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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
For almost half a century, Bertram Mills Circus was a household name throughout Britain among both children and adults and it's Director, Cyril Bertram Mills, was one of the best-known and most influential names in the country's entertainment business. But for forty years, Cyril Mills had also enjoyed a top-secret and wide-ranging career in British intelligence: obtaining the best aerial intelligence on Nazi rearmament for MI6 before the Second World War; becoming the first case officer to monitor the best double agent (Garbo) of the war after joining MI5; and working part-time during the Cold War 'for MI5 or 6 or both without being paid a penny'. Remarkably, no word of Mills's secret career appeared in public until he was over eighty. Nobody suspected that the glamorous world of pre-war circus entertainment had been an extraordinarily fitting rehearsal for the lethal arena of deception and surveillance. In this remarkable true story, Christopher Andrew, best-selling official biographer of MI5, brings to life one of the most surprising and fascinating tales of espionage ever told.
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ii
Inspired by his admiration for Bertram Mills Circus, Churchill produced this oil painting while Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1928. At great personal risk, Cyril Mills later collected important intelligence in Nazi Germany which reinforced Churchill’s attacks on the appeasement of Hitler.
iii
Contents
List of Illustrations
Frontispiece
Performing Elephants in the Circus Ring, 1928, Winston S. Churchill. Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown, London on behalf of Churchill Heritage Ltd © Churchill Heritage Ltd.
Plates
1.Portrait of a Gentleman (said to be Christopher Marlowe, c.1564–1593). Courtesy of the Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge.
2. Cyril Mills’s matriculation photo. Courtesy of Harrow School Archives.
3. Adolf Hitler speaking at the Zirkus Krone in Munich. ullstein bild Dtl./Contributor.
4. Winston Churchill, and his daughter, Mary, at the Bertram Mills Circus at Olympia, London, 22 December 1938. Associated Press/Alamy Stock Photo.
5. Cyril Mills’s aviator’s certificate (pilot’s licence). Courtesy of Cyril Mills Archive.viii
6. Cyril Mills’s first biplane, a second-hand de Havilland Gipsy Moth, in 1934. Courtesy of Cyril Mills Archive.
7. Mills’s second biplane: a de Havilland Hornet Moth purchased in 1936. Courtesy of Cyril Mills Archive.
8. Pilot flight log of Mills’s mission to reconnoitre the Messerschmitt factory at Regensburg for MI6. Courtesy of Cyril Mills Archive.
9. A smartly dressed Mills boards his de Havilland Hornet Moth. Courtesy of Cyril Mills Archive.
10. British fighter ace and stunt-flyer Christopher Draper, the ’Mad Major’ (left), meets Hitler in 1932. Source of image unknown.
11. Koringa, the ‘only female fakir’ with ‘Churchill’, the crocodile she hypnotised during her act, Plymouth, 1937. Hulton Archive.
12. In 1957 the Queen Mother unveiled a memorial to those sent on ‘special missions’ from the Bertram Mills headquarters in Dorset Square. Courtesy of Cyril Mills Archive.
13. The false passport in the name issued to Cyril Mills when he joined MI5 in 1940. Courtesy of Cyril Mills Archive.
14. Cyril Mills’s false National Registration Card. Courtesy of Cyril Mills Archive.
15. Secret letter from Sir David Petrie, MI5 DG, on Mills’s 1943 appointment as MI5 liaison with the FBI. Courtesy of Cyril Mills Archive.
16. Mills’s MI5 identity card, issued for his mission to Canada. Courtesy of Cyril Mills Archive.
17. Royal Canadian Mounted Police mugshot of Werner Janowski. National Archives of Canada, Wikimedia Commons.
18. A ‘message of thanks’ from David Petrie on 10 May 1945 to Mills and other MI5 staff. Courtesy of Cyril Mills Archive.
19. Cyril and Mimi Mills drink champagne after their wedding on 14 February 1950. Courtesy of Cyril Mills Archive.ix
20. Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh attend a charity evening at Olympia on 18 December 1952. Courtesy of Cyril Mills Archive.
21. Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee at the circus, The Sphere, 1 January 1949 © Mary Evans Library.
22. 17 Kensington Palace Gardens (opposite the Russian embassy)in 1960. Courtesy of Cyril Mills Archive.
23. An MI5 Observation Post (OP) similar to that in 17 KPG. Security Service, MI5.
24. A 1981 lunchtime reunion of five leading wartime double agents and their former Double-Cross case officers. Courtesy of Cyril Mills Archive.
25. A reunion lunch in 1985. Courtesy of Cyril Mills Archive.
26. Letter from Cyril Mills to Prince Philip, 5 August 1985. Courtesy of Cyril Mills Archive.
27. Prince Philip’s reply to Cyril Mills, 8 August 1985. Courtesy of Cyril Mills Archive.
28. Mills reunited with GARBO and drinking champagne with Christopher Harmer and ‘Tar’ Robertson, 1984. Courtesy of Cyril Mills Archive.
29. A reunion with ‘Tar’ Robertson, Sir Dick White, Christopher Harmer and Hugh Trevor-Roper in 1989. Courtesy of Cyril Mills Archive.
Appendix
In 1933, a model of the Loch Ness monster was paraded around London on a Bertram Mills Circus lorry with the promise of a L20,000 reward for anyone who tracked it down. Courtesy of Cyril Mills Archive.x
Abbreviations and Acronyms
B1a MI5’s Double Agent Department
BL British Library
BSC British Security Coordination, New York
C Chief of MI6
CAB Cabinet Office files, TNA
CBM Cyril Bertram Mills
CCAC Churchill College Archives Centre, Cambridge
Cheka Chrezvychainaya Komissiya Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage (ancestor of KGB)
CIA US Central Intelligence Agency
CID Criminal Investigation Department, Scotland Yard
CND Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
CPGB Communist Party of Great Britain
CUL Cambridge University Library
DG Director-General
DNI Director of Naval Intelligence
FBI US Federal Bureau of Investigation
FCO Foreign and Commonwealth Officexii
FO Foreign Office
GC&CS Government Code and Cypher School (predecessor of GCHQ)
GCHQ Government Communications Headquarters
GRU Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravlenie (Russian/Soviet military intelligence)
HO Home Office
IB Intelligence Bureau, New Delhi
IO Intelligence Officer
IWM Imperial War Museum
JIC Joint Intelligence Committee
KGB Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security, USSR)
KPG Kensington Palace Gardens
KV MI5 (Security Service) files, TNA
LCC London County Council
NAW US National Archives, Washington DC
NKVD Narodný komissariat vnutrennih del (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, USSR)
NSA US National Security Agency
ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
OP MI5 observation post
OSS US Office of Strategic Services
OTC Officers’ Training Corps
Parl. Deb. Parliamentary Debates
PUS Permanent Under-Secretary
PWE Political Warfare Executive
RAC Royal Automobile Club
RAF Royal Air Force
RFC Royal Flying Corps (predecessor of the RAF)xiii
RCMP Royal Canadian Mounted Police
SHAEF Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force
SIGINT Signals Intelligence
SOE Special Operations Executive
TNA The National Archives, Kew
TUC Trades Union Congress
WO War Office files, TNAxiv
Introduction
The Two Lives of Cyril Bertram Mills: Circus and Espionage
For almost half a century, Bertram Mills Circus, founded by Bertram Wagstaff Mills in 1920, was a household name throughout Britain, popular with both children and adults. Bertram’s elder son, Cyril Bertram Mills, who became joint (in practice senior) director of the circus with his younger brother Bernard on their father’s death in 1938, was one of the best-known and most influential figures in the British entertainment business.
