The Reckoning Read online

  * My name is George Nathaniel Curzon/I am a most superior person/My cheeks are pink, my hair is sleek/I dine at Blenheim twice a week.

  TWO

  ‘This Was the Job for Me’

  The rainbow that arced over Haifa that day would have been visible to Geoffrey Morton as he went about his duties controlling the city’s traffic during Sir Harold’s arrival and departure. He was not the sort of man to believe in omens. Life was good. He was thirty years old, fit, happy and second in command of the Haifa urban district. His service record was crammed with seventeen commendations and in the 1937 New Year’s Honours’ List he became the first recipient of the new Colonial Police Medal in recognition of ‘distinguished and valuable services’. He had got where he was not through luck but by hard work and determination.

  Haifa was a good posting, the most attractive city in Palestine. It faced onto the Mediterranean which sparkled like a sheet of sapphires in the bright daylight and glowed like molten gold in the setting sun. To outsiders it seemed blessedly civilized, a relief after Tel Aviv’s perpetual building works and Jerusalem’s unedifying religious rivalries, which were enough to put some of the devout among the Mandate’s rulers off God for ever. When the Arab revolt erupted, though, Haifa had felt the shock waves.

  Morton was there for the start of the trouble. One morning in May 1936 he was dispatched to deal with a crowd of Arabs who were gathering in the souk. They waved knives and sticks and shouted anti-Jewish and anti-British slogans and were soon surging through the streets towards the District Commissioner’s offices in the middle of town.

  When the main body was blocked by a police cordon, a breakaway band of troublemakers regrouped on Kingsway, one of Haifa’s main streets, and began stoning Jewish cars. Morton was one of the small squad sent to deal with them. He was wearing a steel helmet – standard riot issue. As he stood in the lee of a building discussing the situation with a fellow officer, someone dropped a coping stone from three storeys up, which caught him square on the head.

  He was knocked unconscious but when he came round he carried on with his duties. The requested reinforcements did not materialize. The mob was getting ever more threatening. The senior officer present, Inspector G. F. ‘Dinger’ Ring, decided it was time for action. The Palestine Police had a detailed drill for dealing with mobs. Ring yelled out a proclamation in Arabic, calling on the rioters to go home or face the consequences. The Arabs responded with a shower of missiles. He now ordered the designated marksman in the party, Sergeant ‘Nobby’ Clarke, to move to the next step. He ‘went through the rifle drill as calmly and efficiently as if we were giving on the parade ground a demonstration of our humane methods to a delegation from the League of Nations,’ Morton recalled.1

  First Clarke held a cartridge aloft to leave the crowd in no doubt of what was coming and give them time to do the sensible thing. The gesture had no effect. He loaded the round into the breech and thrust the bolt home. There was another pause, then Ring gave the order to take aim – but to wound, not to kill. ‘Slowly and deliberately’ Clarke drew a bead on the knees of the mob’s ringleader. Morton saw several stones and sticks hit the sergeant’s body ‘but he stood there, steady as a rock, resisting the irresistible instinct to flinch and duck’. Morton speculated later that perhaps a missile had spoiled Clarke’s aim or the victim had been stooping to pick up a stone when he was hit. Whatever the reason, an instant after the order to fire, the ringleader ‘lay, 20 yards away in front of the mob, stone dead, with a neat, round hole between the eyes’. The gunshot was followed by ‘a split second of petrified silence and then by the vague sounds of myriad feet running for dear life’. Moments later ‘there was not a soul to be seen, and that particular riot was over’.

  In later life Morton recounted this incident – and many more like it – with relish. He liked the smell of danger. He welcomed the psychological challenge inherent in every confrontation between the forces of law and order and the mob. Inevitably the police were outnumbered and, though armed, would be overwhelmed if the rioters went on the rampage. By keeping their nerve, though, and reading the mood of the crowd, good policemen should be able to impose their will on far superior forces. Service in the Palestine Police would give him many opportunities for matching his will and skills against the enemies of British rule.

