Norah Briscoe

Norah Briscoe

Norah Davies was born in Wallasey in 1899. Her father, Adolf Davies, was an accountant who worked for Lever Brothers. Her mother, Catherine Dodwell Davies, was an Irish Catholic nurse. "The Davies family home was 213 Seaview Road, Wallasey, near Liverpool. It was a respectable Victorian villa: three storeys with bay windows, and an attic that would later house the maid." (1)

A second child, Hilda, was born the following year. In 1902 triplets were born. Unable to cope with five children under three, Norah was sent to live with Adolf's two unmarried sisters. (2) in 1908 she was sent to be educated at the Lingdale House Convent.

After leaving school she found work in an insurance office. However, she really wanted a career in journalism and eventually found work with the Liverpool Echo: "The throb of the machines and smell of printers' ink, the sounds and sights of nocturnal activity when ordinary folk were getting into their carpet slippers; the nonchalant manner of the commissionaire who directed me upstairs; the disorder discovered there when I opened the door of a paper-cluttered room, took me, as I thought, to the heart of Bohemia, to which I by rights belonged." (3)

Nora Briscoe and Journalism

In 1925 she joined the staff of the Croydon Advertiser. She also wrote freelance articles for the Birmingham Mail and contributed short stories for various woman's magazines. Her writing career came to a halt when she married Reginald Briscoe, a clerk at the Ministry of Works, in 1929. (4)

A son, Paul Briscoe, was born in Streatham on 12th July 1930. Reginald Briscoe died in 1932, following an emergency operation for appendicitis, "leaving a widow who was bitter that he had not taken out life insurance, and resentful that she was encumbered with a son, for whom she felt no affection". (5)

Norah Briscoe was determined to resume her career as a journalist and employed a nanny to look after Paul: "Beatrice was large, round and deaf, and she spoiled me utterly". More importantly, Beatrice provided him with "the affection, the hugs and kisses his mother refused him". (6)

Fascism

In 1934 Norah Briscoe took a holiday in Nazi Germany. She later wrote in her unpublished autobiography: "We seemed to have found in that other land of mountains and streams and towering forests, a corner of the world as remote from war and evil as was possible... You could pray, dance, drink, smoke, and worship as you pleased. Young men in leather breeches leaped over flames on Midsummer Night in a pagan ritual and heard Mass next day. You could follow any creed you liked - provided you followed the Führer, too. And whose business was that but their own?" (7)

On his mother's return to England she joined the PR department of Unilever. One of the tasks she was given was to collect all references to Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the National Union of Fascists, that had appeared in all the newspapers owned by Lord Rothermere. She later learned that the cuttings had been requested by some Jewish directors of Unilever. (8)

Norah Briscoe discovered several articles that supported Mosley including an article by Rothermere in The Daily Mail in which he praised Mosley for his "sound, commonsense, Conservative doctrine". Rothermere added: "Timid alarmists all this week have been whimpering that the rapid growth in numbers of the British Blackshirts is preparing the way for a system of rulership by means of steel whips and concentration camps. Very few of these panic-mongers have any personal knowledge of the countries that are already under Blackshirt government. The notion that a permanent reign of terror exists there has been evolved entirely from their own morbid imaginations, fed by sensational propaganda from opponents of the party now in power. As a purely British organization, the Blackshirts will respect those principles of tolerance which are traditional in British politics. They have no prejudice either of class or race. Their recruits are drawn from all social grades and every political party. Young men may join the British Union of Fascists by writing to the Headquarters, King's Road, Chelsea, London, S.W." (9)

Norah Briscoe also found articles that supported Adolf Hitler. As a result of this investigation "Jewish directors of Unilever... decided to present Harmsworth's owner, Lord Rothermere, with an ultimatum: if he did not stop backing Mosley, they and their friends would stop placing advertisements in his papers. Rothermere gave in." However, as Paul pointed out, her investigation involved her "reading almost everything favourable that had been written recently about Mosley and his Blackshirts. What she read, she liked." Norah handed in her notice at Uniliver and decided to become a pro-fascist freelance journalist.

Nazi Germany

In 1935 Norah Briscoe introduced Paul Briscoe to Joseph Weyrich (Seppl). "I saw him as an intruder and took an instant dislike to him. I resented this tall, dapper man with a studied smile and big eyes framed by round, black spectacles. I had been used to being the centre of attention and getting my own way... Mother announced that Seppl had invited us to come to Germany, and Seppl told me he would soon make a man of me." (10) Over the next eighteen months they spent living out of a suitcase. (11)

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Norah Briscoe centre with Molly Hiscox just behind her (1936)

