‘Extremely valuable work’: British intelligence and the interrogation of refugees in London, 1941–45

Abstract

This article focuses on the compulsory questioning of over 30,000 refugees who escaped to Britain during the Second World War and who were detained in London's Royal (Victoria) Patriotic School. It answers three questions: how did intelligence come to see non-British civilians as sources; what characteristics did refugees possess and how did these influence the information they shared; and who was interested in their accounts? It argues that, while this site was set up as an MI5 vetting camp for the identification of Axis agents, it quickly evolved into an intelligence-gathering centre, serving the interests of multiple departments and organisations.It was March 1941 when Henry Taymans and Joseph Abts, two young students and cousins, escaped Nazi-occupied Brussels. The ensuing journey to Britain, where they planned to volunteer for the Free Belgian forces, was to last 77 days and saw them drive to Paris, take a train to Bordeaux, cross to Spain on foot, then to Portugal, and sail from Lisbon to Gibraltar.From there they boarded HMS Argus, which took them to England. 1 Upon arrival in mid-June, and before they could join the Allied forces, they had to be interrogated by War Office and Security Service officers, and possibly by Secret Intelligence Service ones as well. Although the report the War Office produced on their interrogation was a page long, it was enough to help photographic intelligence identify an ammunitions dump in Forêt de Soignes. 2Locating an ammunitions dump in a Belgian forest was no major intelligence coup. But consider that Taymans and Abts -whose escape story has been selected at random and was not uncommon -were two of over 30,000 people interrogated in the same way, and the value of such interrogations changes. Indeed, while many of these civilians were eager to share information, doing so was not optional: they were kept for days in London for the purpose, and their formal status was of persons under detention. The place of their detention was the Royal (Victoria) Patriotic School, often called Royal Patriotic School (RPS) or the London Reception Centre. 3 This is nevertheless a place about which we know very little. Any mentions made to it in historical work have been brief and descriptive, 4 and emphasised its counter-espionage functions