  Like many in the force, he had arrived there almost by chance. Geoffrey Morton was the second son of William Jackson Morton, a lively character who seemed to embody the vigour, public-mindedness and optimism of early twentieth-century Britain. He was the manager of a busy branch of United Dairies, whose horse-drawn carts supplied London housewives with their daily milk and butter. The premises were in Urlwin Street, Lambeth, south London, next to the yellow-brick arches of a railway viaduct that carried commuters and shoppers back and forth between Blackfriars Station a mile or so away on the north bank of the River Thames and the south-east suburbs of London. Mr Morton lived a few dozen yards from his place of work with his wife, Sarah, two sons and daughter and a maid in a large nine-room terraced house. Their home was a middle-class outpost in a boisterously working-class area. It faced onto Camberwell Road, a wide, traffic-ridden street that during the day was lined with barrows selling fruit and vegetables manned by coarse, chatty costermongers. The many pubs, music halls and cinemas ensured that the area was equally lively at night.

  At first sight, William Morton appeared a man of monumental respectability. He attended the local Anglican church on Sundays and was an enthusiastic Freemason. For thirty years he sat as a Conservative member on the London County Council, the powerful municipal body that ran many of the capital’s services, and, as a lay magistrate, dispensed justice to the drunks and delinquents of the borough. When the war came in 1914, he was forty-three, too old for the colours. He signed up instead as a special policeman, rising to command the auxiliaries in Lambeth and neighbouring Southwark. On his death in 1940, the local newspaper described him as ‘one of the best-known figures in South London’.2

  Behind the austere frontage of conformity, though, there gleamed a sense of fun. Edward VII was on the throne when Geoffrey was born and William Morton shared his sovereign’s enjoyment of card games and long, smoke-filled evenings. Like the monarch, he did not allow his wife’s strict sense of rectitude to interfere with his own enjoyable routines of meeting friends and visiting music halls.

  Later in his own life Geoffrey Morton would give an exhaustive account of his professional career. He said very little about his boyhood and adolescence – as if it had no bearing on who he was or what he became. He left nothing on record concerning his brother, Arnold, four years his senior and a ‘black sheep’ who disappeared early from the family story. Much more is recorded about his younger sister, Marion, an ambitious, spirited girl who went on to become a teacher and an international standard netball player.

  He started at his first proper school aged eight in January 1916. Every morning he set off from Camberwell Road on the two-mile journey to St Olave’s Grammar School, an impressive red-brick building, adorned with stone bas-reliefs of philosophers and poets, which sat on the south bank of the Thames next to Tower Bridge. ‘Stogs’, as it was known to generations of pupils, was founded in 1571 to provide free education to boys from modest homes. The curriculum in 1916 included scripture, Latin, Greek, French, German, Spanish, English grammar and literature, history, geography, arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, chemistry, physics and botany. Great store was set on the values of the rugby field and the cricket pitch. Olavians filled the ranks of the professions. They were lawyers and bankers, accountants and teachers and doctors. They also served the empire as soldiers, sailors and administrators.

  The list of distinguished Old Boys was long. It seemed unlikely that Geoffrey Morton would ever be among them. ‘He has been somewhat disappointing,’ recorded his form master, Mr Midgley, when Geoffrey had been at the school barely six months. ‘His work has shown ability but he is not consistently keen.’3

>   The school’s ethos was Victorian and Edwardian – forward looking, but intensely patriotic and nostalgic for an imagined chivalric past. Its solid brick walls could not shield it from the very modern war being fought across the Channel. Stogs men were floundering in the khaki mud of Picardy, and dying at the same rate as everyone else. In Geoffrey’s first year, the school magazine was full of death notices and unsparing accounts of the fighting. ‘In the Royal Army Medical Corps we see the most terrible side of war,’ wrote an Old Boy, Leslie Hocking.4 ‘We see strong men pass us on their way up the trenches and a few hours later it is our duty to fetch some back as terribly disfigured and mangled corpses.’ Hocking was killed before his account appeared.

