one spy, at least.

1

E
DDIE IS DEAD
,
L
ONG LIVE
E
DDIE

T
he February sun was unusually dazzling as it shone through the French windows of the restaurant, sending up sparkles from the fine crystal and polished silver adorning the elegant tablecloth. Equally dazzling was the blonde woman sitting with three male companions. They had let it be known that they were ‘film people’ and it took no imagination whatsoever to believe that the Harlowesque blonde was the star of some upcoming celluloid epic. The man to whom she devoted most of her attention was film-star material himself – tall, thin, rakishly handsome and with a thin moustache. The two rougher men with them easily could have been mistaken for bodyguards. The woman was Betty Farmer, and they had been in Jersey for a week. This lazy, idyllic Sunday lunchtime in February 1939 was among the best moments of her life. She couldn’t have imagined that she was just a few heartbeats away from the worst.

The handsome man was talking to her about a boat trip that he had seen advertised in the harbour area, but she recalls that her attention was more taken by the small vase of freesias that smelt ‘absolutely heavenly’. At some stage in the conversation, however, she became aware that both the tone and the speed of his speech had changed. Before she knew what was happening, he leapt from his seat, kissed her shoulder and dived through the closed French windows in a shower of broken glass. The man now disappearing through the gardens of the hotel, leaving behind shattered glass, broken crockery, shouting waiters and policemen, and a bewildered and stunned Betty, was Arnold Edward Chapman – professional criminal, safe-breaker extraordinaire, and wanted man. The next time he and Betty would meet, nearly six years later, he would be Arnold Edward Chapman, darling of both the German and British intelligence services, one of the most audacious double agents of all time, and loose cannon. And, grudgingly – to the British Establishment at least – a national hero: Agent Zigzag.

Those few minutes of utter chaos in the restaurant were, unbeknown to Betty Farmer, the pivot point of her life.

Born twenty-two years previously on a small farm near Neen Sollars in Shropshire, Betty was the first of eleven children. If there was a far corner of the Earth in the late 1930s, the farms surrounding this minuscule village in the English midlands were it. The village comprised a few houses, a public house, a church and a school. Betty’s nearest neighbour was a mile away. The farm was surrounded by woodlands and she had to walk to and from her house along a small track a mile or so long, which led to a narrow tarmac road. She walked everywhere, except when the weather was very bad and her father took her in his pony carriage. They would drive some 3 or 4 miles to a main road, and then she walked the rest of the way to school. It was miles away, quite literally, from the bright lights of London and the glittering, glamorous life that awaited her.

As a teenager Betty’s emerging beauty hadn’t gone unnoticed. For a time she went out with the son of the local squire. She was very keen on him but he finally finished the relationship to go out with a more sophisticated girl who had come to the area from London. Betty had a further complication in that the local vicar had fallen in love with her.
¹
She was going out with him at the same time that she was dating the squire’s son. When that relationship finished she was very upset, but did not want to continue her relationship with the vicar. This caused a local scandal in the village:

People thought I was flighty and as I did not intend to have a serious relationship with the vicar I decided the easiest option was to leave. To be honest, I did not want the responsibility of bringing up my 10 brothers and sisters either, so that was a part of my decision to leave, but not the main reason. So, I decided to go to London.

It is hard to imagine in the twenty-first century how radical such a step was. Even as late as the 1960s it was difficult for a single woman to get a bank account in England without a man’s signature. Dickensian England did not die with Charles Dickens.

Of that time, Betty recalls:

My mother was a very good mother. She worked hard bringing up eleven children with only her mother’s help to aid her. She did all the cooking and baking, and father was always out working, running the farm. They were very upset when I left; they did not want me to leave and I didn’t see my mother and father for a good many years afterwards. But I wanted a fresh start and London was a big city with lots of opportunities. The situation at home with Richard and the vicar was too awkward so I needed to leave. I had a few hundred pounds, which was given to me by my two aunts who lived in Rhyl, and who wanted to help me. I used to go to them when I needed clothes and money and they would help me out. My aunts were on my mother’s side of the family. They spent their life in service working for the same family, who were very wealthy. When the last of the family died they did not have any heirs, so left their estate to my aunts. I had the name of an Irish lady, Wonnie Carey, who ran a bed-and-breakfast boarding house for young ladies in Baron’s Court, west London. I moved in and she took me under her wing.

Wonnie Carey introduced Betty to many people, including Charles Hawtree who owned hotels on the Isle of Man, where she later trained for a year to learn the hotel business.

Because I had been brought up very religiously, I carried on going to church. Wonnie would go to church but she was Catholic. Whenever I’ve been in different countries, whatever the faith, I’ve always gone to church. I used to go with her to the Catholic Church. There were two rules: no trousers, and you had to wear gloves on Sunday.

Betty also adds with a chuckle: ‘no smoking or swearing or any of that either! She was a very religious lady and ran what was referred to at the time as a good clean house. I met a lot of people through her. She was very “correct”.’ Betty chuckles again: ‘I couldn’t have a fellow in. The telephone was in the hallway and if you were expecting a call you hung around in the hallway. There wasn’t much privacy.’

Young, pretty and vivacious, Betty went out from time to time with a man she met at the B&B who took her out to a number of London clubs. It was during this time that she was offered the job of social secretary at a social club on Church Street in Kensington (a wealthy enclave of London) as an evening job. She also worked in a fashion shop during the day. It was at this club that she had her first encounter with Eddie Chapman. One evening as she was playing on the pinball machine a member came in with a new young man. The new man, tall, thin and handsome, stood by the machine having a drink with his friend, and as she moved away, she heard the newcomer say ‘I’m going to marry her.’