The Spy Who Painted the Queen (4 page)

The censorship department continued to keep up its good work. On 16 February 1915, cable censors intercepted a suspect telegram addressed to ‘Van Riemsdyk, 8 Orange-Straat, The Hague' which read, ‘Please forward amount to László Uteza 28 and wire Lamar postponing journey writing.' The censor had added the note, ‘The word Uteza in annexed message is “street” in the Hungarian language, and László is a very usual Hungarian name. This message is clearly for Hungary.' As part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with which Britain had been at war since 12 August 1914, this appeared to refer to a breach of the defence regulations on sending money to enemy countries, and the telegram was forwarded to MI5 at its HQ in Watergate House in York Buildings just off the Strand.

Thanks to rapid expansion and the calling up of former intelligence officers, some of whom had served previously in the Boer War, by the beginning of February 1915 MI5 consisted of twenty-three officers (from the army and navy) and officials (the civilian equivalent of officers), and forty-three clerical staff (mostly female, though with a few ex-soldier clerks), orderlies, chauffeurs, telephone operators, domestics and Boy Scouts and Girl Guides (who acted as internal messengers). Almost all had joined since August 1914, and many were still learning the intricacies of the index card system, the file registry and the procedures for recording and looking up information. In addition, under William Melville, there were two other detectives for making discreet enquiries and three male Post Office employees with expertise in opening envelopes and detecting invisible inks. Melville also controlled three secret agents on behalf of MI5 who infiltrated the alien communities. It wasn't a large organisation, and what resources it had had been extremely stretched since the outbreak of hostilities, with hundreds of reports from the public, police and military coming in weekly, as well as just as many requests for information. The filing system all but collapsed. Though the appointment of a War Office clerk, Miss Steuart, prevented things getting worse, it was only with the February 1915 appointment of Edith Annie Lomax, a former senior secretary in the music publishing industry, that things began to improve once she grabbed the staff by the scruff of the neck and imposed the necessary levels of discipline and rigorous procedures. The message from the censor clearly seemed to indicate an attempt by someone to transmit money to an enemy country and needed following up.

Lacking resources of its own, MI5 relied heavily on the local police to carry out low-level investigations on its behalf, and a request was sent to Bath Police to investigate the sender of the telegram. A few days later they received a report from Inspector Marshfield dated 22 February, which read:

In reply to your letter 11825 (A4) of the 19th instant respecting a telegram sent on the 16th instant by Mr Philip De László of Lansdown Grove Hotel, I beg to inform you that this man is a visitor at the hotel together with his wife. He is a high class portrait painter and has a permanent address in London. He is a Hungarian by birth, but became a naturalized British subject on August 29th 1914. He produced his certificate of naturalization to the officer who interviewed him. He stated that the telegram was sent to a friend of his at The Hague for him to send particulars to Hungary respecting his mother who has recently died, as the message would take a good deal longer by any other route.

MI5 noticed that De László had, apparently, lied about the telegram's purpose, noting, in a later memo they sent to the Foreign Trade Department, that he had ‘given an explanation that does not fit in with the wording of the telegram', adding the comment, ‘this discrepancy was noted by us at the time but we forebore to take further action then as we anticipated that further proof might be subsequently forthcoming.'

It wasn't to be the only time De László misrepresented the meaning of the telegram; in the book
Portrait of a Painter
on which he collaborated with Owen Rutter before his death, it was claimed that the telegram ‘Please forward amount to László Uteza 28 and wire Lamar postponing journey writing'
was a message to his brother inviting him to a meeting in Amsterdam following the death of their mother. Hardly so, and he had sat through that part of the Denaturalisation Committee hearing which dealt with the matter, so was well aware of the fact.

The name De László, along with variants of it, the subject and the address of the hotel in Bath, would have been entered into MI5's card index and cross-referenced with the original correspondence for ease of ‘look up' should any of them come to attention again.

