Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (70 page)

There was conflict between the duke – who naturally put the Tower’s function as a military garrison first – and those who saw its potential as a tourist magnet. By the 1850s the American author Nathaniel Hawthorne gave a wide-eyed description of the first of two visits he made to the Tower as a paying punter. Though complaining of the speed with which the Yeoman Warder rushed him round, Hawthorne was shown the armoury – with Henry VIII’s corpulent armour and flattering codpiece as its centrepiece; the execution block and axe; and the Crown jewels – and the tour culminated with tea and buns in the newly opened refreshment room before he exited over the newly drained moat. The Tower, with all its ghosts and secrets, had entered the tourist age.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

THE TOWER AT WAR

APART FROM A
bomb placed by Irish Fenians in the White Tower in 1885 (there was another planted by the Fenians’ IRA successors almost a century later), the Tower of London, so soaked in blood for centuries, was barely touched by violence after the deaths of the Cato Street conspirators for the rest of the nineteenth century. A guide published in the Edwardian era tells us that public entry to the Tower was free on Mondays and Saturdays between ten and six o’clock. On other days the Tower was closed at four o’clock, and sixpence was charged to enter the White Tower and a second sixpence to visit the Crown jewels – then housed in the Wakefield Tower.

In 1914, this peaceful picture changed. As the First World War broke out, the Tower was transformed once more into its traditional roles of military fortress and state prison. Although it was almost 150 years since the last execution – that of Lord Lovat – had taken place at the Tower, once again, in the supposedly enlightened and humane early twentieth century, men would die for their crimes at the fortress.

The first decade of the new century had seen an outbreak of popular paranoia about German spies worming their way into the nation while England slept – or at least dozed. These fears were not wholly groundless: there were a number of German agents quietly collecting information about their future foe, particularly around the ports where England’s Royal Navy docked. One such was a naval officer, Carl Hans Lody, who had been living in the neutral US and spoke good English. When the First World War broke out in 1914, Lody arrived under an American alias, Charles Inglis. He spent three weeks mooching around Edinburgh trying to get information about the fleet anchored at nearby Rosyth naval base. He passed on such snippets to his handler in neutral Sweden in coded letters which were nevertheless intercepted and read by the security
service MI5. Lody even passed on the wild rumour that Russian troops had arrived in Britain in great numbers – identifiable by the snow on their boots.

Lody became aware that he was under suspicion and fled to Ireland. Arrested at a hotel in Killarney, he was tried by a court martial in London and condemned to death. The night before his execution he was transferred from Wellington Barracks near Buckingham Palace to the Tower. A long wooden shed had been set up before the war for the Tower’s garrison to use as an indoor rifle range. The shed lay between the inner and outer western walls of the fortress between the Martin and Constable Towers. It was here that Carl Lody – and the ten spies who followed him during the war – died.

On the fateful date of 5 November 1914, a cold and wet evening, Lody was lodged in the guardroom of the Casemates, near the Tower’s main entrance, for his last night on earth. Lody, a punctilious sailor, wrote his last letters: to the officer commanding Wellington Barracks, thanking him for his correct treatment during his confinement; and, movingly, to his family:

My Dear Ones, I have trusted in God and He has decided. My hour has come. And I must start on the journey through the Dark Valley like so many of my comrades in this terrible War of the Nations. May my life be offered as a humble sacrifice on the altar of the Fatherland. A hero’s death on the battlefield is certainly finer, but such is not to be my lot, and I die here in the enemy’s country silent and unknown, but the consciousness that I die in the service of the Fatherland makes death easy. The Supreme Court-Martial of London has sentenced me to death for Military Conspiracy. Tomorrow I shall be shot here in the Tower. I have had just judges, and I shall die as an officer, not as a spy. Farewell. God bless you. Hans.

Lody’s last words about being an officer rather than a spy were echoed when he greeted the Assistant Provost-Marshal who came to fetch him from his cell. ‘I suppose that you will not care to shake hands with a German spy?’ ‘No,’ replied the soldier. ‘But I will shake hands with a brave man.’ Lody, upright and unafraid, was marched into the execution shed, seated in a wooden chair and blindfolded. The eight-man firing squad, from the 8th battalion of the elite Grenadier Guards, took aim and fired. The ten agents who followed Lody to death in the Tower during the war
were of a lesser calibre. Mostly civilians, and often motivated by the hope of money rather than Lody’s patriotism, they were quickly recognised and arrested.

