Hidden
from view to the general public, Craigiehall House is probably unfamiliar to many
residents of Kirkliston and the surrounding area, despite a history dating back
to the 12th century. Situated within the campus of the former
Scottish Army Headquarters just off the Burnshot Road between Kirkliston and
Cramond, the house and grounds were requisitioned by the military at the
outbreak of war in 1939. It was there in 1941, during the darkest days of World
War Two that the house became the venue of a top-secret meeting between a
prominent Nazi figure and a member of the British Royal Family. How this came
to pass is a tale of intrigue, duplicity, subterfuge and treachery.
One-Way Ticket
The pilot’s desperate attempts to escape from his aircraft had been under observation by one of the many Royal Observer Corps posts that kept a constant vigil against enemy attacks throughout the war. As the pilot floated safely earthwards under his parachute, a bright flash of flames lit the sky as his aircraft crashed to the ground. Despite blacking out once again on landing, the pilot was conscious by the time the first person to reach him arrived. David McLean, head ploughman at Floors Farm, Eaglesham helped the shaken man out of his parachute harness and asked him his nationality.
“German,” was his reply. He then introduced himself as Hauptmann (Captain) Alfred Horn and stated he wished to be taken to Dungavel House, the home of the Duke of Hamilton. However, his lengthy struggle to escape from the aircraft had carried him some considerable distance from where he meant to be. Instead, he had landed on Eaglesham Moor, 12 miles from Dungavel House where he had hoped to put down his aircraft on the nearby airstrip.
McLean helped the limping German to his cottage close by where members of the local Home Guard Unit and other military personnel soon arrived. After a rather fruitless interrogation of the pilot – now a prisoner, of course – he was shunted between various locations until someone with the necessary seniority could be found to take custody of the prisoner. Throughout, ‘Captain Horn’ persisted in his request to be taken to the Duke of Hamilton for whom he claimed, he had ‘a vital secret message’. By chance, one of the officers interrogating ‘Captain Horn’ had spent some time in Munich before the outbreak of war and thought he recognised the prisoner. “You look exactly like Rudolf Hess,” said the officer.
Rudolf Hess
As Deputy Führer, Hess was one of the most senior figures in Nazi Germany, which made his flight to Scotland in 1941 seem all the more preposterous and incomprehensible. However, Hess was convinced that the continuation of war between Britain and Germany was unnecessarily ruinous for both nations, although he was utterly convinced that Germany would be victorious sooner rather than later. Hess also believed there existed a powerful appeasement and anti-war lobby within Britain that was ready to oust Prime Minister Winston Churchill and replace his government with politicians that would sue for peace. There was another good reason for Hess wanting to make an early peace with Britain; Hitler was about to launch a massive attack on the Soviet Union. Having to fight Britain in the West and the Soviet Union in the East would place a heavy burden on Germany’s resources, one which should be avoided if at all possible. Hess’s mission was to bring peace proposals to the Duke of Hamilton and gain an audience with King George VI in the hope of persuading him to remove Churchill from office and replace him with a figurehead amenable to a cessation in hostilities and more sympathetic to Nazi Germany.
APPEASERS,
TRAITORS OR PATRIOTS?
Lord Halifax
Who were the most likely candidates in Britain willing to oust Churchill and sue for peace? The previous Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain had done everything he could to avert war, and his failed policy of appeasement had brought disgrace upon the nation in allowing Hitler to gobble up Czechoslovakia and Austria before finally declaring war on Germany after the invasion of Poland, (although it can also be argued that it bought precious time to enable Britain to build up the strength of its armed forces in order to better resist Nazi Germany in the future). However, Chamberlain’s early death from cancer in 1940 put him out of the equation as far as Hess’s plans were concerned, so it was to other figures that Hess hoped to appeal. In 1940, it seemed that the most likely successor to Chamberlain as Prime Minister was Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, another notorious appeaser. As history records, it was Churchill who succeeded Chamberlain as Prime Minister and we know only too well that Churchill had every intention of pursuing the war until victory was achieved. Churchill got wind of clandestine attempts by Halifax to communicate with the Nazi regime in order to broker a peace agreement and therefore shunted him across the Atlantic as Ambassador to the United States. This kept Halifax at arms-length and well out of the immediate sphere of influence within the British Government. However, there were other eminent individuals and politicians within the British Government and society who were variously appeasers, anti-Semites and those who regarded Bolshevism in the Soviet Union as a much greater threat to peace in Europe than Nazi Germany and saw Hitler as a possible ally against the ‘Red Menace’.