While in Nazi Germany Norah met Molly Hiscox, "a pretty woman in her late twenties who organised German holidays for English Fascist sympathisers". They soon became very close friends. "Neither of us liked the unfair anti-German talk that was increasing in intensity in England... True, Austen Chamberlain had just returned from a visit to announce that Germany was 'one vast arsenal'. What of it? Must they not take proper precautions to protect themselves? But weren't the majority of its inhabitants - and Molly travelled widely in Germany and saw them for herself - enjoying life as they hadn't enjoyed it for many years, with good roads to drive on in their cheap and well made little cars, a freedom from industrial troubles, a decrease in violence, a return to sanity and security, in fact? They were borne on an upsurge of hope and confidence, freed from the long, lingering misery of defeat, we agreed... In the meantime, we listened to the tramp of marching soldiers in the streets at intervals, and found their triumphant songs and happy faces immensely heartening. Here was real joy through strength. We heard no menace in them, nor in the mock air-raids and blacked-out rehearsals that occasionally occurred. The Germans were realists." (12)

In the summer of 1936 Norah returned to England and left Paul with Seppl's family in Miltenberg. (13) Now aged six, Paul attended the local primary school. "Oma had kitted me out in lederhosen, bright braces and stout boots. With my shock of snow-blond hair, I made a convincing little Bavarian - until of course, I opened my mouth to speak... At half-past seven one soft September morning, Oma took me by the hand and led me across the Martplatz and down the lane to the Volksschule. When she left me at the door, I felt physically sick." (14)

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Richard Houston and Molly Hiscox (1936)

On her return to London, Norah Briscoe went to live with Molly Hiscox at 50 Thornton Road, Streatham. Molly introduced Norah to her lover, Richard (Jock) Houston. According to Paul Briscoe: "Mother immediately fell under his spell. The fascination wasn't sexual, it was political. Jock, then aged 31, was a fanatical admirer of Hitler and a frenzied activist who fizzed with energy. Fast-talking, short-fused and histrionic, he was a house painter who had - as he frequently reminded people - pulled himself out of the gutter by his bootstraps. But if truth be told, he hadn't pulled himself very far. He was never more at home than when he was standing on an East End pavement on a soapbox, ranting at a crowd in the odd accent of a cockney who had spent much of his life in Glasgow. One of his techniques was to upturn a box on a busy corner and begin a speech to a one-man crowd that was in on the trick. The stooge would heckle, and the dialogue would descend into a shouting match; a crowd would gather, and Jock would have an audience."

Nora found his message appealing: "Jack told them what he told anyone who would listen: that he, they, and the nation were being kept down by an international conspiracy of Jews. The unemployed were told that the money that should be creating work for them was being hoarded by Jewish financiers, and that their jobs would be stolen from them by Jews from the only country that was dealing with the Jewish menace, Hitler's Germany... The analysis was crude, hateful and false - but Mother embraced it uncritically. It explained her own failure to flourish: the world had refused to acknowledge her as special because the world was controlled by an elite to which she could never belong. Mother was one of many to find the theory of fascism credible and seductive. It offered dignity to the disappointed, allowing them to see themselves as wronged rather than unlucky or inadequate. Hitler sold these ideas to a Germany that had been humiliated in the recent war; Jock, and others like him, peddled them to Englishmen robbed of jobs and self-respect in the subsequent peace." (15)

British Union of Fascists

Nora Briscoe now became a supporter of Sir Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. Her son later wrote that "The fascist cause became an obsession. She talked of little else. The Jews were parasites conspiring to destroy western civilisation and engineering a war that had to be stopped... Mother had found a flag that offered her the recognition she felt was hers by right and which had been denied her by her family and by society." (16)

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Dr Leigh Vaughan-Henry speaking at a public meeting (1939)

During this period Nora became friends with Dr Leigh Vaughan-Henry, the head of the National Citizens' Union. "Mother formed a particular admiration for Vaughan-Henry, who was the most educated and urbane person she had ever met. Eloquent and softly spoken in German, French and Italian as well as English, he was a poet and a composer, though his poems and compositions had brought him little recognition or fame... Like Mother, he saw himself as a frustrated artist. Fascism gave him a voice. He wrote about national culture for The Blackshirt and gave talks about music on German radio." (17)

In 1939 Vaughan-Henry wrote to Emil Van Loo, a leading fascist in the Netherlands: "This is to introduce you to a journalist friend and author, Mrs Briscoe... I think this would be a good opportunity for her to discuss with you your New Economic Order movement in Holland, especially as she is politically well-informed and ties up her interests in contemporary international matters to that in cultural developments, seen as components of the social and political whole. She is quite Jew-wise and aware of much of the machinations which are worked by international finance. You may find her views proceed further in the direction of totalitarianism than your own, as do my own ideas, as you are well aware." (18)

In April 1940 Leigh Henry was fined and bound over to keep the peace for six months. The charge was "using insulting words whereby a breach of the peace was likely" and the words in question were "disgusting and unbridled language against the Jews". He was described at the time as being "rabidly pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic".