A more distinguished and famous wartime resident was the Irish humanitarian and martyr (or traitor, depending on your viewpoint), Sir Roger Casement. Casement was the Ulster-born diplomat who before the war had ruined his health, but made his humanitarian reputation, by fearlessly exposing the brutal genocidal oppression practised by colonisers first in Africa’s Belgian Congo, and later in the Putomayo region on the upper Amazon between Brazil and Peru. The reports into these outrages produced by Casement had shocked world opinion and led to reform. The Irishman was rewarded with a knighthood, and took early retirement, becoming ever more extreme in his Irish republican views.

The outbreak of war found him propagandising among the Irish community in America, whence he was sent to Germany in an attempt to persuade Irish prisoners of war serving in the British Army to fight with Germany for their country’s freedom. Failing in this endeavour, a frustrated and depressed Casement was sent back to Ireland in 1916 on board a U-boat to either support or call off the planned Easter Rising against British rule, depending on the conditions he found on arrival. The dinghy which brought Casement and his companions ashore near Tralee on Ireland’s west coast was swamped; half-drowned, he was rapidly arrested.

He was brought to London and taken to the Tower, where, like the German spies, he was confined in the guardroom of the Casemates. Treated as a traitor and turncoat by his guards, and denied visits from his London sympathisers, Casement’s physical and mental condition dramatically deteriorated. He twice attempted suicide: once by ingesting curare, the South American paralysing poison which he had carried since the Putomayo; and once by swallowing nails he twisted from the walls of his cell. His guards were forbidden to speak to him, and he only discovered what had happened in Dublin when a Welsh guard, with sympathy for a fellow Celt, whispered the news that the Easter Rising had been bloodily suppressed.

Eventually, the Liberal prime minister, H. H. Asquith, was told of Casement’s desperate state and ordered him to be moved to an ordinary prison. His solicitor, Gavan Duffy, later a Sinn Fein leader, saw him in the Tower and was unable to believe that the tattered scarecrow was the elegant man he had known before the war. The prisoner was filthy and
covered in bites from the bugs infesting his cell. He was still dressed in the sea-soaked clothes he had worn when he came ashore. His beard was matted, his eyes bloodshot and sunken, and he seemed unable to speak or concentrate. Deprived of his braces lest he attempt to hang himself, he was forced to hold his trousers up. The last of the Tower’s distinguished traitors, Casement’s deplorable condition revived the very worst of its traditions.

Tried at the Old Bailey, Casement received the inevitable sentence of a traitor in wartime: death. His sympathisers attempted to win a reprieve on the grounds of Casement’s pre-war humanitarian work. To counter the campaign, the government secretly circulated documents, the ‘Black Diaries’, revealing Casement’s obsessive homosexuality – then regarded as a moral, as well as a criminal offence. He was hanged at London’s Pentonville prison in August 1916, although his body was repatriated to Dublin in 1966. He walked to his execution, said the hangman, ‘like a prince’.

Between the wars another, albeit less distinguished, traitor who worked for the Germans was detained at the Tower – much to the curiosity of the press, and the public who continued to flock to within a few feet of the guardroom in the Tower barracks where the prisoner was held. Norman Baillie-Stewart was a disgruntled army officer of the Seaforth Highlanders, who resented authority and was attracted by the new Nazi regime which had come to power in Germany in 1933. On holiday in Germany, he seems to have fallen for a honeytrap set by the Nazi secret services, became entangled with a German girl, and agreed to become a spy.

He was quickly detected. At the time, Britain was still anxious to appease Hitler and Baillie-Stewart was an embarrassment. It was too awkward to put him on public trial, so the authorities threw him into the Tower. Held in the Wellington barracks in a guardroom with slit windows, Baillie-Stewart’s presence soon became known to the press who dubbed the anonymous prisoner ‘the Officer in the Tower’. He was eventually court-martialled, after which it was felt that the simplest thing was to expel Baillie-Stewart from the army and let him return to Germany. He became a German citizen and broadcast propaganda over Berlin Radio during the war. It was Baillie-Stewart’s posh voice, rather than the nasal tones of William Joyce, that first led a British journalist to dub him ‘Lord
Haw-Haw’ – a nickname soon bestowed on Joyce. Baillie-Stewart’s German citizenship saved him from sharing Joyce’s fate dangling from a rope after the war, and he died in a Dublin bar in 1966.

