Maxwell Knight

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Charles Henry Maxwell Knight OBE, known as Maxwell Knight, was born on 4th September 1900 in Mitcham, Surrey, UK and died of heart failure on 27th January 1968. A respected spymaster and naturalist, in April 1925 he was recruited by Major General Sir Vernon Kell, Director General of the British security service MI5 responsible for counter terrorism, and rose to be head of section B5(b) responsible for infiltrating agents into potentially subversive groups, based for much of its existence at 308 Hood House, Dolphin Square, London separate from the rest of MI5.

A respected case officer, notable successes were the infiltration of political groups leading to the internment and imprisonment of people regarded as a threat to the UK such as Albert Williams, Percy Glading, George Whomack, Anna Wolkoff, Tyler Kent, Captain Archibald H M Ramsey and Sir Oswald Mosley. His early warnings of communist infiltration of MI5 were not taken seriously. A notable failing was his entrapment of Ben Greene the pacifist Quaker refugee worker who was interned by the then Home Secretary, Sir John Anderson, as result of false evidence from Knight's agent provocateur Harald Kurtz.

Agents working under him included Olga Grey, Joan Miller and Tom Driberg,

Ian Fleming the author of the James Bond series of books used an amalgam of Knight and his former superior Rear Admiral John Godfrey, Director of the Naval Intelligence Division as a model for the character 'M', Bond's boss.

After the second world war in 1946, Knight, who had since childhood been an ardent naturalist, began what was to become a successful broadcasting career on BBC radio, appearing in and hosting such programmes as Naturalist, Country Questions and Nature Parliament. He appeared occasionally on television in Peter Scott's Look and Animal, Vegetable or Mineral and published 34 books and wrote magazine articles. His broadcast career progressed alongside his MI5 work until 1956 when he retired early from MI5 on the grounds of ill health, suffering from angina. After his death in 1968, the Maxwell Knight Memorial Fund was set up and from the proceeds funded the Maxwell Knight Young Naturalists' Library in the education centre of the Natural History Museum.

[edit] Published Works

• Crime Cargo, 1934
• Gunmans Holiday, 1935
• Bird Gardening

[edit] References

• Masters, Anthony. The Man Who Was M - The life of Maxwell Knight (Grafton Books 1986). ISBN 0586068678