Nazi Spy

Norah Briscoe and Molly Hiscox both became involved in the secret Right Club. It was established by Archibald Ramsay, the Conservative MP for Peebles and Southern Midlothian, in May 1939. The Daily Worker described Ramsay "Britain's Number One Jew Baiter". (19) This was an attempt to unify all the different right-wing groups in Britain. Or in the leader's words of "co-ordinating the work of all the patriotic societies". In his autobiography, The Nameless War, Ramsay argued: "The main object of the Right Club was to oppose and expose the activities of Organized Jewry, in the light of the evidence which came into my possession in 1938. Our first objective was to clear the Conservative Party of Jewish influence, and the character of our membership and meetings were strictly in keeping with this objective."(20)

Norah Briscoe, like other members of the Right Club, was opposed to going to war with Nazi Germany. Apparently, she booed Winston Churchill whenever he appeared on the cinema newsreels and started loud anti-war conversations in pubs. (21)

Unknown to Ramsay and Briscoe, MI5 agents had infiltrated the Right Club. This included three women, Joan Miller, Marjorie Amor and Helem de Munck. The British government was therefore kept fully informed about the activities of Ramsay and his right-wing friends. Soon after the outbreak of the Second World War the government passed a Defence Regulation Order. This legislation gave the Home Secretary the right to imprison without trial anybody he believed likely to "endanger the safety of the realm" On 22nd September, 1939, Oliver C. Gilbert and Victor Rowe, became the first members of the Right Club to be arrested. In the House of Commons Ramsay attacked this legislation and on 14th December, 1939, asked: "Is this not the first time for a very long time in British history, that British born subjects have been denied every facility for justice?" (22)

Anna Wolkoff, a member of the Right Club, and Tyler Kent, a cypher clerk from the American Embassy, were arrested and charged under the Official Secrets Act. The trial took place in secret and on 7th November 1940, Wolkoff was sentenced to ten years. Kent, because he was an American citizen, was treated less harshly and received only seven years. Archibald Ramsay was surprisingly not charged with spying. Instead he was interned under Defence Regulation 18B. (23)

The New York Times reported: "Here was a man who was known to a wide circle of friends, many of whom seemed to be no better than himself, to be grossly disloyal to this country, and to be an associate, as he was, of thieves and felons now convicted. Captain Ramsay's whole picture of himself was of a loyal British gentleman, with sons in the Army, doing his best to help this country to win a victory in her life-and-death struggle. Captain Ramsay was, however, a man of no character and no reputation, and was perhaps very lucky only to be detained under the Defence Regulations." (24)

Norah Bruce was brought to the attention of the police when they received an anonymous letter: "Please investigate the right of a certain Mrs Briscoe to be in the Ministry of Information office. The woman has always been a Nazi propagandist, has a large circle of German friends and is to the best of my knowledge married to a German. She has a son by her first husband being educated as a German in Germany. I'm sorry I cannot sign my name as I'm afraid she may do some harm to my friends." (25)

This information was passed on to MI5. They kept a close watch on her activities. On 20th January 1941, Norah took a job as a typist in the Ministry of Supply. On 19th February she was promoted to the Central Priority Department. Most of its work was confidential and much of it secret. (26) Norah was now typing up sensitive documents about submarine bases and the shortage of spare parts. Apparently, she told a friend, "I get sight of such important official documents. When I come across a really hot one, I make a carbon copy and keep it in a folder in my desk." (27)

Norah joined forces with Molly Hiscox to get these documents to Nazi Germany. Molly put her in touch with one of her associates at the Right Club, a man in his twenties who was known to her as John. It has been suggested that this man was really Ferdinand Mayer-Horckel, a German-Jewish refugee. He in turn introduced her to a man named Harald Kurtz. Both men were in fact MI5 agents. (28)

Guy Liddell, director of counter-espionage at MI5, wrote in his diary that he had a meeting with Major Charles Maxwell Knight, head of counter-subversion unit B5(b): "The Norah Briscoe case is developing. M (Charles Maxwell Knight) is introducing a German agent and there is to be a meeting when he will get the documents. This case was first brought to my notice on Saturday. One of M's agents was asked to tea with Molly Hiscox, where he met Norah Briscoe, who is the wife or mistress of Jock Houston, the interned member of the BUF Briscoe said that she was working in quite an important section of the Ministry of Supply and that she had been copying all documents which she thought would be of interest. She is of German origin and has a son who is being brought up in Germany. She is now looking for some means of getting the documents through to the Germans." (29)