Like that other London landmark St Paul’s Cathedral, the Tower survived the Blitz virtually unscathed. However, the fortress’s most enduring and best-beloved tradition – its population of ravens – came close to extinction. No one knows when the ravens first arrived at the Tower, although this biggest member of the carrion crow family may originally have been attracted by the quantities of rotting human remains left in and around the fortress after executions. All except one of the Tower’s dozen or so ravens were scorched or scared to death by the bombs. The sole survivor – a bird named Gyp – lived, maintaining the tradition that so long as ravens stay at the Tower, Britain will endure.

In the Second World War a single German agent, Josef Jacobs – who broke his ankle parachuting into a field in Cambridgeshire, and was soon captured – shared the fate of the eleven spies shot in the Tower in the First World War, thus becoming the last man to be executed in the Tower – to date. The Tower, however, played host to a rather more important parachutist than the sad figure of Jakobs. Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy Führer and faithful dog-like follower, arrived unexpectedly in wartime Britain, parachuting out of a clear sky over Scotland in May 1941. Hess, always an eccentric figure, was apparently trying to regain lost favour with the Führer by undertaking a one-man peace mission to Britain so Germany would not have to fight a war on two fronts when it invaded Russia the following month. He may have been lured across in a British Intelligence ‘sting’ which suggested that he would meet members of a secret ‘peace party’ favouring a compromise deal with Nazi Germany. Arrested on his arrival, Hess never tasted freedom again, and his first place of confinement when he was brought to London from Scotland was the Tower.

The beetle-browed Nazi leader arrived at the fortress in an anonymous ambulance and was put in the Lieutenant’s Lodgings, the half-framed Tudor house where Lady Jane Grey and Guy Fawkes had been among those preceding him, and which Hess described as ‘charming’. During his time at the Tower, Hess watched admiringly as the fortress garrison drilled to pipes and drum with a precision he praised as ‘worthy of Prussians’. After four days, Hess was driven away – again by ambulance
– to the first of several safe houses in London and Wales where he would spend the rest of the war. Tried at Nuremberg, he was sentenced to prison for life – and stayed in Berlin’s Spandau jail until the end of his days in 1987.

If Rudolf Hess was one of the Tower’s most infamous prisoners, the pair of young toughs who spent a week in the guardhouse of the Wellington Barracks in 1952 were almost equally notorious. Identical twins Reggie and Ronnie Kray were the East End wide boys who became London’s most notorious gangsters of the 1960s, building an empire in their native ‘manor’ based on murder and violence meted out without mercy to those who crossed them. The first of their many enemies was the Royal Fusiliers army garrison at the Tower, from which they absconded after assaulting a corporal on their first day as conscripts doing compulsory military National Service in the fortress.

Arrested at their mother’s house, the twins were brought back to the Tower where they spent a week sleeping on the bare boards of the Wellington Barracks’ punishment cell before absconding again. The boys, who had trained as boxers, were handy with their fists and soon made life too hot for even the army to hold them. After months of the same cat-and-mouse game of absconding followed by recapture, the Army gave them up as a bad job. In 1954 the Krays were freed to begin a very different career. The twins, in their brutal and violent ways, marked an appropriate full stop to the Tower’s thousand years as the world’s premier prison.

EPILOGUE

The words of an anonymous and tattered guidebook to the Tower, published at the dawn of the twentieth century, are as true today, when the old fortress is Britain’s bustling, buzzing high-tech tourist trap, as when they were written a century ago:

There is no spot in the British Isles where the memories of the past cluster more thickly than around the old grey walls, the picturesque towers and the dark and gloomy chambers of the Tower of London. The Tower is one of the most notable historic monuments in existence. For seven centuries it occupied a foremost place in all the transactions that affected the welfare of the kingdom and the personal fortunes of its rulers. As we tour the Tower there pass before us in memory’s sad review the shadowy figures of kings and queens, statesmen and warriors, prisoners, martyrs and those doomed to a cruel and bloody death. Every tower reminds us of a memorable deed, every chamber of a famous name. The great fortress is peopled once more with its victors and its victims; past times live again; history ceases to be a dull record; it becomes a living, moving tale; men and women of other ages are mere names no longer, they are clothed with flesh and blood; we witness their triumphs, we hear their prayers and sighs, we note their bearing in hours of trial, of exaltation and despair, and we see them in the dismal torture chamber or on the terrible scaffold with the glitter of the headsman’s axe before their eyes. To know the story of the Tower of London is to be familiar with all the great actors in the drama of English history, for its ancient walls and weather-beaten stones are the links that bind generation to generation and age to age from the Norman conquest to the present day.