The Duke of Hamilton
The Duke of Hamilton
The Duke of Windsor (formerly King Edward VIII)
Apart from the establishment and constitutional abohorrence at a British monarch wishing to marry a twice-divorced American citizen (bearing in mind that a reigning British monarch is the head of the Church of England and Defender of the Faith), the Duke of Windsor’s openly pro-Fascist views and his desire for an Anglo-German alliance were of great concern to the British Government. In 1937 he had visited Germany and was warmly received by Hitler and other prominent Nazis who saw him as a likely pawn in gaining Britain’s future acquiesence to Hitler’s plans for European expansion and domination.
In the early days of the war, approaches were made to the duke by German intermediaries regarding his desire for peace and willingness to be reinstated as King of Great Britain should circumstances change in the future. Again, news of these attempts to broker peace became known to Churchill. Again, it was deemed expedient to remove the troublesome individual to somewhere out of harm’s way; hence the duke’s appointment as Governor of the Bahamas on the other side of the Atlantic!
Prince
George, The Duke of Kent
Before the war he worked closely with his brother David* (King Edward VIII) and shared openly, similar pro-German sympathies. At various times he served in all three branches of the Armed Forces and even worked as a Civil Servant in the Foreign Office and later the Home Office, the first member of the Royal Family to do so. Although married, he had a somewhat tarnished reputation as a playboy and cad and was reputed to have had affairs with various individuals ranging from Noël Coward and Anthony Blunt (later to be exposed as a Soviet spy) to the musical star Jessie Matthews. It was also rumoured he was addicted to drugs, especially morphine and cocaine which was not such a commonplace vice then, as it is today.
The Interrogation of Hess
Even if Hess has landed successfully on the airstrip at Dungavel House at the end of his solo flight, he would have been hugely disappointed to discover that the Duke of Hamilton was not at home. In fact, he was at RAF Turnhouse in Edinburgh where he was station commander! Hamilton received a call in the middle of the night that a German airman had crash landed and was probably Rudolf Hess and that he urgently requested a meeting with him. It was evident that Hess’s arrival and demand to meet the duke was as much of a surprise and mystery to Hamilton as it was to most people.
At this time, Hess was being held at Maryhill Barracks, Glasgow where a somewhat chaotic preliminary interrogation had gleaned little from a generally uncooperative Hess. On hearing his constant demands to meet with the Duke of Hamilton on matters of great importance, Hamilton was instructed by his superiors to drive the 50 miles from RAF Turnhouse to Maryhill Barracks where he arrived at 10 am that morning. At first, Hamilton did not recognise Hess, but was eventually persuaded of his identity when Hess reminded him that they had lunched together at Hess’s house in 1936 during the Olympics. Hess told Hamilton that he was ‘on a mission of humanity’ and that Hitler did not wish to defeat England [sic] and wished to stop fighting. Hess went to outline Hitler’s terms for peace and asked that the King give him ‘parole’ as he had come unarmed and of his own free will.
Hamilton was soon to be called down to London to report in person to senior government figures including Churchill himself while Hess was transferred for safety to Drymen Military Hospital on the shores of Loch Lomond, as Maryhill was deemed too vulnerable to German air raids. However, it was not long before Hess was to be shifted again to yet another location …
-ooo-
On Tuesday,13th May, a pilot officer named Frank Day and 5 other young pilots were ordered to report to RAF Turnhouse where they were rather mysteriously told to stand guard duty. Soon afterwards they were driven a short distance – about 5 miles - to a large Victorian house. Later, a tall German officer in Luftwaffe uniform arrived escorted by two soldiers and was shown into one of the rooms outside which Frank Day was standing guard. Five minutes later a senior RAF officer arrived wearing a gold-braided cap and several medal ribbons. Day was later told that the RAF officer was ‘the duke’ who he assumed was the Duke of Hamilton. However, the gold braid and chest full of medals sported by the new arrival meant he could not possibly have been the Duke of Hamilton who was a Wing Commander and did not wear a cap with gold braid. Sensationally, the description certainly DID match that of another ‘duke’ with the rank of Air Vice-Marshal. The ‘large Victorian house’ in question was, of course, Craigiehall House and the ‘duke’ was none other than Prince George, Duke of Kent, the younger brother of King George VI.