At meeting was arranged at a flat in Chelsea, Norah Briscoe handed over to Kurtz a collection of secret documents from the Ministry of Supply. Maxwell Knight and two members of Special Branch were in the next room and a few moments later they arrested the two women. (30) Briscoe and Hiscox appeared before the magistrate on 17th March 1941 on charges under the Treachery Act (1940). They were convicted and sentenced to five years penal servitude at the Central Criminal Court on 16th June 1941. (31)

After the case Liddell recorded in his diary: "Lunched with M. He told me all about the Briscoe case and showed me the documents. They are voluminous and cover a wide field. If the information had leaked it would certainly be a very serious matter. They relate to the location of factories, shortage of materials, establishment of submarine bases in Northern Ireland, etc. (32)

Reunion with Paul Briscoe

Norah Briscoe was released from Holloway Prison in the summer of 1945. At the end of the Second World War the occupying British Army made contact with the 15 year-old Paul Briscoe. In October 1945 he was told that he had half an hour to pack: he was going "home" to a country "whose language he had long forgotten and to a mother he had not heard from for four years". (33) At first he refused to go: "I thought of Hildegard as my mother, and with Seppl gone, it was my duty to look after her." (34)

Paul went to stay with Norah who was living with Molly Hiscox and Richard Houston in South Norwood. "I never met anyone so full of himself... Mother and Molly were obviously in awe of him... I felt no affection for the Mother that had reclaimed me, but I could see that she was genuinely proud of me. I was grateful for that." (35)

In 1946 Norah began working for John Middleton Murry, the literary critic and editor of the pacifist journal. Norah and Paul went to live with Murry at Lodge Farm, Thelnetham, Suffolk. (36) Paul enjoyed his time with Murry on his commune but his mother decided to leave in 1947 to take up a new post as assistant matron in a Land Army hostel. "It was strange how difficult we renegades found it to confront the mild, gentle man, and the puzzled, sadly accusing eyes, to tell him the unpalatable truth: that his free society felt remarkably like a prison to us, from which we must escape or die." (37)

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Paul Briscoe (left) John Middleton Murry (centre of back row) and Norah Briscoe (far right).

In 1948 Norah Briscoe's novel, No Complaints in Hell was published. The book, which was based about her experiences in prison, It received mixed reviews: "Most praised its realistic description of prison life, but described the characterisation as functional and flat." Paul believed that the novel was deeply flawed because although she "was beginning to understand other people, she had not yet learned to understand herself." (38)

Paul Briscoe become a pacifist. However, his attempt to plea conscientious objection in 1949 was rejected and had to do his National Service. (39) He was sent to Germany where his knowledge of the language was put to good use: "I was assigned to Field Security, put in civilian clothes and sent to listen in on political meetings. I wasn't any better at spying than Mother. I was identified as a foreigner at a gathering of old Party comrades in Bad Harzburg and was lucky to get away before I was lynched. The same thing happened at a Communist rally in Hamburg, when I was rescued by being bundled into a jeep by the Military Police." (40)

After demobilisation he repaired historic buildings for the Ministry of Works. In 1956 he married Monica Larter, an infant schoolteacher. Inspired by his wife's profession he did a two-year teacher training course and in 1960 he began teaching woodwork in a secondary modern school in Essex. He later taught German in a schools in Suffolk. (41)

Monica gave birth two children, Catherine and Robert. Norah Briscoe, who was now suffering from Bell's Palsy, moved in with the family. "She stayed with us for the last thirty years of her life, living contentedly on the edge of our family and social circles, becoming known and liked as a spirited, independent-minded character who travelled the countryside on her bicycle until well into her eighties. She loved telling our children and our visitors stories of her life and adventures, but she never spoke of her crime or its punishment, and she fell silent whenever anyone mentioned the war." (42)

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Paul and Monica Briscoe with Norah Briscoe and their children (1962)

In 1993 Norah Briscoe suffered a series of minor strokes that left her needing constant nursing care and was placed in a home near Saxmundham: "Monica and I visited her almost daily,but visits were difficult: she suffered frequent hallucinations, and would talk about strange things that only she could see... After a few months of this, she had another stroke that robbed her of the power of speech. At first, she was distressed and frustrated, but after only a few days, she seemed to accept her condition and put up with it bravely." (43)

Primary Sources

 

(1) Norah Briscoe, Daemons and Magnets (unpublished)

The throb of the machines and smell of printers' ink, the sounds and sights of nocturnal activity when ordinary folk were getting into their carpet slippers; the nonchalent manner of the commissionaire who directed me upstairs; the disorder discovered there when I opened the door of a paper-cluttered room, took me, as I thought, to the heart of Bohemia, to which I by rights belonged.