With more definite information, MI5 could now solidly identify the sender of the telegram. No doubt he appeared in their analysis of foreign-born residents from the 1911 census, where he is the only Philip László, and appears as resident at 3, Palace Gate, West London, aged 42 and of Hungarian nationality, along with his 40-year-old wife Lucy, born in Dublin and his sons Stephen, aged 6, born in Vienna, and Patrick, 2, born in London. They also had a cook, four maids, two nurses and a button boy. This was not a poor household.

A glance at
Who's Who
would have provided some basic information (he first appeared in the book in 1905 as Filip László), including the fact that he had been made a member of the Royal Victorian Order in 1910 and had painted Pope Leo XIII in 1900, the late King Edward VII and other British and foreign dignitaries. He had also held numerous foreign honours, won innumerable awards and married into the wealthy Guinness family. This was a man with connections, and clearly not someone with whom one would tangle without great care. He had also had an interesting life and was a fascinating man, even without their suspicions.

Laub Fulop (in Hungarian the surname is quoted first and Fulop is equivalent to the English name Philip) had been born on 30 April 1869 in Pest, Roumania (now part of Budapest), the third child of a poor family. His father, Adolf, was a tailor. He had two older sisters, then below him another brother and another sister; three more boys might possibly have died in infancy, and he had another brother who died in his 30s. His mother Johanna had been a governess. The family were Jewish and lived in the Jewish quarter. They spoke German at home (though Fulop's was always idiosyncratic), but he probably learned Hungarian at school. According to family stories Fulop was always interested in shapes and colours, and started drawing at an early age.

Following a difficult education (he was nothing if not opinionated, even as a small child), Fulop left school after being humiliated by his headmaster at the age of 9. After attending an exhibition of the great Hungarian artist Mihály Munkácsy, and being highly impressed by what he saw, he took work as a scenery painter, then as assistant to an architectural sculptor.He left after he was, he claimed, bullied by the other apprentices. He was then apprenticed to Ignac Fischer, a well-known painter of porcelain and majolica, but he left again (after eight months) because of bullying. He had abandoned school and three promising apprenticeships by the age of 12. After a short spell working for a sign painter he was apprenticed to Lipot Strelisky, society photographer, and given the task of hand-tinting photos. At the age of 15, a quick sketch he had made of Count Jeno Zichy led to an introduction to the head of the state-funded School of Decorative Arts, and Zichy allowed him to study there two evenings a week. At 17 he was admitted as a visiting student to the Academy of Arts and won a competition to become a pupil of the artist Karoly Lotz. He took private coaching in mathematics to help him pass the necessary certificate required to enter university, which in turn allowed him to defer national service until the age of 23.

In 1888, he won a state scholarship allowing him to study at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice, then at Munich and finally at the Académie Julian in Paris. He then returned to Munich where, in 1892, he met Lucy Guinness, the daughter of Henry Guinness, a banker, of Burton Hall near Dublin. He fell desperately in love and followed her to Paris to press his suit, and the feelings were discovered to be mutual. Though he now had a small reputation as a portrait painter, he was still impoverished, and her family objected to the union. They continued their relationship by post. De László returned to Budapest in 1892 to do his national service, but after only a few weeks he was discharged with varicose veins. In Budapest his talent was recognised by Elek Lippich, secretary of the Fine Arts Department at the Ministry of Education, who supported him and probably secured for him a commission to paint the prime minister, Sándor Wekerle, which led to De László's first royal commission. It was for two portraits, of Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria and his consort Princess Marie Louise, for which Ferdinand awarded him the Bulgarian Order of Art and Science. Back in Pest in 1895 he was commissioned to travel to Dresden to copy the only known portrait of Prince Ferenc Rákóczi II, the man who had led the Hungarian struggle for independence from the Hapsburgs in the eighteenth century. While in Dresden he won other important commissions, and on his return to Budapest he began painting members of the old Hungarian noble houses. By 1896 he had an established reputation in his own country and a growing one abroad, and had converted to Christianity. He was starting to earn considerable amounts of money and built a five-storey house that boasted three studios, which he intended for him and Lucy to live in if and when they were allowed to marry.