  The conflict was on the doorstep. Britons could no longer rely on the surrounding seas to insulate them from violence when the country went to war. In the summer of 1915 Zeppelin airships started to drop bombs on London. In 1917, a raid demolished homes in Albany Road, a few hundred yards away from the Mortons’ house, killing ten and injuring twenty-four.

  Occasionally, Geoffrey responded to his teachers’ urgings to try harder. The rallies were brief. Now and again he shone at French and German. His best subject was English grammar. In everything else he was towards the bottom of the class. He was particularly weak at scripture. William Morton’s conventional piety had failed to rub off on his son and Geoffrey’s indifference to God would persist all his life.

  He left St Olave’s in December 1922, three months after his fifteenth birthday. His penultimate report carried a wounding parting shot from the headmaster, William Rushbrooke. ‘Failure in effort is culpable,’ he pronounced. ‘He can’t smile a path to success.’5 Geoffrey’s smile was one of his most noticeable characteristics. In the school photographs he always wears a shy grin that makes him seem vulnerable and very young. This immaturity was also commented on by the teachers. ‘He is often childish and silly in his behaviour,’ his last class master, L.W. Myers, observed in the same report.

  Geoffrey’s subsequent amnesia about his schooldays can be explained as a simple unwillingness to recall a period of prolonged failure. Qualifications came to mean a lot to him. In his police career he accumulated many yet he left St Olave’s with none. In a recording made at the end of his life he confessed to being ‘embarrassed’ by this.6

  Stogs boys were expected to stay until they were at least sixteen, when they sat for the School Certificate, which was an essential requirement for a halfway decent job. He never explained the early departure, but it is unlikely that money was the problem. The school fees were modest and the family’s circumstances were comfortable enough to fund Marion’s education through school and university. The likeliest reason was that there seemed little point, to parents and teachers, perhaps to Geoffrey himself, in staying on.

  Without his ‘school cert’ he could expect only a dead-end job. He found one at the meat and poultry market at Smithfield in the City of London, where, each day, from the early hours, porters in bloodstained overalls humped carcasses from cold stores to butchers’ vans. He worked as a clerk for a provisions merchants, no more than a ‘general dogsbody’ he would say later.7

  At some point he quit Smithfield and started work as a low-level manager with his father’s firm, United Dairies. It was scarcely more rewarding than clerking. He soon decided that his ‘future lay elsewhere’ but where exactly he had no idea.

  In the early summer of 1926, chance pointed him in the right direction. Beyond the dairy walls, a great national crisis was brewing. Britain was in the throes of a social upheaval that seemed to some the prelude to a possible revolution. In May, the General Council of the Trades Union Congress called a general strike in an attempt to block proposals to cut miners’ pay and increase their hours. Nearly two million workers responded. The government set up volunteer units to maintain essential services. Tens of thousands of conservative-minded males stepped forward to do their bit to keep the country running, including Geoffrey Morton.

  When the strike was announced he joined one of the expanded special police units that sprang up to assist the forces of law and order. They were untrained, unarmed save for a whistle to summon help and wore civilian clothes with only an armband to denote their authority. On the second day of the strike he turned up at the nearest police station and awaited instructions. The main drama of the day was an attempt by strikers to blockade the London County Council tramcar depot at Camberwell Green and paralyse local transport. One tram had managed to break through and travel half a mile to the Elephant and Castle, a busy road junction. It had been halted by pickets and Morton and a ‘burly constable’ were sent to the scene of the trouble.

  When they arrived, he wrote, they found ‘a large crowd of men – several thousand of them – centred around a stationary tramcar to which they had clearly conceived a marked antipathy. All professional transport workers were on strike, so that the presence of the tram meant that it must be manned by volunteers – or blacklegs as the strikers would have called them.’8

  Morton ‘saw smoke and flames rise from one end of the vehicle, to be greeted by an ironic cheer from its attackers’. Preoccupied by the spectacle of the burning tram, the strikers had not noticed the pair arrive. Despite the number present, Morton’s hefty companion ‘wasted no time. He did not trouble to draw his baton, but with a verve and determination which should assuredly have earned him his cap for England at Rugger, started to elbow his way through the mob towards the tram, with the strikers giving way right and left beneath the impetus of his progress.’

