Eric Roberts

Eric Roberts was born in 1907 and grew up in rural Cornwall. On leaving school at 17 he moved alone to London, and found work as a clerk in Westminster Bank’s big Threadneedle Street branch. There he met fellow clerk Audrey Sprague, who offered him cheap lodgings with her and her mother. He and Audrey would live together for the rest of their lives. Outside work, he joined a new political movement, the British Fascisti (BF), which was modelled on the Italian fascist movement and mostly focussed on combatting communism.

Another member of the BF, Maxwell Knight, was in fact a spy. He was not only spying on the BF, but also serving as the BF’s own spymaster, with an interest in what was going on inside the Communist Party. He recruited Roberts to join the Communists and report back. Roberts’ reports impressed Knight, and indeed it seems Roberts soon became rather more interested in his espionage work than in the politics that had given rise to it. Knight subsequently joined MI5, but by then the BF had folded and Roberts’ information from inside the Communist Party was of less value to Knight, so the relationship between the two men dwindled.

In 1934, however, Roberts approached Knight with a new proposition. He was about to marry Audrey Sprague, and they planned to honeymoon in Germany. Roberts offered to report on what he saw while he was there of the Nazi government and the state of the country. Knight was glad to have such a report, and to re-establish ties with Roberts at a time when a new fascist party was emerging in Britain: Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF). Knight asked Roberts to join the BUF, and Roberts began reporting on the party to Knight and his employers at MI5.

Meanwhile, at the bank, Roberts’ frustration with his work was growing. Despite sitting exams and taking endless evening classes, he was still a lowly clerk, increasingly convinced that his lack of a university degree and family connections meant he would never progress. Desperate for a change, he was applying for jobs in South America and staving off boredom at work by playing practical jokes on colleagues and customers. After work he attended BUF meetings, changing into his jackboots and black shirt in a public toilet on the way, so that nobody from the office would know what he got up to in the evenings.

By 1940, Roberts was working at the bank’s Euston Road branch. His wife Audrey, who had been required to resign from the bank upon marrying, was at home caring for their two small children, and occasionally cooking for his boss – his secret boss, Maxwell Knight – when he came to dine with the family. She was well aware of Roberts’ espionage activity, which was clearly far more compelling to him than anything he did in his day job at the bank.

War was raging between Britain and Germany, and Knight and MI5 agreed that a man of Roberts’ talents should be working full time for British intelligence. Accordingly, in June 1940 a letter landed on the desk of Westminster Bank’s assistant staff controller, asking for this rather ordinary and overlooked clerk in his mid-30s to be released for important war work. No details were given, and the assistant staff controller was puzzled, writing back ‘What we would like to know here is, what are the particular and especial qualifications of Mr Roberts – which we have not been able to perceive – for some particular work of national importance?’ It’s not clear whether that question was ever answered, but of course the bank could not turn down such a request, and Eric Roberts left the bank on 4 July 1940, never to return.

Upon joining MI5, Roberts was tasked with tackling the problem of Fifth Columnists – British Nazi sympathisers intent on undermining Britain by sending inside information to Germany. Roberts took on the persona of an undercover Gestapo officer using the alias ‘Jack King’ and, through his pre-war links with the BUF, contacted likely Fifth Columnists, meeting them in a small flat in central London to receive the details they had gathered and, they believed, send them on to his superiors in Nazi Germany. In so doing, he gathered huge amounts of information for MI5 about these people and what they knew, and also neutralised the threat they posed by making them believe their contributions were reaching Germany. The arrangement continued throughout the war, and his informers never realised that their contact Jack King was really working for British intelligence.

In the 1950s Eric and Audrey Roberts retired to Canada, where their two sons had already settled. Aside from Eric, Audrey and a handful of MI5 contacts, nobody knew anything about his war work until 2014, when the National Archives released the files on the wartime Fifth Column operation. Using these files and the private Roberts family archive, Robert Hutton wrote his excellent book Agent Jack (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2018) to tell the amazing story of Eric Roberts. At long last, some 42 years after his death, the bank finally had an answer to its question about the ‘particular and especial qualifications’ of its ordinary, extraordinary clerk Mr Roberts.