Too bizarre for Bond

Sinclair McKay on the colourful life of a maverick spymaster who inspired ‘M’

Certainly, in Henry Hemming’s compelling new biography of the MI5 maverick Maxwell Knight, there is an overwhelming sense of the man’s slippery personalities: from grim young fascist to jazzloving defender of the realm; from high-spirited adventure novelist to avuncular, much-loved animal expert. Indeed, the spy who partly inspired Ian Fleming’s “M” was many degrees more eccentric than 007 could have coped with.

Knight’s ideological journey into the secret heart of British espionage was serpentine, too. His formative years left him ragged at the edges: born in south London in 1900, thrown into the Navy at 14, and then drifting after the war, he became a sports teacher. In the febrile political atmosphere of the Twenties, Knight was recruited to a shady private intelligence outfit called the Makgill Organisation, founded by Sir George Makgill, a wealthy heir consumed with a hatred for Bolshevism and all things Left-leaning. Knight’s first assignment was to infiltrate the nascent British Fascisti – not to hinder it, but to find other promising recruits for Makgill.

Knight’s infiltration was so successful that he inadvertently became a senior figure in the Fascisti. His mask soon became flesh; the future looked ugly. His first wife, Gwladys, was a proud fascist. One of his closest friends was William Joyce, later the treacherous wartime broadcaster “Lord Haw-Haw”. This was a world of nauseating anti-Semitism, of street fights and razor scars. And yet Knight was caught just in time: a quiet approach from an MI6 man led Knight into the security services, which provided a slow decompression chamber away from his radicalised circle.

Hemming is careful to trace Knight’s redemptive progress, and buff up a layer of romanticism on his portrait. This was a man, after all, who took time out of actual spying to write Buchan-esque spy adventure novels – a mirror-maze manoeuvre. Then there was his mania for all animal life: he filled his London flat with parrots, bush babies, exotic fish, the occasional Himalayan monkey, harvest mice, tortoises, snakes and insects. (Hemming does not dwell on how unpleasant this must have been both for the animals and indeed the Sloane Street neighbours.)

Knight was also an obsessive animal watcher and behaviourist. Occasionally, this would translate into a deep appreciation of human

His marriages were all unconsummated and he filled his flat with exotic animals