For forty years, Cyril Mills also had a wide-ranging, top-secret career in British intelligence: obtaining the best aerial intelligence on Nazi rearmament for MI6 (Britain’s foreign intelligence agency) before the Second World War, recruiting and becoming first case officer for the most successful wartime double agent, codenamed GARBO, after joining the Security Service MI5, and working part-time during the Cold War ‘for MI5 or 6 or both without being paid a penny’. For fifteen years, in the middle of the Cold War, at the request of MI5’s Director-General, Sir Roger Hollis, the Mills family lived in a mansion opposite the Soviet embassy so that MI5 could 2keep it under surveillance. Hollis and Sir Dick White, Chief of MI6, became such close family friends that the Mills children called them ‘Uncle Roger’ and ‘Uncle Dick’.
Remarkably, not a word of Mills’s secret career leaked out in public until he was over eighty.1 Among the many taken aback by the belated revelation of some of his intelligence exploits was his friend, the Duke of Edinburgh.2 Though, like Queen Elizabeth II, an enthusiastic patron of the Bertram Mills Circus and fascinated by British intelligence operations, Prince Philip wrote to Mills in 1985: ‘…I must admit that I would not have expected your involvement. I cannot imagine a better cover [than the circus]!’3
Mills framed the letter.
During Prince Philip’s lifetime, his close contacts with both MI5 and MI6 were mostly kept secret. After Philip’s death in 2021 at the age of ninety-nine, however, the Chief of MI6, Sir Richard Moore, revealed that he had made ‘numerous visits’ to its London HQ at Vauxhall Cross, often for lunchtime discussions: ‘HRH called it as he saw it with directness and wit. Visits were never dull.’4 Prince Philip had his own intelligence book collection and read the authorised centenary history of MI5 with great attention.5 His discussions about that too – with its author, among others – were also ‘never dull’.6
3Prince Philip’s surprise at discovering Cyril Mills’s use of the circus as a cover for his intelligence work for both MI5 and MI6 reflected the lack of awareness during the Cold War of the historical links between British intelligence and the entertainment business.7 Probably the earliest example of these links involved Queen Elizabeth II’s oldest-known royal ancestor, King Alfred the Great (the only English monarch ever given this title). The most celebrated act of espionage in Anglo-Saxon England was King Alfred’s alleged eavesdropping during his wars against Danish invaders led by Guthrum the Old. In 878, with the Danes seemingly on the brink of victory, Alfred entered Guthrum’s camp disguised as a wandering minstrel. According to the great medieval historian, William of Malmesbury: ‘Taking a harp in his hand, [Alfred] proceeded to the king’s tent. Singing before the entrance, and at times touching the trembling strings in harmonious cadence, he was readily admitted.’8 The intelligence Alfred obtained while posing as a minstrel is said to have enabled him to win the decisive Battle of Ethandun (now Edington) against the Danes – a turning point in English history.9
Though the comparison between King Alfred’s impersonation of a minstrel to deceive the Danes and his own use of the circus to deceive the Gestapo in Nazi Germany did not occur to Cyril Mills until after he began working for MI6, he grew up knowing the story of King Alfred as a spy in the Danish camp. As well as featuring in many Victorian and Edwardian children’s history books, the story 4also inspired a series of widely reproduced nineteenth-century portraits of Alfred the Great holding the harp which helped save England from the Danish invaders.10
***
No leading member of the modern British entertainment industry has played such a varied and influential role as Mills in intelligence operations in both war and peace for so many years. Very little was known to Mills and his contemporaries, however, about the intermittent links between intelligence operations and the entertainment business during the millennium since Alfred the Great. Mills was entirely unaware, for example, that the leading French playwright at the end of the ancien régime, Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, used his cover as the author of the internationally famous Figaro plays to mastermind, against Britain, probably the most successful cloak-and-dagger operation of the eighteenth century. Without the arms that Beaumarchais secretly supplied to the American rebels at the beginning of the Revolutionary War, the Americans’ victory over the British at Saratoga in 1777 – a turning point in that conflict – might have proved impossible.11
When Mills began his circus career in the early 1920s, he knew almost nothing about British intelligence services past or present. None of the books he read or classes he attended at Harrow School and Cambridge University made any mention of them. Well-educated Victorians and Edwardians knew far more about intelligence operations recorded in the Bible than they did about 5the role of intelligence at any moment in British history. According to the Old Testament, the first major figure to emphasise the importance of good intelligence was God. Like Mills, most Victorian and Edwardian schoolchildren were taught how, at God’s command, both Moses and Joshua (originally one of Moses’s spies) had sent agents to ‘spy out’ the Promised Land; how Joseph, having become the Egyptian Pharaoh’s vizier, pretended not to recognise his errant older brothers and accused them of being spies trying to identify weak points in Egypt’s defences; and how Judas Iscariot, a paid agent of the high priests, betrayed Jesus days before his crucifixion.12 But they could not have named any British spy more recent than Alfred the Great.
What many Edwardians knew, or thought they knew, about contemporary intelligence operations largely came from sensational spy novels, inspired by wildly exaggerated fears of German spy rings preparing an invasion of Britain. The most successful spy novelist, William Le Queux, was so popular that, at his peak, publishers paid him the same rate per thousand words as Thomas Hardy. Le Queux earned more than Hardy because he wrote more.13 It is unlikely, however, that any of his novels were among Cyril’s childhood reading.