(2) Norah Briscoe, Daemons and Magnets (unpublished)

Neither of us liked the unfair anti-German talk that was increasing in intensity in England... True, Austen Chamberlain had just returned from a visit to announce that Germany was "one vast arsenal". What of it? Must they not take proper precautions to protect themselves? But weren't the majority of its inhabitants - and Molly travelled widely in Germany and saw them for herself - enjoying life as they hadn't enjoyed it for many years, with good roads to drive on in their cheap and wellmade little cars, a freedom from industrial troubles, a decrease in violence, a return to sanity and security, in fact? They were borne on an upsurge of hope and confidence, freed from the long, lingering misery of defeat, we agreed.

We had to admit that the women's clothes were a trifle behind the times, that people's mobility was strictly controlled, and that freedom as we had been trained to understand it was certainly lacking; but these things were part of the birth pangs, and would improve as the economy became stable, and full stature was regained...

In the meantime, we listened to the tramp of marching soldiers in the streets at intervals, and found their triumphant songs and happy faces immensely heartening. Here was real joy through strength. We heard no menace in them, nor in the mock air-raids and blacked-out rehearsals that occasionally occurred. The Germans were realists.

An encounter with the Gestapo, no less, gave me one more proof of the perfidy of the detractors. The two men who called for me were insignificant looking enough. Only Frau B (landlady) flurried manner and anxious eyes as she ushered me into their presence warned me that they were not as they seemed; and the swift turning back of the jacket lapels gave the final theatrical touch. Neither could speak English, nor could their chief, to whose bureau they accompanied me on foot. Whether I got anything across in my execrable German of my admiration for their country, I don't know. At all events, the handsome man with the grey, clipped moustache, appraising me from behind his desk, had soon had enough of me, abruptly shook my hand, and had me taken away, not to an extermination camp, but out into the street and freedom.

(3) Paul Briscoe, My Friend the Enemy: An English Boy in Nazi Germany (2007)

Molly Hiscox had invited her (Norah Briscoe) to share her flat at 50 Thornton Road, Streatham, where she had introduced her to her lover, Richard Houston, known as "Jock". Mother immediately fell under his spell. The fascination wasn't sexual, it was political. Jock, then aged 31, was a fanatical admirer of Hitler and a frenzied activist who fizzed with energy. Fast-talking, short-fused and histrionic, he was a house painter who had - as he frequently reminded people - pulled himself out of the gutter by his bootstraps. But if truth be told, he hadn't pulled himself very far. He was never more at home than when he was standing on an East End pavement on a soapbox, ranting at a crowd in the odd accent of a cockney who had spent much of his life in Glasgow. One of his techniques was to upturn a box on a busy corner and begin a speech to a one-man crowd that was in on the trick. The stooge would heckle, and the dialogue would descend into a shouting match; a crowd would gather, and Jock would have an audience.

Jack told them what he told anyone who would listen: that he, they, and the nation were being kept down by an international conspiracy of Jews. The unemployed were told that the money that should be creating work for them was being hoarded by Jewish financiers, and that their jobs would be stolen from them by "refu-Jews" from the only country that was dealing with the Jewish menace, Hitler's Germany. Those who had fought in the Great War were told that its only beneficiaries were profiteering Jewish businessmen. And everybody was told that the Jews were cooking up another conflict with Germany to serve their own selfish interests. The problem and its solution were summed up in the slogan chanted by Jock and fellow members of Sir Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts as they marched through the East End of London: "The Yids! The Yids! We gotta get rid of the Yids!"

The analysis was crude, hateful and false - but Mother embraced it uncritically. It explained her own failure to flourish: the world had refused to acknowledge her as special because the world was controlled by an elite to which she could never belong. Mother was one of many to find the theory of fascism credible and seductive. It offered dignity to the disappointed, allowing them to see themselves as wronged rather than unlucky or inadequate. Hitler sold these ideas to a Germany that had been humiliated in the recent war; Jock, and others like him, peddled them to Englishmen robbed of jobs and self-respect in the subsequent peace. But there was another reason for Mother's enthusiasm. Jock saw himself as a leading figure in English fascism. He boasted that when England had a Fascist government, he would be a Gauleiter and his friends would be figures of influence. Mother's admiration for him was genuine, but it was not without self-interest.

If Hitler had won the war, Jock might very well have been given the power he craved, though I wonder how long he would have hung on to it. He was a misfit. His personality wasn't flexible enough to enable him to cooperate with anyone else. He only really got on with two people: Molly, who worshipped him, and Mother, who was then in awe of him. Everybody else he met would sooner or later disagree with something that he said and be dismissed as "stupitt", a word he pronounced often and in the Glaswegian manner.

In the early 193os, Jock had been the blue-eyed boy of Sir Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists, drumming up recruits so effectively that he was paid by the party to deliver speeches. In 1936, though, Mosley was attempting to tone down his party's anti-Semitism for tactical reasons, and when it got out that Jock had been fined forty shillings in 1935 for using insulting words and behaviour during one of his soapbox rants, Mosley expelled him from the BUF.