In order to convince Hess that his peace proposals were being taken seriously Churchill thought a meeting with the king’s brother might cause Hess to reveal more information than he had thus far. With the duke being so closely related to the king, Hess might be convinced that the next step would be a meeting with the king himself and the culmination of his ambitions for the removal of the Churchill Government. Conveniently, at that time the Duke of Kent was residing at Pitliver House near Rosyth just across the Forth. It may have been possible that the duke would be recognised at Drymen Military Hospital whilst a short hop across the Forth to a secure military base like Craigiehall House would reduce the chances of this happening.
To this day, what took place at that meeting in Craigiehall House remains buried along with other sensitive state secrets. It seems possible that Hess may have been the victim of a ‘sting’ engineered by British Intelligence and lured to Scotland under false pretences. To keep Hitler thinking that a peace agreement was still on the table would let him concentrate on his forthcoming assault on the Soviet Union. It is uncertain whether Hitler’s denials that he knew of Hess’s planned peace mission were true or not. In any event, to be seen trying to negotiate peace might be perceived as a weakness, so Hitler could not publicly admit prior knowledge of Hess’s mission. Significantly, German air raids on London tailed off dramatically after Hess’s mission which may suggest that Hitler was still being given the impression that Britain would sue for peace.
Hess was eventually relocated to Aldershot (after a brief spell in the Tower of London) for the duration of the war and was spared the hangman’s noose at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. Sentenced to life imprisonment, he spent the rest of his days in Spandau jail in Berlin where, ironically, he hanged himself at the age of 93 on 17th August 1987. By this time, he was the sole remaining inmate of Spandau; a pawn in the Cold War as his incarceration gave the Soviet Union access to democratic West Berlin as part of a shared guard duty roster between the victorious nations.
As for Prince George, the Duke of Kent, he met an untimely death on 25th August 1942 when the Sunderland flying boat in which he was a passenger crashed into a hillside near Dunbeath, Caithness.
Was Prince George a traitor? Probably not. His meeting with Hess was engineered by the British Government and he did not seem to harbour any lasting empathy with Nazi Germany. Was the Duke of Hamilton a traitor? Highly unlikely. His bewilderment upon Hess’s unexpected arrival did not speak of someone who was plotting against the State and his war record was quite distinguished. Was the Duke of Windsor a traitor? There is persistent evidence that his sympathies remained heavily with the Third Reich and that he would have acquiesced to a resumption as monarch in the event of the fall of the Churchill Government and the deposal of King George VI, thence becoming a puppet king with Hitler pulling the strings.
- David was indeed the first baptismal name of King Edward VIII. The adoption of the name Edward was an example of a regnal name, often used by popes and monarchs during their reigns. It has occurred a number of times in the UK. Queen Victoria’s first name was Alexandrina and her son Albert became Edward VII (against his mother’s wishes) as he regarded Edward as an honoured name borne by six of his predecessors and did not want to diminish the status of his father, Prince Albert. After Edward VIII’s abdication, Prince Albert, Duke of York also chose one of his other Christian names and was crowned George VI. It had been speculated that King Charles III would choose to be King George VII in honour of his grandfather, although it would have been be more to do with the fact that the name ‘Charles’ has a chequered history as far as British monarchs are concerned. Charles I lost his head on the block and Charles II was reviled for his Catholic sympathies at a time when there was great animosity between Catholics and Protestants.
A P George
Kirkliston Heritage Society
SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Military History Matters
Padfield,
Peter, Hess, Hitler and Churchill, Icon Books Ltd, 2014
The Rake, The Modern Voice of Classic Elegance
Wikipedia
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