Mrs Zigzag: The Extraordinary Life of a Secret Agent's Wife (13 page)

The Ashanti region of southern Ghana is a remnant of the Ashanti Empire, which was founded in the early seventeenth century. Its success depended on the trade in gold both with Europeans at the coast and with the Muslim north. In 1874 Britain annexed the whole region south of the Ashanti Empire as the Gold Coast Crown Colony. Eddie and Betty had good relations with the Ashantis, and were friendly with their king, Premper. Betty remembers him as:

A fabulous character. The Ashantis at that time were a very war-like people. They are all about 5ft tall. If there is any trouble, it takes place up in Ashanti. But they are great people. The one nation that the British there were frightened of was the Ashantis. Ashanti was a fascinating bit of country and if you looked underneath it they were very nice people. One of our friends was a tribal secretary and his father had been a torturer to the precious King of the Ashantis. We met the king as well and we saw all his treasure.

Eddie has his own memories of the first contact with the Ashantis:

This particular man was the chief spokesman for the parliament under Nkrumah. When I arrived he met me at the airport. He was dressed in Ashanti clothes. They have real gold thread, very, very colourful, and gold sandals. He looked up at me and I looked down. He put both hands on mine and said, ‘You villain, me villain, we do business together!’

Eddie continues:

There was an important Ashanti symbol of their religion, the Golden Stool and it is solid gold.
³
It takes about four men to lift it, and it is supposed to be inhabited by a white spirit – feminine. When I took Betty to the north, a lot of them had never seen a white person before, and they looked at her white hair, and they used to run screaming. They were petrified of her. People used to say to me, ‘You can’t take your wife up there – aren’t you frightened for her?’ I said, ‘Frightened? You should see the natives – they’re terrified of her!’

The Adakassi was an Ashanti ritual that was performed every twenty-five years. It was to purify the Golden Stool, and its indwelling feminine spirit:

They still had human sacrifice – that was the way that they purified it. It was still being practised. And they paraded all the entire household treasures, like the golden keys, the silver keys. At night there were hundreds of drums drumming, and suddenly they would stop. Then they would start up again. Every time they stopped there was supposed to be a human sacrifice. They used to kidnap Nigerians, chop their heads off and pour the blood over the stool. Then there were two cases whilst we were there of young girls being kidnapped, and their hearts pulled out through the womb. Two of the people that were convicted had been educated in Oxford. The juju there was very strong. The people would adopt Christianity, and they loved it – the singing etc., but when it had finished they would change into their native clothes and go to the juju. People were terrified of the witch doctors, and would do anything not to upset them [as we saw in the previous chapter with Betty’s houseboys]. They were so highly regarded by King Premper that he presented them with a replica of the Golden Stool – a singular honour never given to any white person.

Another person who they met in Ghana was Bob Flemming, who came to Ghana as the American Counsel General. He represented America in the Olympics for weightlifting. He sent for all his weights, and when they came, the porters tried to carry the box up the stairs at the hotel, but they couldn’t budge it. Bob lifted it easily, and the word soon got around – thus his reputation was made. He corresponded with the Chapmans for many years after.

But their time in Ghana was not to last, as Betty recalls:

While Eddie was still in Ghana, I came home to do something about a book that Eddie had written, trying to get it launched. On route home from Africa, we stopped in Dakar to refuel. While waiting, as I wandered around an African sales pitch, a young African placed an ostrich egg in my hand, saying, ‘You buy him ma’am, you get piccing’ – that’s a word in the African language that means baby. I bought it; my daughter was born soon after, after an earlier loss of a son. I also returned to England by the wish of Nkrumah to talk to the Taylor Woodrow construction company. The government in Africa didn’t want us to transmit news (by telephone or radio) – so that no one could pinch the information – so instead they sent me.