(4) Dr Leigh Vaughan-Henry, letter to Emil Van Loo (6th June, 1939)

This is to introduce you to a journalist friend and author, Mrs Briscoe... I think this would be a good opportunity for her to discuss with you your New Economic Order movement in Holland, especially as she is politically well-informed and ties up her interests in contemporary international matters to that in cultural developments, seen as components of the social and political whole. She is quite Jew-wise and aware of much of the machinations which are worked by international finance. You may find her views proceed further in the direction of totalitarianism than your own, as do my own ideas, as you are well aware.

(5) Guy Liddell, diary entry (13th March, 1941)

The Norah Briscoe case is developing. M (Charles Maxwell Knight) is introducing a German agent and there is to be a meeting when he will get the documents. This case was first brought to my notice on Saturday. One of M's agents was asked to tea with Molly Hiscox, where he met Norah Briscoe, who is the wife or mistress of Jock Houston, the interned member of the BUF Briscoe said that she was working in quite an important section of the Ministry of Supply and that she had been copying all documents which she thought would be of interest. She is of German origin and has a son who is being brought up in Germany. She is now looking for some means of getting the documents through to the Germans.

(5) Guy Liddell, diary entry (17th June, 1941)

Lunched with M (Charles Maxwell Knight). He told me all about the Briscoe case and showed me the documents. They are voluminous and cover a wide field. If the information had leaked it would certainly be a very serious matter. They relate to the location of factories, shortage of materials, establishment of submarine bases in Northern Ireland, etc.

(7) The Daily Mail (21st April, 2007)

Liverpool-born Norah Briscoe dumped her only son in Germany and left him there when war broke out.

Besotted with Nazism, she returned to Britain to spy for the Germans, was caught red-handed by MI5 and narrowly avoided being hanged for treason.

It is more than 60 years since World War II ended, but it continues to throw up extraordinary stories - and few are as astonishing as the mother-and-son tale of Norah and Paul Briscoe, now told in a newly published book by Paul himself.

Paul was Norah's only son, born in 1930 when his mother was a freelance journalist and writer, fiercely ambitious for herself, struggling in a man's world to place articles and short stories in newspapers and magazines.

She saw herself as a cut above the rest, someone destined for great things. Mysteriously, for such an exotic creature, she married a plain man - Robert Briscoe, a civil service clerk who loved his garden, his dogs and his car.

He died of appendicitis after three years of marriage, leaving Norah a widow and more desperate than ever for adventure....

After her husband's death, Norah bumped into a friend on a train who recommended a guest-house in Bavaria for a holiday. Germany was an instant hit: she loved everything about it - the forests and mountains, the pretty towns and, above all, the Fuhrer.

Heel-clicking Nazi Party officials treated the foreign journalist as an honoured guest. She was dined, flattered and seduced, not sexually but politically.

As a middle-class child in Liverpool, she had been pushed to one side when her mother gave birth to triplets and she was sent to live with two elderly aunts. A convent schooling sharpened her sense of rejection. In Hitler's Germany, she found her home.

Her son writes: "Mother had found a flag that offered her the recognition she felt was hers by right and which had been denied her by her family and by society."

Back in England, she took up with the Right, but at its furthest edge - and beyond. She aligned herself politically with the ranting, fanatical 'Jock' Houston, a soapbox orator whose anti-Semitism was too virulent even for Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts.

Norah descended into a dangerous-underworld of extremists who hated the Jews. Some wore a silver badge in the shape of an eagle killing a snake, with the letters 'PJ' - Perish Judah.

"The fascist cause became an obsession," her son writes. "She talked of little else. The Jews were parasites conspiring to destroy western civilisation and engineering a war that had to be stopped."

While championing the fascist cause in England, Norah was also making regular trips to Germany, drawn to the picturesque town of Miltenberg in the Odenwald forest. With its cobbled streets and ancient, timber-framed buildings, to her it was Aryan heaven....

Most mothers would be frantic if their child was marooned, but Norah was no ordinary mother. "I never feared for his welfare in the enemy's land," she wrote.

And she had work to do. She booed Churchill whenever he appeared on the cinema newsreels and started loud anti-war conversations in pubs. MI5 and Special Branch watched and did nothing.

Norah took a job as a typist in the Ministry of Supply. Vetting should have weeded her out as a security risk, but the bureaucracy failed utterly, and she was promoted to typing up sensitive documents about submarine bases and the shortage of spare parts.

"I get sight of such important official documents," she told her clandestine group of fascist friends. "When I come across a really hot one, I make a carbon copy and keep it."

Molly Hiscox, lover of 'Jock' Houston (who had been interned under emergency wartime regulations), was thrilled. How could they get this stuff to 'the other side'?

