Mrs Zigzag: The Extraordinary Life of a Secret Agent's Wife (8 page)

Meanwhile Eddie returned to his life of socialising and so forth. When I found the West Halkin Street house, I was entitled to War Damage Benefit on it, and so I took it. I set about turning it into a paying proposition, and a home. It had four floors and I proceeded to turn two floors into offices. A society photographer was on one floor and shipping offices occupied the other. We lived on the top two floors. That was my first venture, my introduction to the property market.

I was also lucky to find in a nearby street a shop, which I turned into a hairdressing and beauty salon. Amongst our collection of friends was a hairdresser, who was also a dancer. At that time she became my partner in the business known as SIRI. We had an upmarket clientele, comprising lots of film, West End stage folk and so forth.

Eddie recalled of the time: ‘I did exactly nothing. I just ate, drank and made merry.’ This was to become a somewhat familiar pattern, although because of Eddie’s injuries from his last parachute landing, he was never able to do heavy physical work. Before the war he had been very athletic. He loved sport and excelled at football, cricket, high jumping, etc.

Betty admits that she was never really a homemaker and was always busy with one enterprise or another. ‘I loved property and I loved business,’ she says. Despite her time on the Isle of Man training in the hotel business, in looking back to the early times after Eddie’s return, Betty says:

I hadn’t been trained in anything, except the school of life. But I think I was always destined to work hard; a soul needs to be heard. I loved walking; it was fantastic for my thinking process and was when I thought up a lot of my business ideas. God can contact us in many ways, and he helped me whilst I was walking, and thinking. Because I didn’t have any particular skills, I became a sort of entrepreneur. As time went by I learnt from every venture I entered into, from inventing a pot of face cream, to building and renovating, to doing multi-million-pound deals.

SIRI was both a beauty salon and a hairdresser’s. It was very rare in London to find a salon and beauty shop together, except Elizabeth Arden. It was a very successful shop located in a very exclusive area of Knightsbridge. One of our very regular customers was David Niven’s wife, Jordis, and Tanya Mallet, and Sarah Churchill amongst other high-society names. Silvia Stuart was also a regular. She used to say: ‘You know, Betty, my ‘usband owns ‘arleen’s ‘air tonic, but ‘e don’t ‘ave an ‘air on his ‘ead!’ She spoke very cockney and never pronounced ‘h’! Harleen’s hair tonic was very popular at the time. When I had the beauty parlour I was able to leave it with a manager. Her name was Adel Lawrence, and she had previously been a dancer. During the periods between dancing jobs, she had trained to become a beautician. It left me free to pursue other things.

At this time I was mostly involved in property. When the war was ending I saw a good future in the property market; it was all about finding properties that had been damaged by the bombs that could then be purchased with that as a benefit. War Damage Allowance made it good value. I had a marvellous bank that supported me to the hilt. I was lucky. After purchasing the properties I would reconstruct everything and then sell or let them. So I really was able to make money, really make money. The area I worked on was mostly around the exclusive areas of London: Belgravia, near Buckingham Palace, also in Knightsbridge and Victoria.

To further her beauty business, Betty took a course in cosmetics, leading her to invent the face cream mentioned above:

I invented it through an English doctor friend of mine. His name was Williams. We also invented a cream to make a coloured person’s skin look lighter. I don’t think we could sell that today! Eventually, I was made to take the face cream off the market. For some reason it was claimed that there was already another identical product on the market.

Betty’s remark was: ‘I’m damned if I know what it was!’

Eventually Eddie decided to re-enter the world of work. That is, work Eddie’s style. He tells the story:

The Israelis were over here buying planes. At that time the war had stopped, but in order to keep jobs and the factories going they were still making planes. You could buy them for £3,000 or £4,000, without the armaments. They were offering £12,000. The moment these were built they scrapped them. There was an embargo placed. We were not allowed to fly these things out of the country, and you had to get special permissions to be able to use them. So I came up with an idea. I got an old drunken producer and said we were going to make a film on the Battle of Britain. We had a script written. We hired a camera crew, and said we wanted some shots of planes in action. Pearson flew one; George Dawson’s pilot, Jimmy Swanston flew one; and there was one other. We got permission for them to be airborne and had the cameras there. We filmed the take-off, one after the other. Suddenly someone said, ‘What time are they coming back?’ I said ‘They’re not – they’ve gone to Israel!’

Soon after, Eddie decided to go back to sea. Having come from a seafaring family, when Eddie was young he was an apprentice in the shipping industry, at Thompson’s Shipbuilders in Sunderland, north-east England. Based on this experience, he and Betty started a cargo business. Eddie and his brother Winston, a marine engineer, were in charge, carrying grain and commercial goods up and down the Bristol Channel.

They bought a boat called the
Sir James
, a coal steamer, from the Harris Shipyard in Appledore, on the north Devon coast.
¹
This gave birth to the shipping and travel business called Courtline, of which Winston was the director. Betty and Eddie invested heavily in it, with money left over from Eddie’s pay from the Germans, and from various different projects of Betty’s.

In the early days the business consisted of the two brothers, a transient crew and one small steamer. Ever loyal, Betty followed them up and down the Devon coast as they shipped cargos back and forth. When work for small ships became thin, they moved to Newry in Northern Ireland and ran cargo from there to Glasgow. A transit office was built in Newry, where Betty worked for a while helping to arrange the manifests.

