Molly Hiscox

Norah Briscoe

Gertrude (Molly) Hiscox, was born in Hendon, in 1910. She held right-wing views and joined the National Union of Fascists in 1934 and was the Organizer of the 8th London Area BUF. (1)

In 1935 she began visiting Nazi Germany. During one visit she met Norah Briscoe. She later wrote that Hiscox was "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." (2)

Molly Hiscox & Richard Houston

On her return to London, Molly Hiscox lived at 50 Thornton Road, Streatham with her lover, Richard (Jock) Houston. Norah Hiscox moved in with the couple. 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."

Norah Briscoe 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." (3)

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

Molly Hiscox was a founding member of The Link in July 1937. The organisation was founded by Admiral Barry Domvile, a former Director of Naval Intelligence. In his autobiography Domvile explained that he established the organisation "to foster the mutual knowledge and understanding between the British and German peoples, and to counteract the flood of lies with which our people were being regaled in their daily papers." (4)

The Right Club

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". (5) 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."(6)

Lothar Kreyssig
Richard Houston and Molly Hiscox (1936)

Unknown to Molly Hiscox, 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?" (7)

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. (8)

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." (9)

Molly Hiscox & Norah Briscoe

Molly Hiscox's friend, Norah Briscoe 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." (10)

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. (11) 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." (12)

Norah Briscoe 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. (13)

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." (14)

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. (15) 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. (16)

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. (17)

Post-War

Molly Hiscox was released from Holloway Prison in the summer of 1945. She established a home with Richard Houston in South Norwood. They was later joined by Norah Briscoe and her fifteen year-old son, Paul Briscoe. He later wrote: "I never met anyone so full of himself as Houston... 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." (18)

Molly attended a spiritualist church in Ipswich. "In the late 1980s Molly found a lump on her breast and went to a faith healer, who prescribed prayer and a diet consisting of grapes. The lump was cancerous and she died. " (19)

Primary Sources

 

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

Molly Hiscox... a pretty woman in her late twenties who organised German holidays for English Fascist sympathisers... 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.

(3) 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.

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

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.

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) Julie V. Gottlieb, Femine Fascism: Women in Britain's Fascist Movement (2003) page 310

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

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

(4) Admiral Barry Domvile, From Admiral to Cabin Boy (1947) page 64

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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