The creation of the twentieth-century British intelligence community was concealed not only from the public, but also from most MPs. The founding, in 1909, by H. H. Asquith’s Liberal government of the Secret Service Bureau, whose home and foreign departments became today’s domestic security service MI5 and foreign intelligence agency MI6 (officially known as the Secret Intelligence 6Service), was one of the best-kept secrets in British peacetime history – revealed only to a small group of senior Whitehall officials and ministers who never mentioned it to the uninitiated. Throughout Mills’s lifetime, biographers of Asquith and his ministers, despite their growing access to once classified government files, remained unaware of its creation. Even the official nine-volume biography of Mills’s fellow Old Harrovian and political hero, Winston Churchill, the main supporter of the Secret Service Bureau in the Asquith Cabinet, as well as the leading intelligence enthusiast in every government in which he served, makes no mention of it. Nor do any of the nine volumes mention Mills.
The first Chief of what became MI6 was a charismatic former naval officer, Sir Mansfield Cumming, in honour of whom all his successors, including the current Chief, Sir Richard Moore, have been known as ‘C’. Moore still follows Cumming’s practice of writing in green ink: ‘so anyone getting a note in green ink knows it comes from me.’14 The qualities Cumming looked for in his recruits strongly suggest he would have been happy to enlist Mills. The British spy, he wrote in his secret journal, ‘should be a gentleman … absolutely honest with considerable tact and, at the same time, force of character … In the long run, it is only the honest man who can defeat the ruffian.’15 Mills was a powerful personality with strong principles who had the remarkable tact required to recruit, in his two parallel careers, temperamental star performers for the circus and double agents for British intelligence.
Cumming would also have been impressed by Mills’s role as Britain’s leading circus director. He was the first head of a modern 7British intelligence agency to recruit leading members of the entertainment industry, whose unconventional creativity he much admired. Among them was Britain’s most successful pre-First World War playwright, William Somerset Maugham, four of whose plays had recently been staged simultaneously in London’s West End. Cumming made Maugham Head of Station in revolutionary Russia, where, after the overthrow of the Romanov monarchy in the February Revolution of 1917, he regularly entertained the head of the provisional government, Alexander Kerensky, to convivial evenings at Petrograd’s best restaurant with the finest caviar and vodka until Kerensky’s overthrow by the Bolsheviks. As Cumming had hoped, Maugham used his dramatic talents to persuade Kerensky ‘that I was more important than I really was’.16
The American playwright Edward Knoblock, famous for his sensational 1911 West End and Broadway hit Kismet, was so spellbound by Cumming that he gave up US citizenship and became a British national in order to work for him.17 ‘We all loved him to a man,’ Knoblock recalled.18 Cumming trusted Knoblock so much that he was one of the very few permitted to see the private photo and art collection devoted to the naked ‘female form divine’, which he kept locked in a secret drawer of his desk.19 ‘C’ formed an equally close bond with the ebullient Scottish writer and entertainer Compton Mackenzie, a member of one of Britain’s leading theatrical families. Cumming made Mackenzie wartime Head of Station in Greece and the Aegean, in which capacity he navigated the Greek islands in a former royal yacht, dressed in a bespoke white uniform and 8wielding a swordstick personally presented to him by Cumming. ‘After the war is over,’ Cumming told him, ‘we’ll do some amusing secret service work together. It’s capital sport!’20
Despite Cumming’s extrovert personality and A-list friends in the entertainment business, his role as first Chief of MI6 remained a closely guarded official secret. The fact that no mention of his intelligence career appeared in print until almost a decade after his death in 192321 was all the more remarkable because he was willing to be interviewed about his experiences as both a racing driver and a pioneer aviator. Cumming was an enthusiastic member of both the Edwardian Royal Automobile Club and Royal Aero Club. He told the Royal Automobile Club Journal: ‘I know of nothing more exciting than skimming along at a cracking pace, especially if you are picking up on the next one ahead!’22Flight International magazine reported in November 1913 that, at fifty-four, Cumming was ‘probably the doyen of pilots’: ‘He does not believe in extreme youth as a necessary or even desirable qualification for the making of a successful pilot.’
Cumming was also the first major British advocate of aerial reconnaissance, later to become a key part of twentieth-century intelligence gathering. By 1913 he had drawn up detailed plans to purchase a Secret Service Bureau biplane for spy missions. The War Office, however, showed no interest in aerial reconnaissance until after the outbreak of war, when it was entrusted, not to Cumming but to the newly founded Royal Flying Corps (RFC).23 The belated fulfilment of Cumming’s plans for peacetime aerial reconnaissance by MI6 over twenty years later was chiefly due to Cyril Mills – like 9Cumming an adventurous aviator. Though MI6 still had no biplane of its own, Mills used his own de Havilland Hornet Moth to gather important intelligence on Nazi aerial rearmament while flying over Germany, supposedly on circus business.24
***
Long before Mills had any intention of working for MI5 or MI6, the first spies to make a deep impression on him were not British but German. Though during the First World War, both the British media and Parliament avoided all reference to spying by MI6,25 wartime German spies, both real and imaginary, were front-page news. Britain’s declaration of war on Germany on 4 August 1914 produced the most dramatic newspaper headlines seen by the then 12-year-old Cyril so far. In less than a fortnight, police arrested virtually the entire German espionage network in Britain – twenty-two agents of the naval Nachrichten-Abteilung, who had been under surveillance for several years by Vernon Kell’s counter-espionage bureau (later renamed MI5) and local police.26
Gustav Steinhauer, who ran the German agent network, had the unenviable task of reporting the ‘wholesale round-up of our secret service agents in England’ to Kaiser Wilhelm II. ‘Apparently unable to believe his ears, the Kaiser raved and stormed for the better part of two hours about the incompetence of his so-called intelligence officers, bellowing: ‘‘Am I surrounded by dolts? Why was I not told? Who is responsible?’’ and more in the same vein.’27
10The Home Secretary, Reginald McKenna, told the Commons on 9 October 1914 that pre-war German spies had obtained ‘little valuable information’ and that Germany’s whole spy network in Britain had, in all probability, been ‘crushed at the outbreak of the war’. Though McKenna was right, he failed to convince much of the British press and public. The Times claimed, absurdly, that ‘in their eager absorption of the baser side of militarism, the Germans seem to have almost converted themselves into a race of spies.’28
Though only twelve, Cyril Mills cannot fail to have been struck by the enormous publicity given to the capture and trial of Carl Lody, the first German spy sent to Britain after the outbreak of war. A public court martial at the Westminster Guildhall sentenced Lody to death by firing squad in November 1914, the first execution at the Tower of London for over 150 years. Kell, whom Mills later got to know well, ‘felt it deeply that so brave a man should have to pay the death penalty’.29
The dwindling number and poor quality of Lody’s wartime successors, all discovered without great difficulty while spying in Britain, led some senior figures in Whitehall to wonder whether abler enemy agents with better cover were going undetected. The few officials who were informed about Cumming’s foreign intelligence operations thought, like him, that German intelligence might be recruiting from sections of the entertainment business – particularly music halls and circuses. Largely ignorant of the history of British counter-espionage, they were unaware that such fears were centuries old. During the conflict with Spain in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, at least two foreign spies were believed to have entered England ‘in the guise of tumblers [acrobats]’.30 Foreign tumblers 11were thought dangerous because of their opportunities to perform at court and in noble households.