One of the group, a man called John, also seemed very interested. He had a friend, Kurtz, he said, but he would probably want original documents rather than just copies. Meetings were arranged at a flat in Swan Court, Chelsea.

Both John and Kurtz were, of course, MI5 agents, and they were setting up the classic sting. Norah and her friend Molly were too silly, unable to grasp the seriousness of what they were doing. The trap was set and they fell into it.
The day of the meeting, a German bomb had just devastated Bank Underground station, killing 56 people.

"Have you seen the crater?" Molly asked Kurtz gleefully, excited to be talking to a 'real' German spy. "Isn't it just marvellous!"

Norah produced a sheaf of papers from her handbag and began to explain their contents. The hidden tape recorder noted every word. She came to a list of power stations, "which gives you an idea of what to get at".

The spy-catchers had all they needed. Two police officers came through the door and Norah and Molly were soon in Holloway jail.

They should have been hanged despite the fact that nothing had been communicated to Germany. Norah had, without doubt, tried to communicate secret military information to the enemy, and that was a capital offence.

Their lawyer saved them. At a closed hearing at the Old Bailey, he argued that they were deluded and deranged rather than treacherous. The judge gave them five years apiece.

(8) The Daily Telegraph (20th August, 2010)

Paul Briscoe was born in Streatham, south-west London, on July 12 1930. His mother, born Norah Davies, was a journalist with literary and social ambitions; his father, Reginald Briscoe, was a clerk at the Ministry of Works. Reginald died in 1932, leaving a widow who was bitter that he had not taken out life insurance, and resentful that she was encumbered with a son, for whom she felt no affection. A nanny looked after Paul while his mother attempted to rebuild her career.

When Norah Briscoe took a holiday in Hitler's Germany in 1934, she fell in love with the country and with a German she met there. The following year she began an extended tour of the Reich, taking Paul with her. They spent much of 1935 and 1936 living out of a suitcase.

When his mother returned to England to file copy and solicit more freelance commissions, Paul was left in the care of her fiancé's parents. He moved in with them permanently when he was six, so that he could go to school. The plan was for Norah to join them later, but she and her fiancé drifted apart. Paul, however, remained with his new family, an arrangement that suited all parties.

His mother's visits became less frequent, and when war was declared in 1939 they stopped. Her efforts to get Paul back to England failed. He was stranded in Germany for the duration, and his German family adopted him to spare him internment.

"The war gave me a perfect opportunity to demonstrate my loyalty to the nation and the family that had accepted me," he wrote later. "The most obvious way of helping the war effort was to join the Hitler Youth." Boys had to be at least 10 to enrol in its junior section, the Jungvolk, but Paul was so keen that he was allowed to join two months early, on Hitler's birthday.

When he swore the oath of allegiance to the Führer, he meant it. "I would have carved those words in my heart if they had asked me to," he wrote. In 1944 he joined the Feuerwehr, the auxiliary fire service, and was injured in an air-raid that destroyed his school. The following year he was an eyewitness to the surrender of Miltenberg by its Bürgermeister and the town's occupation by American troops.

In October 1945 a British Army officer appeared at the door of Briscoe's adoptive family and announced that he had half an hour to pack: he was going "home" – to a country whose language he had long forgotten and to a mother he had not heard from for four years. It was an unhappy reunion, followed by a shock. Norah Briscoe explained why she had not kept in touch: she had been in prison. She had been caught trying to pass information to the enemy. If one of the two charges against her had not been dropped, she would have been hanged.

She was, however, unrepentant, and proudly presented her Germanised son to her friends, including the soapbox anti-Semite "Jock" Houston, whose rabidity was so uncontrolled that he had been expelled from the British Union of Fascists. Later, Briscoe wrote that the last time he had heard talk like Jock's he had gone along with it, but hearing it again he could see how, even as a child, he should have recognised it for what it was.

Having repudiated the anti-Semitism with which he had been indoctrinated, Briscoe recounted his participation in Kristallnacht with shame. "What I did was a sin," he wrote, "a small part of one of the greatest sins of all time, which could never have happened without many lesser sins like mine. May God forgive me for it."

Paul Briscoe was a gifted raconteur, and delivered many talks about his experiences to audiences in Britain and Germany. He wrote two autobiographical memoirs, Foster Fatherland (2002) and My Friend the Enemy (2007). In each, he presented a child's-eye view of the hopes, fears and disappointments of an ordinary German family as the war progressed.

He described in detail the increasing privations of everyday life as the Reich began to crumble, including a visit to the dentist in which his tooth was stopped with melted-down coins. He recorded how Nazi propaganda poisoned every aspect of the school curriculum: his maths books taught subtraction by asking how much more profit was made by the Jew who charged more for his goods than the Aryan; his history lessons listed the evils of the British Empire. He was taught to think of the English as his enemy.