Nkrumah had a big party for me to say goodbye just before I left for that trip to England, and he said then that Eddie and I must never both be out of Africa at the same time as Britain would never let us return; and look what happened! Asafo Ajah and her husband (who was the Minister of Agriculture) in Ghana, also gave me a farewell do at their home. I went down to the Congo, in Abidjan, and spent the night there, and very hairy it was too. The next day I took off for Paris. What I didn’t know was that I was taking the inaugural African flight of The Comet – the world’s first commercial jetliner. It had had a crash in Karachi just before, because birds had got into the engines. As a result, I was the only woman on board; all others had cancelled because they were afraid. When I got to Paris, I was greeted with a huge bouquet of flowers by someone from the airline. I was also given three days’ stay in Paris for using the airline; it was great to be the only woman! I was anxious to get out of Ghana anyway. When I returned to London I stayed in Guy Gibson’s old flat in Chelsea.
⁴

The day before I was due to go back to Ghana, in 1953, I was staying with Eddie’s sister, and two detectives from Scotland Yard came and said that my visa had been delayed and I couldn’t go back until it had been cleared. So there started a real rumpus. Sir Richard Acland MP, a friend of Nkrumah, asked in parliament what had happened. They said they would have to look into it and let us know, and so delaying it as much as possible. Someone had said that we had given a bribe to Nkrumah and his party to get the contracts, and rumours started. Eddie was in a state of not knowing what to do, as we were apart with no contact, so he came to England to see me and to see what was going on. It was then that he discovered that a case had been brought against us. Eventually a ‘white paper’ completely exonerated us, but in the meantime, an English company got the contract. Just as planned, we suspected.

Eddie had a succinct comment on the whole affair: ‘They were my friends. I didn’t have to bribe them.’

There was also a plot to sully Eddie’s name, which nearly succeeded. He was charged with robbing a naval man of £120 in the middle of the night. When arrested he had to empty his pockets. He had £2,000 in cash on him as he had been out gambling that afternoon. Betty recounts:

In fact that afternoon I had had a call from the woman who owned the gambling club to tell me that he had a considerable amount of money on him and was drunk and asked me to come and get him. Of course I did, I took him home and put him to bed. It was during this night that they said he had robbed this man of £120.

So then Eddie rang Len Burt, a former contact he had been working with from Special Branch. He asked him to come and see him, he came around and Eddie said, ‘Your dear chief of police has framed me.’ Burt replied: ‘I had heard about you in the paper.’ Eddie said to him, ‘Len, I’ve worked with you before. Do you think I would do something like this? I can prove it right up to the bloody hilt that I was nowhere near there. He heard my side of the story.’ Burt asked: ‘Would you say that to the chief’s face?’ Eddie said he would. Burt said, ‘Okay, I’ll ring him now and get him round here now.’ So he did.

Eddie continued: ‘We were in this flat when he arrived and Burt said to me, “Repeat exactly what you told me”, which I did.’ The chief went absolutely white. Eddie said, ‘This is absolute nonsense. I was never near the place.’ He continued: ‘Two of your detectives that were there when you were plotting and planning it are willing to come forward and say it was a frame up.’ Eddie informed him: ‘If I’m not out of court by Tuesday I will make it public and I will sue you.’ He just said ‘Oh!’ and left. Len was head of Special Branch, and remarked: ‘I know we’ve sunk to some pretty low depths at Scotland Yard.’ Eddie went into court on Tuesday, and the Crown lawyer stood up and said: ‘We wish to offer no further evidence in this case. A slight mistake has been made.’

A ‘mistake’ had been made, but the damage had been done – probably as intended all along. While Eddie and Betty were both tied up with legalities, an English firm got the contract they were trying for.

Betty recalls wistfully:

We didn’t go back to Ghana, as there was no point. All we had had in the palm of our hands was gone. Nkrumah had to play along or else he could be seen as collaborating and there would have been trouble, but he came to England to personally tell us. He had been tricked into withdrawing my visa to save me from the embarrassment of being set up in a bribery scandal, which I never had any knowledge of.