In 1916, Sir Edward Troup, the long-serving permanent secretary at the Home Office, warned all chief constables:
…that the German Government is endeavouring to recruit circus-riders, music-hall performers, and persons on the regular stage for purposes of espionage in this country. Two such persons, circus-riders, who were of German origin, have recently been detected endeavouring to come to this country and have been refused permission to land, and a third, who had been touring as a music-hall performer with a Dutch passport, is believed to be a German and is now in custody.31 I am therefore to request that special attention may be paid to any persons belonging to these professions who may visit your area…32
Bertram Mills understood German circuses far better than the Home Office. Though he still had no intention of running a circus himself, he had got to know many leading pre-war German circus owners. As Cyril later recalled:
…before the war he had exhibited at most of the big horse shows on the Continent, and whenever there was a horse show it was usual for a circus to play the town at the same time, as horse lovers are always good circus customers, and on countless occasions Father had gone to the circus in the morning to watch the training of horses.33
12Bertram Mills knew enough about leading German circuses to be convinced that none was likely to be involved in wartime espionage in Britain. Immediately after the war, he renewed and expanded his contacts with them. Ironically, however, his own interwar circus was to provide highly successful cover for his son Cyril’s MI6 intelligence missions to pre-war Nazi Germany.
The First World War German spy who made the greatest impression on Cyril’s then adolescent imagination was probably the Dutch exotic dancer and striptease artist Margaretha Geertruida Zelle, whose stage name Mata Hari still appears in some English dictionaries as a synonym for ‘beautiful female spy’. Shot at dawn by the French in 1917 for spying for Germany after previously promising to spy for France, Zelle had shown little aptitude for intelligence operations for either side. MI5’s leading interwar agent-runner, Maxwell Knight (better known as a popular BBC naturalist), whose agents penetrated both the Communist Party and fascist groups, would have nothing to do with what he called ‘Mata Hari methods’. He believed that MI5 should avoid recruiting any ‘woman agent who suffers from an overdose of sex’.34
Despite her operational incompetence, the seductive fictional image of the glamorous Mata Hari made her the best-known female spy of the twentieth century. In 1931, Greta Garbo immortalised Mata Hari on screen in the eponymous film in what was her biggest, and most erotic, box-office success as the ‘temptress of the secret service’. Ironically, the Chairman of the London County Council (LCC) Licensing Committee and its Inspection of Films Sub-Committee, which approved the showing of the film in London, was none other than Bertram Mills. The LCC Licensing Committee 13possibly underestimated the film’s erotic impact and it was subsequently only available in a censored version.
Mata Hari made a great impression on Cyril Mills. For the rest of his life he told his family that Greta Garbo was the greatest film actress he had ever seen.35 As an MI5 officer in 1942, when Mills recruited the most successful double agent of the Second World War, Juan Pujol García, he gave him the codename GARBO as a tribute to his star quality. Pujol was the only male member of the British Double-Cross System to be given a female codename.36 The proudest moment of Mills’s retirement was his reunion with GARBO on the fortieth anniversary of the D-Day landings on the Normandy beaches, the greatest triumph of the Double-Cross deception.14
1 What did leak out was often incomplete and confused. The brief references to intelligence operations in Cyril Mills’s entry in the usually authoritative Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), though revised in 2008, still includes several errors and omissions. There is, for example, no reference to any of his work for MI6. He is incorrectly described as an MI5 ‘secret agent’ ‘attached to the War Office’ in the Second World War, rather than as an MI5 officer with a key role in B1a. The brief ODNB account of Mills’s role in the Cold War surveillance of the Russian embassy is badly garbled.
2 Both, like Bertram Mills, were carriage-driving enthusiasts.
3 Unpublished letter sent to Cyril Mills by Prince Philip from Royal Yacht Britannia on 8 August 1985; CBM. See illustration no.27.
4 ‘A Tribute to HRH the Duke of Edinburgh 1921–2021’, @ChiefMI6, 7 April 2021.
5 Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (London: Penguin, 2010).
6 Prince Philip discussed The Defence of the Realm with me in some detail soon after its hardback publication in 2009. In 2010 I was invited to talk to the Royal Household about the book at Buckingham Palace. Richard Eden, ‘The Queen Is Amused by MI5 Inquiries at Buckingham Palace’, Sunday Telegraph, 17 October 2010.
7 Christopher Andrew and Julius Green, Stars and Spies: Intelligence Operations and the Entertainment Business (London: Bodley Head, 2021).
8 William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum, twelfth-century manuscript, Cambridge University Library (CUL) MS Ii.2.3, ff. 33v–34r. Not surprisingly, there is no surviving contemporary record to confirm William of Malmesbury’s account. According to the Elizabethan historian Holinshed, Alfred ‘was suffered to go into every part [of the Danish camp], and play on his instrument, as well afore the king as others, so that there was no secret, but that he understood it’.
9 The likely consequences (short- and long-term) of a Danish victory at Ethandun were discussed in an episode of the BBC Radio 4 series What If?, which was recorded at the battle site (presenter: Christopher Andrew; producer: Ian Bell).
10 Joanne Parker, ‘England’s Darling’: The Victorian Cult of Alfred the Great (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp.108–9. The story of King Alfred’s espionage may not have been included in Prince Philip’s education in France, Germany and Britain before he joined the Royal Navy aged eighteen in 1939.
11 Andrew and Green, Stars and Spies, pp.96–7.
12 Christopher Andrew, The Secret World: A History of Intelligence (London: Allen Lane, 2018), ch.1.
13 Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (London: Penguin, 2010), section A, introduction.
14 Richard Moore, interview on BBC Radio 4 Today programme, 30 November 2021.
15 Alan Judd, The Quest for C. Mansfield Cumming and the Founding of the Secret Service (London: HarperCollins, 1999), p.470.
16 Christopher Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush (London: HarperCollins, 1995), pp.47–8. Maugham had initially been recruited by John Wallinger of military intelligence. He found Wallinger ‘a very ordinary man’ and did not take to him.
17 Judd, The Quest for C, pp.420–21.
18 Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service, 1909–1949 (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), p.730.
19 Judd, The Quest for C, p.59.
20 Compton Mackenzie, Greek Memories, 2nd ed. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1939), p.324.
21 See below, p.53.
22 Cumming was notorious for driving his Rolls-Royce at high speed, even through the centre of London. Christopher Andrew, Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1985), pp.74–5.