After the war Briscoe and his mother found a home and employment in the community of pacifists and misfits established by the literary critic John Middleton Murry at Lodge Farm, Thelnetham, Suffolk. In 1949 he found himself back in Germany on national service, in which he was ordered to dress in civvies and spy on meetings of Nazi sympathisers. After demobilisation he repaired historic buildings for the Ministry of Works.

In 1956 he married Monica Larter, an infant schoolteacher. In 1960 he, too, qualified as a teacher and he went on to teach woodwork and German at schools in Essex and Suffolk.

In 1975 he became joint manager of Monica's family farm at Framlingham, where he played an active part in the community as a church warden, conservationist and supporter of local charities.

He kept in close touch with his German foster family, and was reconciled to his mother, whose extremism faded, and who spent her last 30 years living with Paul, his wife and their children.

Paul Briscoe is survived by his wife, by their son and daughter, and by a daughter by an earlier relationship in Germany.

Student Activities

Adolf Hitler's Early Life (Answer Commentary)

Heinrich Himmler and the SS (Answer Commentary)

Trade Unions in Nazi Germany (Answer Commentary)

Adolf Hitler v John Heartfield (Answer Commentary)

Hitler's Volkswagen (The People's Car) (Answer Commentary)

Women in Nazi Germany (Answer Commentary)

The Assassination of Reinhard Heydrich (Answer Commentary)

The Last Days of Adolf Hitler (Answer Commentary)

References

(1) Paul Briscoe, My Friend the Enemy: An English Boy in Nazi Germany (2007) page 13

(2) The Daily Mail (21st April, 2007)

(3) Norah Briscoe, Daemons and Magnets (unpublished)

(4) Paul Briscoe, My Friend the Enemy: An English Boy in Nazi Germany (2007) page 19

(5) The Daily Telegraph (20th August, 2010)

(6) The Daily Mail (21st April, 2007)

(7) Norah Briscoe, Daemons and Magnets (unpublished)

(8) Paul Briscoe, My Friend the Enemy: An English Boy in Nazi Germany (2007) page 28

(9) Lord Rothermere, The Daily Mail (22nd January 1934)

(10) Paul Briscoe, My Friend the Enemy: An English Boy in Nazi Germany (2007) page 28

(11) The Daily Telegraph (20th August, 2010)

(12) Norah Briscoe, Daemons and Magnets (unpublished)

(13) The Daily Mail (21st April, 2007)

(14) Paul Briscoe, My Friend the Enemy: An English Boy in Nazi Germany (2007) page 44

(15) Paul Briscoe, My Friend the Enemy: An English Boy in Nazi Germany (2007) pages 63-65

(16) The Daily Mail (21st April, 2007)

(17) Paul Briscoe, My Friend the Enemy: An English Boy in Nazi Germany (2007) page 70

(18) Dr Leigh Vaughan-Henry, letter to Emil Van Loo (6th June, 1939)

(19) Paul Briscoe, My Friend the Enemy: An English Boy in Nazi Germany (2007) page 71

(20) Archibald Ramsay, The Nameless War (1955) page 105

(21) The Daily Mail (21st April, 2007)

(22) Archibald Ramsay, House of Commons (22nd September, 1939)

(23) Richard Griffiths, Fellow Travellers of the Right (1983) page 370

(24) New York Times, (25th July, 1941)

(25) Anonymous letter sent to Scotland Yard (May, 1940)

(26) Paul Briscoe, My Friend the Enemy: An English Boy in Nazi Germany (2007) page 118

(27) The Daily Mail (21st April, 2007)

(28) Paul Briscoe, My Friend the Enemy: An English Boy in Nazi Germany (2007) page 119

(29) Guy Liddell, diary entry (13th March, 1941)

(30) Paul Briscoe, My Friend the Enemy: An English Boy in Nazi Germany (2007) pages 128-129

(31) Julie V. Gottlieb, Femine Fascism: Women in Britain's Fascist Movement (2003) page 287

(32) Guy Liddell, diary entry (17th June, 1941)

(33) The Daily Telegraph (20th August, 2010)

(34) Paul Briscoe, My Friend the Enemy: An English Boy in Nazi Germany (2007) page 169

(35) Paul Briscoe, My Friend the Enemy: An English Boy in Nazi Germany (2007) page 184

(36) The Daily Telegraph (20th August, 2010)

(37) Norah Briscoe, Daemons and Magnets (unpublished)

(38) Paul Briscoe, My Friend the Enemy: An English Boy in Nazi Germany (2007) page 199

(39) The Daily Telegraph (20th August, 2010)

(40) Paul Briscoe, My Friend the Enemy: An English Boy in Nazi Germany (2007) page 204

(41) The Daily Telegraph (20th August, 2010)

(42) Paul Briscoe, My Friend the Enemy: An English Boy in Nazi Germany (2007) page 209