Back in England, following our Ghana saga, fame of a certain kind was awaiting us. One day I went to Claridge’s in Mayfair, the famous hotel, and I had made front-page news because of it! It was splashed all over the front page of a newspaper lying in [the hotel] reception. It was also because I was Eddie’s wife and my visa had just been withdrawn for Ghana. Britain loved to hate Eddie. Britain was always looking for something to charge Eddie with. It was all bad publicity – the British Establishment was always trying to discredit Eddie, especially to stop him going back to Ghana. Sir Lionel Thompson, a good friend of his, was often the one to bail Eddie out of such silly charges and put an end to the trouble.
⁵

Betty and Eddie were back in Britain, cut off from their home and work, and despite Eddie’s occasional luck at gambling, were virtually penniless.

7

A
COLOURFUL BUNCH
OF VILLAINS

P
icking up the pieces after the disaster of Ghana, Eddie returned to Tangier and bought – with money provided by Betty – a yacht called
Flamingo
. At that time Betty owned a share of Terence Young’s film
The Red Beret
,
¹
which she sold to the film producer Cubby Broccoli in order to raise the money.
²
She takes up the story:

Terence Young was very flamboyant and extravagant – he liked to show off. Although he made lots of money off the Bond movies, it seemed he was always short of money. One day he came to me and said ‘Betty, I’m a little short of money. Would you like to buy my share in
The Red Beret?
’ So I said yes, and I bought his share. Eddie had decided by this time that he wanted to get a boat. Eddie always had all kinds of wild schemes because his whole family was sea-going. This boat was the famous
Flamingo
that he went to Africa with, which caused press coverage more or less worldwide. Cubby Broccoli came to do the deal for Terence Young on
The Red Beret
and I immediately sent the money down to Tangier to help Eddie pay for the boat.

Eddie crewed the boat with Bill Beamish as his skipper again, and a crew of old criminal associates, as well as the boxer George Walker. Eddie recalled:

I had done a deal with the fellow who ran Soho to buy half a yacht,
³
an ex-admiralty boat. I had a look at it and liked it so bought a half share. I flew to Tangier with him and I met some friends of mine down there who said that they could give me one or two nice smuggling jobs. I said, ‘Okay, I’ll introduce you to the people running some of the smuggling, and there is a hell of a profit for cigarettes, whisky etc., and you can get plenty of money from this.’

Eddie said of his crew:

They were all villains, top villains, and not one of them had been to sea before. A lot of them had never been outside London before, but they took that boat 3,500 miles to Tangier. When the boat arrived in Tangier, they all got off, they looked around, and said, ‘What the hell are we going to do here?’ I said, ‘Don’t worry about it, I am going to take you to meet a friend of mine’, and I took them to the best brothel in Tangier. The woman who ran it used to give me information from time to time. I introduced them all. They employed about thirty girls there. She had a menu printed, but as well as the food, was the price of all the girls.

They did genuine cargo work there, as well as the smuggling of guns, gold and cigarettes. Dealing in contraband in that area was so widespread it was almost respectable. Eddie tells the story: ‘We ended up smuggling about 2–3,000 cases of cigarettes which we bought at about 4 pence per pack. The first trip we earned about 50,000 dollars. I took a newspaper reporter along and we sold the story to them.’

Most of this was unknown to Betty at the time, because Eddie said: ‘I deliberately did not involve her in anything, for her own protection.’ She says:

I didn’t take part in any of that except that he wanted money. I had no working relationship with him. Some of those things that he talks about, I think they got up to some incredible high jinks. I sat there for three months not knowing any of what he was up to. The only news I got about him in that time was from the
Daily Express
, who were actually sitting there and watching me to see if I talked to anyone, waiting for Eddie to contact me. I used to sit on the beach in dark glasses and while away the time. I had no contact with him. I only knew what the
Express
told me or what I read in the papers.