23 Judd, The Quest for C, pp.39–48, 251.
24 See below, ch.3.
25 MI6’s secret wartime designation was MI1c.
26 Andrew, Defence of the Realm, pp.50–51.
27 Gustav Steinhauer, Steinhauer: The Kaiser’s Master Spy: The Story as Told by Himself, ed. Sidney Felstead (London: Bodley Head, 1930), p.37.
28The Times, 15 October 1915; Andrew, Defence of the Realm, pp.53–5.
29 Andrew, Defence of the Realm, pp.64–5. On Mills and Kell, see below, p.47–8, 77–8, 80.
30Calendar of State Papers, Elizabeth I; cited by Ward in Beneath the Big Top, p.44.
31 This was probably a reference to Leopold Vieyra, who had ‘been touring as a music-hall performer with a Dutch passport’ and who was ‘now in custody’. Convicted of espionage in November 1916, he was the last German spy to have been discovered in the British wartime entertainment industry.
32 Sir Edward Troup to chief constables, 16 July 1916; TNA HO 45/10779.
33 Cyril Bertram Mills, Bertram Mills Circus: Its Story, rev. ed. (Bath: Ashgrove Press, 1983), p.16.
34 Andrew and Green, Stars and Spies, p.223; Andrew, Defence of the Realm, p.221.
35 Mills’s family believe that he met Garbo but no record survives of when and where the meeting occurred.
36 See below, p.134.
Chapter 1
Harrow School and Cambridge University
The chief influence on Cyril Bertram Mills’s early career was his father Bertram Wagstaff Mills, who was born in London on 11 August 1873. Bertram’s father, Halford Mills, owned a successful coach-building and undertaker’s business in Paddington, as well as two farms in the Home Counties. Bertram spent most of his childhood at the family farm in Chalfont St Giles, where he began a lifelong passion for horses.1 After joining his father’s business in 1888, he began to compete at international as well as British horse and carriage shows, eventually becoming a leading judge. Not until after the First World War, however, did it occur to Bertram Mills that he might start a circus. But for his success in doing so, Cyril would probably never have worked for either MI5 or MI6.
Though Bertram Mills had left school before his fifteenth birthday, he was much more ambitious for his sons, Cyril and Bernard, and sent both of them to Harrow School and Cambridge University. Harrow was second only to its traditional rival, Eton College, as 16the world’s most famous school. Its former pupils include seven British Prime Ministers – more than any other school except Eton – as well as the first Prime Minister of independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru.2 The most celebrated Old Harrovian Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was also Cyril Mills’s greatest personal hero. In 1908, aged only thirty-three, Churchill became the youngest Cabinet minister for over forty years. Two years later, he was appointed the youngest Home Secretary since his fellow Old Harrovian Sir Robert Peel in 1822.
Though Churchill has inspired some excellent biographers (himself included), none mentions Cyril Mills’s extraordinary relationship with him, both public and private. The Bertram Mills Circus clowns made Churchill laugh more loudly than any other part of the entertainment industry. The secret intelligence that Mills obtained from Nazi Germany before the Second World War gave Churchill an important insight into the rise of Hitler’s Luftwaffe.3
Throughout the course of his long career, Churchill showed greater enthusiasm for, and understanding of, intelligence than any other twentieth-century British politician. His adventures during the Boer War had included cycling in disguise through Johannesburg to carry out reconnaissance behind enemy lines. Churchill later acknowledged that, had he been caught, ‘no court martial that ever sat in Europe would have had much difficulty in disposing of such a case.’ He would have been shot as a spy.4
During his first seven years as a Cabinet minister (1908–15), Churchill played a key role in founding all three of today’s main British 17intelligence agencies. He was a committed supporter of both the home and foreign departments (the future MI5 and MI6) of the Secret Service Bureau founded in 1909. As Home Secretary a year later, Churchill promoted secret cooperation between police chief constables and the future MI5, which enabled the surveillance and arrest of the entire German spy network in Britain at the outbreak of war.
As First Lord of the Admiralty in 1914, Churchill presided over the secret creation of Room 40 (forerunner of today’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ)), Britain’s first code-breaking agency since the closure of the Foreign Office Deciphering Branch after parliamentary protests seventy years earlier. British codebreakers went on to achieve major successes in breaking wartime codes and ciphers of both Britain’s chief enemy, Germany, and its main ally, the United States. Churchill was right to claim a decade later:
I have studied this information over a longer period and more attentively than probably any other minister has done. All the time I have been in office since it began in the autumn of 1914, I have read every one of these flimsies [decrypted messages] and I attach more importance to them as a means of forming a true judgement of public policy in these spheres than to any other source of knowledge at the disposal of the State.5
Cyril Mills, however, only began to learn of Churchill’s key role in the creation of the modern British intelligence community when he started to work for MI5 and MI6.
Churchill himself was largely responsible for the almost total 18secrecy which surrounded the intelligence agencies throughout his career. As Home Secretary, in 1911, he helped to rush the Official Secrets Act through the Commons in less than an hour. Even in Parliament no reference was allowed to British intelligence operations until the 1980s, with the partial exception of those targeted against foreign espionage and subversion.
When Cyril Mills began working for British intelligence at the age of thirty-four, he did not regret having previously been kept in almost total ignorance of it. Like Churchill, Mills believed that secrecy was essential to the success of British intelligence operations. He even kept his father and his first wife in complete ignorance of his own espionage in pre-war Nazi Germany. His children, Christopher and Sandra, still vividly recall the strength of his support for the Official Secrets Act and his stern warning, when the family moved to a mansion opposite the Soviet embassy in 1960, that they should stifle all curiosity about surveillance of the embassy and other Soviet buildings from the upper floors of their house.
***
For rather different reasons, Cyril Mills was also unusually secretive about his years at Harrow School, which he almost never mentioned to his children. The 284 pages of Mills’s partly autobiographical 1967 history of the family circus contain less than a line about his school-days: a passing reference to spending ‘four and a half years at Harrow’ before going to read engineering at Cambridge in October 1920.6
Mills’s memories of his schooldays were permanently scarred by the carnage of the Great War. Like many who experienced trench 19warfare, his father Bertram, who served as captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps, preferred not to talk about it afterwards. Mills followed his example.
Arriving at Harrow as a fourteen-year-old in 1916,7 Cyril heard the Headmaster read out the names of Harrow’s latest war dead at evensong every Sunday for the rest of the war. The pupil-edited newspaper, The Harrovian, sometimes added horrifying details about how they had died. Many were recent pupils. Almost 30 per cent of the boys who had entered Harrow in the academic year 1909/10 were killed in action, others died from wounds and illnesses contracted during military service.8 Of the total of twenty Victoria Crosses awarded to Harrovians – more than to any other school except Eton – nine were won during the Great War.