In 1899 he was awarded the Gold Medal at the Paris Salon for a portrait of Prince Hohenlohe, painted the Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria and won another Gold Medal in Paris in 1900 for a portrait of Pope Leo XIII. In June 1900 he finally married his beloved Lucy at a ceremony in Stillorgan parish church in Dublin and the couple travelled to Budapest to take up residence in his specially-built house. Their first son, Henry, was born there in June 1901.

De László was now in great demand internationally and spent a great deal of time travelling. In 1903 the family moved to Vienna following the death of their second son. In 1907 he was invited to give his first exhibition at the Fine Art Society gallery in Bond Street and then to paint Princess Victoria, King Edward (painted in morning dress for the first time) and Queen Alexandra. Society people flocked to him to have their portraits painted. The family took up residence at 3, Palace Gate, London, close to Kensington Palace and the Royal College of Art, and in the centre of the diplomatic quarter. The family seemed settled, the demand for portraits continued to be strong and paid well and De László professed a long-held admiration for Britain and its institutions. He made many friends amongst his clientele, including Arthur Lee, MP for South Hampshire, Arthur Balfour, former Conservative prime minister and many other members of both Houses of Parliament. He was also invited to royal garden parties. His international commissions still came thick and fast. He painted the American president, Theodore Roosevelt, in 1908 and an official portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm in 1909. In 1910 he was made a Member of the Royal Victorian Order and in 1912 was ennobled by Franz Joseph, Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary. By early 1914, De László was at the height of his powers and all appeared well with the world.

On 24 July 1915, an MI5 official, Mr Robert Nathan, wrote to Mr Moylan at the Home Office requesting, ‘May we please see the naturalisation papers of László, the artist (Philip Alexius László de Lombas)? He was granted a certificate of naturalisation on 29/8/14.'
This may have been in response (though it seems slightly delayed) to the interception of a postcard dated 18 June from Madame van Riemsdyk in Holland referring to the use of the diplomatic bag to send correspondence to him via the Dutch Legation in London. It may also be linked to a reference in some of the MI5 correspondence, which says, ‘Information was subsequently [i.e. after the Bath Police interview] received from a reliable source that De László was sending money from this country to his relatives in Hungary, and steps were accordingly taken to exercise special supervision over his correspondence.'
The reliable source was almost certainly the normal censorship which had intercepted a letter dated 3 March 1915 referring to another money transfer. Whichever it was, ‘special supervision'
meant all post addressed to De László through the ordinary mail was put into the hands of the Post Office Special Section to be opened and, at the very least, copied before being sent on. Unlike mail from abroad, opened by the Censorship Department, which was opened blatantly and bore a large sticker ‘Passed by Censor', this mail was identified at the local sorting office and sent to be opened secretly by a team of highly trained Post Office clerks who could read and speak French and German and who learned Dutch in their own time after war was declared because of the number of letters they had to check written in that language.

This ‘Special Section' was closely linked to MI5 and included Malcolm Brodie, who had been involved in the Carl Lody case, and two colleagues, Frederick Bosworth Booth and John Barr Fetherston. They were given honorary military rank and became fully fledged MI5 officers. Their methods remain secret to this day, though the steam kettle was used, as was a long, thin instrument that could be used to roll up a letter very tight, inside a sealed envelope, and then draw it out through a small gap at the top. It's not explained how they got it back in again! These men were experts, and MI5 depended heavily on their expertise. They faced a number of German ploys to prevent or detect tampering with their letters including envelopes stuck together with adhesives that were immune to steam treatment, the placing of special chemicals in an envelope that would change colour if in contact with moisture, the use of wax seals, and the careful and intricate folding and placing of letters within the envelope. Spur-of-the-moment solutions had to be invented, among them the boiling of the notepaper and, on several occasions, the complete reproduction of the correspondence and envelope. As far as they knew, these duplications were never discovered.