  Morton followed in the constable’s wake, ‘safe in the vacuum created by his passage’. As the crowd registered the arrival of the police, the missile-throwing faltered. One man remained oblivious, and ‘brought his arm back over his shoulder, nearly hitting my policeman on the nose as he did so, and launched a bottle containing a colourless fluid at the tram. As the missile flew from his hand some instinct must have warned him of impending danger for, with a look of horror on his face, he turned his head and saw the huge bulk of the constable towering over him.’ The rioter blurted out an apology only to be ‘answered by a laconic: “Too late, mate!”’ The constable’s baton, ‘which had materialised as if by magic, came down smartly on the bottle-thrower’s unprotected left shoulder. In another second he had disappeared behind us, the baton was back in its pocket and we were on our way once more.’ Soon reinforcements arrived, the rioters were dispersed and order was restored.

  Despite the jaunty tone of this account, the incident made a deep impression. Writing many years later, after a long and incident-packed police career, Morton declared he had ‘never anywhere witnessed a more effective display of sheer police sense than that given by that ordinary, uniformed, duty constable in dealing with that mob’. The arrival of reinforcements had relieved him of the need for a further display of initiative but Morton was convinced that ‘had they not arrived I am sure that my friend was prepared, as a simple matter of duty, to place himself squarely between the tram crew and the rioters, who would only have got at their intended victims over his dead body’.

  The episode had given him an intoxicating taste of the possibilities of police work. It offered power, a whiff of danger, opportunities for heroics in the discharge of duty, and above all adventure and a way out of the tedium of his current existence.

  When the strike ended after nine days in utter defeat for the trade unions, Geoffrey stayed on in the ‘specials’. Nothing he did subsequently, though, matched the excitement of those first days. During the next three years of service he carried out mundane police duties, doing well enough to rise to the rank of sergeant. He was still stuck in his boring job. Every day he scanned the small ads in the newspaper looking for a way out, but the prospects of finding one were dwindling. At the end of 1929 the Great Depression settled on the country and millions were out of work.

  In the late summer, advertisements began to appear calling for recruits to the Palestine Police Force. The anti-Jewish rioting of Augus
t had demonstrated the urgent need for more British officers. The Colonial Office was offering adventure, comradeship, sport and sunshine and an absence of academic qualifications was no handicap. It seemed the answer to Morton’s prayers. ‘The more I thought about it,’ he wrote, ‘the more I was convinced that this was the job for me. It had everything, and surely I had quite a lot to offer in return – I was fit and strong, reasonably literate and willing to learn.’9

  He set off to apply in person at the offices of the Crown Agents for the Colonies at Number 4, Millbank, Westminster, overlooking the Thames. He left after a brief interview with ‘an acute feeling of depression’. Preference was being given to ex-servicemen and being a sergeant in the specials did not compensate for his lack of military experience.

  The walk home through the dreary streets of autumnal south London only intensified his determination to escape. A few months later more recruiting ads appeared. This time Morton did not apply in person but simply sent for the application forms, and filled them in with no mention of the previous setback. He was summoned for a brief interview and a medical, both of which he passed. He was in. On a bitterly cold morning in February 1930, together with twenty-nine other embryo policemen, he set sail from Southampton for Port Said, Egypt. The boat was the Esperance Bay. It was, he said later, a good name. ‘Esperance’ meant ‘hope’, the spirit sustaining all of them as they headed off to their new lives.10

  The force they were joining had an exotic, frontier feel. They wore the kalpak, a high-crowned astrakhan cap, a legacy of the Ottoman era, and the rural sections patrolled the dusty fields, parched hills and stone-walled villages of the territory on horseback. The British contingent contained a high proportion of adventurers and risk-takers. It seemed to some of its members that they had joined a sort of British version of the French Foreign Legion, whose ranks were filled with men who had enlisted to escape or forget.