Mills’s generation of Harrovians were regularly reminded that, like Harrow’s fallen heroes, they too might have to die for their country. During the last German offensive of the war in 1918, The Harrovian published this sombre appeal:
TO THOSE WHO ‘FOLLOW UP’9
You who come after the brave gone before you
You who must finish what they have begun,
Never forget, when the world goes against you,
How they were tempted—fought harder and won.
Never forget how they loved perfect freedom,
Nor how they struggled the right to maintain!
Never turned back, but gave all for their country—
20Surely they cannot have battled in vain?
Surely, O children, you will not forget them?
Fail to fight bravely, to finish their work?
Think, if they bitterly said to each other,
‘We died but for cowards who falter and shirk!’
But, children of heroes, the enemy threatens,
He throws down the gauntlet, who dares pick it up?
Stand fast and be brave, brace yourselves for the struggle!
Then answer the challenge and cry, ‘Follow Up!’10
Cyril Mills was determined to ‘follow up’ if the war continued. He joined the Harrow Officers’ Training Corps (OTC) in his second term and won rapid promotion, singled out by his commanding officer, Colonel E. G. Mercer, for his ‘great energy, keenness, and enterprise as Squad Commander’. Mills was also a very good shot. At the annual OTC exercises, he won his highest marks for shooting.11 Many years later, he told his son Christopher he had expected to survive for only a few weeks if he had to ‘follow up’.
Though the operations of MI5, MI6 and the future GCHQ were too secret to be mentioned in the OTC, Mills learned the importance of aerial reconnaissance, the main intelligence innovation on the Western Front at the outbreak of the First World War.12 When, later, Mills began reconnaissance by biplane over Nazi Germany, he probably recalled the pioneering work of his fellow Harrovian, Second Lieutenant Alan Scott Balfour, which was celebrated after his death in action early in 1918. According to The Harrovian, though Balfour had been ‘a rather shy and retiring boy’ at Harrow, 21he was ‘devoted to a hobby which was to prove of the utmost value to his country later on’. The hobby was photography, which led to Balfour’s recruitment as observer/photographer by the RFC on the Western Front. His squadron leader wrote to his father, Sir Robert Balfour, Liberal MP for Glasgow:
Your son was on a photographic reconnaissance, and in spite of the fact that there were many enemy machines [aircraft] about, he persisted in going over to the very extreme edge of his area to start taking his photographs. The result of this very gallant conduct was that he was attacked by five hostile machines. In spite of putting up a splendid fight, your son was killed in the air…
Your Son’s last photographic reconnaissance, before the one on which he met his death, was so good that I brought it to the attention of the General Officer Commanding the Brigade, in which this Squadron is. He congratulated your son and told me that it was the finest photographic performance that he had ever come across.13
Unlike Balfour’s role as an RFC observer on the Western Front, Mills’s aerial reconnaissance of Nazi German airfields twenty years later was to remain secret for almost half a century.14
Within the Harrow OTC, Mills also learned the importance of tactical battlefield intelligence on enemy forces. The Harrovian’s tribute to Captain Walter Stone, the last former pupil to be awarded (posthumously) the Victoria Cross during the war, singled out the ‘most conspicuous bravery’ with which Stone sent intelligence reports from the Western Front:
22He observed the enemy massing for an attack, and afforded invaluable information to Battalion Headquarters … Captain Stone stood on the parapet with the telephone under a tremendous bombardment, observing the enemy, and continued to send back valuable information until the wire was cut by his orders. The rearguard was eventually surrounded and cut to pieces, and Captain Stone was seen fighting to the last, till he was shot through the head. The extraordinary coolness of this heroic officer and the accuracy of his information enabled dispositions to be made just in time to save the line and avert disaster.15
Twenty years later, though never in as much danger as Stone, Mills also showed ‘extraordinary coolness’ and courage in collecting intelligence from German airfields on the rapid growth of the Luftwaffe for MI6.
At Harrow, Mills won a reputation as a (mostly modest) daredevil, which remained with him during both his circus and intelligence careers. He was also highly competitive. One of Harrow’s most eccentric games was the annual scattering of thirty eggs in the large school swimming pool. Competitors dived into the pool to collect as many eggs as possible from the bottom before resurfacing to catch their breath. In 1918, Mills and Harrow’s fastest competitive swimmer, J. E. Minoprio, shared first prize for collecting nine eggs each. Determined to show that he could beat Minoprio, Mills dived into the pool again and this time resurfaced with twelve eggs – a new school record that was duly recorded in The Harrovian.16
The high point of Mills’s time at Harrow was the Armistice, which famously ended the Great War at the eleventh hour on the eleventh 23day of the eleventh month of 1918. The Harrovian probably spoke for Mills and most of his fellow pupils: ‘The thought that the present generation, which so cheerfully waited its turn, should in this vast conflict have no turn to wait for brings a relief, which needs no words – were it not so deep…’
As Mills was well aware, not all of his fellow pupils had ‘cheerfully waited’ for their turn in the trenches. Though most tried to conceal their fear of violent death on the Western Front, the future leading fashion and royal photographer, Sir Cecil Beaton, who entered Harrow in January 1918, purchased surgical boots with metal leg splints from a Harley Street specialist and pretended to be disabled. He removed the boots before visits from his parents.17
Harrow on the Hill, unlike central London, held no public celebration of the Armistice. Before the eleventh hour struck, the school had been forced to close due to the ‘Spanish flu’ epidemic, which, globally, may have killed as many people as the Great War. In Britain there were 228,000 deaths during the epidemic. Among those who narrowly survived was Lady May Cumming. Her husband, Sir Mansfield Cumming, first Chief of MI6, wrote to a friend after her recovery: ‘my wife had a very bad dose of influenza & was in bed over 4 weeks with a hospital Nurse all the time.’18
Though Mills won no prizes at Harrow, he did well academically, especially in natural sciences, mathematics and history. In the Harrow argot, still in use half a century later, he was a ‘groize’ (hard worker) and was conscious that his father expected him to do well enough to win a place at Cambridge and become the first family member with a university degree.