Although it is hard to recall, this was Northern Ireland before the Troubles,
²
but with all the problems brewing: a Catholic minority who found it hard to get work, idealist republicans who had not yet moved into the terrorist era, strident and prosperous Protestants who comprised the majority of the employers, and many ordinary working people who did not promote the religious divide. Eddie and Betty, never ones to take the Establishment line, found themselves friends with both the Protestant bosses who became their clients, and with the republicans. Before they could start the shipping line they had to drain a canal that hadn’t been drained for ten years. There was a lot of trouble with the IRA (Irish Republican Army) at that time, and the crew made it a point to be difficult, so it was a stressful time for Betty.

The crew was joined by Brendan Behan, an Irish poet, short story writer, novelist and playwright who wrote in both Irish and English. Behan was hiding out from the authorities: he was a republican and belonged to the Irish Republican Army,
³
and had been released from prison under a general amnesty for IRA prisoners in 1946. Aside from a short prison sentence he received in 1947 for his part in trying to break a fellow IRA member out of a Manchester jail, he effectively left the IRA. He wrote his first and much acclaimed play on board the
Sir James
– some of it on a toilet roll. In his memoirs, Behan refers to Eddie as ‘the Fixer’, suggesting that he was an agent for the Italians. ‘I personally think that he was an agent for himself, but Scotland Yard gave him the benefit of the doubt and freedom from all his sins, past, present and future.’
⁴

Eddie tells the story of hiring Brendan:

He could write, and he was a very amusing companion. He could walk into a pub and take it over – start singing Irish rebel songs. He had a tremendous sense of humour. The friend who asked me to take him on was Kathleen Ryan’s brother. He had never been to sea before, but I said don’t worry about it. We only had four other people on board – myself, my brother, the skipper and a fireman. It was a small cargo boat – only carried about 200 tons. His [Behan’s] parents lived in the slum district. We couldn’t get a taxi, so we walked miles, right into the slum district. We went up a little hill to a row of broken-down cottages, and when we got there, it was about 2 o’clock in the morning. He banged on the door, and banged and banged. After about half an hour of banging and kicking and shouting, finally his father opened the window and shouted ‘Who is it?’ Brendan said ‘It’s Brendan, father. I’m going to sea with Eddie Chapman.’ His father said, ‘Good,’ and put the window down.

Betty also remembers these times:

Brendan was one day painting the ship, from the bottom upwards and only then did he start to question how he was going to get down! Bill Beamish was the skipper and Eddie got on very well with him, they kept in touch and he later skippered Eddie’s yacht,
Flamingo
(see Chapter 6). He was rather a drunk captain! On one trip, which turned out to be very rough seas, he came aboard with plenty of bottles of booze, but no food. Eddie made him catch fish and eat it raw when they were out to sea, as punishment, because he spent all his money allowances on alcohol.

It wasn’t long after his stint as a seaman that Behan became famous as a playwright:

Eddie and I went to the first night of his play. He had an old dirty shirt, and a pint of Guinness. Many people had come to see him. People were buying him drinks, and he got drunk. Halfway through the play he suddenly shouted ‘Stop! That’s not the bloody way I wrote it.’

Eddie and Betty’s business venture was not approved of by the authorities. They had opened up the harbour at Newry and were offering a cheaper and more convenient service than was previously offered to the farmers and traders who had to transport their goods via Belfast, which was further away. The vested interests exerted pressure on Stormont to bring in restrictions to hamper the business.
⁵
Eventually using subsidies, the rival company undercut and put Eddie and Betty out of business.

Betty says of the venture:

It was a hard slog. They did a lot of tough work to get the shipping thing going. Other shippers used to rip-off the merchants and, because of this, Eddie was able to cut their prices and carry the merchandise for much less, so that was a good start! Whilst in Ireland, I got ill and suffered a breakdown; I went to a nursing home called Saint John of God. Despite the severe rationing, the nuns used to smuggle beef across the border for me to eat to build up my strength. I then got transferred to Queen Mary’s Hospital in London for five months. I really suffered from stress. It was a hard life with Eddie.

While Betty was recuperating, Eddie stayed in Ireland to run the shipping business. After its collapse he continued with the cargo business, but this time using an aeroplane. He had retained contacts with many former Battle of Britain pilots. Their expertise and undaunting courage, which had earned them accolades during the war, did not qualify them for anything during peacetime, however. So Eddie and some of ‘the Few’ ran cargo in and out of Tangier, which at that time was an international port.

Gradually Eddie’s story was becoming known, and both Betty and Eddie became well-known personalities. Betty says:

Sometimes I look at celebrities and think how I know that scene only too well. At some point when Eddie wasn’t around so much, I went to Paris for the weekend with a friend. Eddie told us to go to The Elysee and look up Johnny Zumbach who was the man that owned this club. We went in and sat down, made ourselves known, ready for some refreshments. I said to Johnny, ‘That’s not Aristotle Onassis
⁶
and Maria Callas
⁷
is it?’ He took me over and introduced me and we had a good cosy drink and a chat. It was something that very few people have probably had the opportunity to do; they were among the most famous people of the time. To be certain they were more interested in each other than me, but even so I found them both to be very nice people. It was obvious that there was a very deep and loving relationship there. Maria sang with my friend, the famous opera singer Joan Carlyle, and Joan was later asked to unveil a bust of her in London.

We used to go quite a lot to Les Ambassadeurs in Park Lane when we were together in London again. I remember one time when we were there, Richard Burton
⁸
was having lunch with Eddie, and I with his then wife Sybil. We often lunched there to discuss the possibilities of making a film of Eddie’s exploits. Sometimes we met with people such as Paul Douglas
⁹
and Audrey Hepburn,
¹⁰
and various producers. Audrey was so excited, as she was about to go off and do a film – she was all over the place! She was only about 20 at that time. We got invited everywhere because we too at that point were considered celebrities as well. To be quite honest we got sick of it sometimes. There came a time when we wished we could be free of the rich and the famous.