After leaving Harrow in the summer of 1920, Mills stuck to the 24unwritten rule that pupils past and present, whatever their private feelings, did not publicly criticise the school. Those who did so could expect to be ostracised. Such was the fate of the adventurous Arnold Lunn, well known to Mills (also a keen, competitive skier) as the originator of ski slalom competitions. In 1914, eight years after Lunn left Harrow, he published a novel entitled The Harrovians, based on his school diaries. Though not a direct attack on his old school, it was, he said later, ‘a careful record of the cynicism of Harrow youth’. It caused such outrage among Old Harrovians that Lunn was forced to resign from all five of his London clubs19. He sent his son Peter (later a senior MI6 officer) to Eton.20
Arnold Lunn’s experience helps to explain why Mills remained so reluctant to say or write anything in public about Harrow. Mills did not mention, even to his family, the ritual humiliations of school fagging, which he learned to endure with his usual stiff upper lip. The best-known school songs, composed by a Harrow director of music, John Farmer, and another master, F.W. Howson, included one in praise of fagging: ‘Boy!’, first sung in 1883, which Mills and his contemporaries were sometimes expected to sing a quarter of a century later.21The Harrovian reported ‘a very large audience’ at the term concert attended by Mills in March 1918, ‘old Harrovians being present in large numbers’: ‘The School songs were, as a whole, better sung than they have been for a long time … “Boy”, sung by the trebles and four members of the XII [Headmaster’s House], was very effective.’
Churchill later claimed that his ‘first responsible office’ was ‘Head of the Fags’ at Harrow. The unpaid menial tasks which, as a new 25boy, Mills was expected to perform for his sixth-form ‘fagmaster’ were probably quite similar to those required of the actor Simon Williams over forty years later:
As a new boy at Harrow in 1959, my morning duties were to spit and polish my prefect’s shoes (even his rugby boots), to serve him tea and toast, make his bed, run his bath and fetch his paper (the Daily Express, for heaven’s sake). It was also my duty to sit on the lavatory he intended to use after breakfast in order to warm the seat for him. ‘And don’t you bloody well do anything in there, Williams, I don’t want you stinking the place out.’22
Mills was far less inhibited when reminiscing about his three years at Cambridge University after leaving Harrow. As he later admitted, he ceased to be a ‘groize’, did not ‘over-exert’ himself academically and enjoyed an energetic sporting and social life.
Mills’s favourite recreations, like those of Sir Mansfield Cumming,23 included travelling at speed – occasionally a requirement of his later spying career. The combined demands of his Cambridge degree course and the Christmas circus season at Olympia prevented him, however, from skiing for more than a fortnight each year. Nor was he able to purchase a fast car. University regulations prohibited students in residence from keeping cars within the city precincts. So, Mills bought a motorcycle and joined the fledgling University Motorcycle Club and enjoyed speeding from the city centre through the Cambridgeshire fens. He also took part in the ‘grass-track’ races (motorcycle scrambles) around Cambridge. One 26such race at a Cambridge agricultural show in 1923, in which Cyril probably competed, attracted 20,000 spectators. He won a bronze medal in one of the races and bequeathed it to his daughter Sandra, who still has it. Cyril lost much of his interest in motorcycling when he left Cambridge and was forced to slow down. In 1925 the Auto-Cycle Union (ACU) banned road racing and some other competitions because of the growing number of accidents befalling both spectators and participants.
***
Only many years later, after he had begun working for British intelligence, did Mills realise how appropriate his choice of Cambridge college, Corpus Christi, had been. During his first year, when he had a room in the college, he passed every day the memorial in Old Court to Corpus’s two greatest playwrights, Christopher Marlowe and John Fletcher, still the only monument in the college to any of its old members. Before Shakespeare began to make his reputation on the London stage in 1592, Marlowe was acknowledged as the greatest Elizabethan dramatist. Though Marlowe did not, as some have claimed, write Shakespeare’s plays, it seems likely that, like Fletcher later, he did collaborate with him for a time. The current edition of The New Oxford Shakespeare ascribes authorship of Henry VI jointly to ‘William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe’. At the end of his career, Shakespeare also collaborated with John Fletcher.
What makes Marlowe’s precocious success as a playwright even more extraordinary is that he was also an active spy, probably recruited to Queen Elizabeth I’s secret service in 1585 while studying for his master’s degree at Corpus. The Corpus Christi Buttery Book, which recorded students’ expenditure on food and drink, shows 27that from 1585, when Marlowe began his intelligence career, his presence at the college became irregular and, probably thanks to his secret service income, his expenditure while there considerably higher. Though details of Marlowe’s espionage were kept secret at the time and no longer survive, in 1587 the Privy Council sent a letter to Cambridge University authorities designed to ensure that Marlowe’s absences abroad on secret service did not delay the award of his master’s: ‘he had done her Majesty good service, & deserved to be rewarded for his faithful dealing’. Marlowe’s espionage, like Mills’s later, was sometimes dangerous. He was fatally stabbed in 1593 during a brawl which may have been related to the rivalries and disruption within Elizabeth I’s intelligence service following the death of her spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham.24
Mills became the most striking twentieth-century example of a leading figure in the British entertainment business who was also a major spy. But the first to combine these two professions in Britain was his fellow Corpus Christi College graduate, Christopher Marlowe.
After passing his final honours examination in engineering, Mills was awarded the BA at a traditional degree day ceremony at the Cambridge Senate House in June 1923, but he did not return to the Senate House for almost a decade to receive the MA for which he qualified, without further exams, in 1927. A convenient moment arrived in April 1932 when he brought his father’s circus to Midsummer Common in Cambridge. Before receiving his MA, he was welcomed back by his former Corpus-approved landlady with whom he had lodged after moving out of his room in college. She 28now occupied a large Victorian terrace house in Maid’s Causeway, overlooking Midsummer Common:
During the [circus] build-up, she and her elderly maid, who still wore starched cuffs and a little white cap perched on top of her head, sat at a window watching our every move. I had been what she called one of her ‘young gentlemen’ when any of us were about, but I suspect we were referred to as ‘her boys’ when we were not within earshot…
Every evening when work ended one of these dear ladies came over and said the other was running a hot bath and that a meal would be ready by the time I had bathed. They knew I could dine at the circus but felt they could do better and indeed they did.25
The circus tent was packed. As Cyril recalled over thirty years later, ‘undergrads in those days had more money and less work to do than now and … they poured into the circus’. In defiance of safety regulations, many sat on the ground between the seats and the circus ring26 in order to be as close as possible to the animals and artistes. Cambridge’s main club for gregarious, well-heeled ex-public schoolboys, the Pitt Club, was situated only a few hundred yards from Midsummer Common. The club’s now most notorious member was the subversive, heavy-drinking Old Etonian Guy Burgess, who may well have been among the many students in the circus audience. Within a few years, Burgess was to join both Soviet intelligence and MI6. Though Mills did not discover it until much later, he and Burgess worked for the pre-war MI6 at the same time. In later life, he could never bring himself to mention Burgess’s name.
1 Cyril Mills wrote of his father: ‘He had three loves – his family, his home and horses – and there was nothing he would not do for any of these.’ Mills, Bertram Mills Circus, p.12.
2 In 2005, Harrow celebrated the centenary of Nehru’s admission in the presence of the Indian High Commissioner, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/rest-of–world/how-harrow-made-nehru/articleshow/1296553.cms
3 See below, p.179.
4 W. S. Churchill, My Early Life (London: Eland, 2000 [1930]), p.372.
5 Austen Chamberlain MSS, Birmingham University Library. First cited by Andrew in Secret Service, p.316.
6 Mills, Bertram Mills Circus, p.18.
7 For Cyril Mills’s matriculation photograph on his arrival at Harrow, see illustration no.2.
8 Christopher Tyerman, A History of Harrow School 1324–1991 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), ch.16.
9 ‘Follow Up’ was a reference to the most famous Harrow School song, ‘Forty Years On’, whose chorus repeats the phrase five times. The title of the Harrow alumni magazine is Follow Up!.
10The Harrovian, 1918.
11 C. B. Mills file, Harrow School Archives. I owe this reference to Dr Tim Schmalz.
12 Aerial reconnaissance had been attempted half a century earlier, with little success, by the Balloon Corps in the American Civil War. Andrew, Secret World, chs.24, 25.
13The Harrovian War Supplement, September 1918.
14 See below, pp.73–4.
15The Harrovian, citation reprinted from the London Gazette of 2 February 1918.
16The Harrovian XXXI, no.7, 14 December 1918, pp.5–6.
17 Hugo Vickers, Cecil Beaton: The Authorised Biography (London: Phoenix, 2002), ch.3.
18 Judd, The Quest for C, p.465.
19 Arnold Lunn, The Harrovians: A Tale of Public School Life (London: Methuen, 1914) and introduction to the posthumous 2010 edition.
20 Ibid.
21 Other Farmer and Howson songs are still sung at the annual Churchill Songs Day.
22 Simon Williams, ‘The Archers’ Simon Williams on public school “fagging”’, Daily Telegraph, 8 December 2017.
23 See above, p.8.
24 Andrew and Green, Stars and Spies, ch.1. Christopher Mills believes that Cyril, who enjoyed history books as a teenager, had learned about Walsingham’s career as Elizabeth’s principal Secretary of State from 1573 to 1590.
25 Mills, Bertram Mills Circus, p.60. In striking contrast, Mills left no account of his return to Harrow.
26 Ibid., p.59.
Chapter 2
The Circus, Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill
The chief influence on Cyril Mills’s choice of career after he left Cambridge was his father Bertram, known to his staff as ‘The Guv’nor’. Lady Eleanor Smith, one of the founders of the Circus Fans’ Association of Great Britain (now the Circus Friends Association), remembered him as ‘a short, stocky man with a bald head, a ruddy pugnacious face, a grey moustache, and twinkling, shrewd blue eyes. His eyes were as blue as the cornflower he invariably wore in his button-hole.1 He would have looked undressed without that cornflower.’ A caricature in The Sketch carried the caption: ‘Say It With Cornflowers! King of the circus and coaching enthusiast Bertram W. Mills, J.P., always wears a cornflower in his button-hole’. A clown is shown reaching across Mills’s chest to adjust his bright blue boutonniere.2
30The main turning point in Bertram Mills’s career came early in 1920 when a close friend, Sir Gilbert Greenall (later 1st Baron Daresbury), a director of the London Olympia Exhibition Hall, invited the Mills family to a performance at Olympia of The Great Victory Circus. When pressed over supper afterwards for his views on the performance, Bertram Mills replied, ‘If I couldn’t do better, I’d eat my hat!’ A few days later, Olympia’s managing director, Reginald Heaton, founder of the London International Horse Show, asked Mills to put on a circus during the following winter.3
Eighteen-year-old Cyril Mills, then about to leave Harrow School for Cambridge University, accompanied his father on a summer tour in 1920 of what seemed at the time ‘all the circuses in Europe’ to find the best acts for Olympia. Cyril’s role was to identify those that would most appeal to ‘the younger generation’. When he and his father compared notes at the end of the tour, they found that they had usually been most impressed by the same acts. By the time they returned to London, the programme for Olympia was almost complete:
The biggest surprise I had during that tour was that Father was known to so many circus owners, but the explanation was that before the war he had exhibited at most of the big horse shows on the Continent, and wherever there was a horse show it was usual for a circus to play the town at the same time … On countless occasions Father had gone to the circus in the morning to watch the training of horses.4
31Many of the pre-war European horse shows and circuses which Bertram Mills most admired had been German. Munich, Hamburg, Dresden, Magdeburg and Breslau each had their own circus – some of them based in the city’s largest public building. Berlin had several circuses, each able to seat an audience of 5,000. All big-city circuses gave two or three performances a day for six days a week.
After the horrors of the First World War, however, Germany was widely regarded in Britain as a pariah state. In the post-war British entertainment business, Cyril later recalled, ‘nobody dared present a German act or even one with a German name’. ‘The first crunch came when we saw the Schumann horses in Copenhagen … by far the best in the world.’ The Schumann brothers were Danes and Swedes ‘but their names sounded German so they were out’. The circus, which opened at Olympia on 17 December 1920, was billed as ‘The Great International Circus’, with, in very small type in the bottom right-hand corner, the words ‘Organised by Bertram W. Mills’. It was an instant success. The Times headlined its report on the opening performance: ‘The Big Circus – Enraptured Audience!’
Before the circus opened, Cyril’s daredevil instincts, already evident at Harrow, made it impossible for him to resist the temptation of trying to swing on the high trapeze:
My attempt produced more laughs than a good clown entrée and, having fallen several times, I was reduced to crawling most of the way [across the safety net] on hands and knees … By the time I reached the ground I had resolved I was not cut out to be a performer and have ever since resisted all temptations to try to be one.
By 1921 it was possible to engage people with German (or German-sounding) names, and the first circus contract signed by 32Bertram Mills was with the Schumann Brothers. Ernst Schumann brought their horses to Olympia, as he did again during the 1922–23 season, by which time his older brother Willy had taken over as Equestrian Director and Producer of the circus.5
The third Great International Circus, which opened at Olympia in December 1922, was an even bigger success than its predecessors. As Cyril recalled:
My father had booked [the Italian-born Russian, Enrico] Rastelli, the greatest of all jugglers, and had taken me to the [United] States where we saw all the big circuses and where he booked three high-priced acts on which he had to pay return transportation across the Atlantic.
In 1922, for the first time, the name BERTRAM MILLS CIRCUS appeared prominently in capitals on circus posters.6
