Who was Elizabeth Poston? Composer, editor... and undercover agent
Not many people know of Elizabeth Poston. Those who do may call to mind the haunting beauty of her most celebrated composition, ‘Jesus Christ the Apple Tree’, or recognise her name as the editor of the Penguin Book of Carols.
But during the Second World War, working under cover of the BBC’s music department, this elegant and sophisticated composer was a secret agent responsible for sending vital messages to resistance groups across Europe. Under her aegis, the BBC’s overseas services broadcast precise pieces of music whose hidden message could only be deciphered by those in possession of a code. In the depths of Bush House, under Churchill’s direct orders, Poston worked alone. A single mistake would, at best, ruin a mission, at worst mean death to all its participants. She told no-one what she did, either then or later.
Protecting state secrets
Fact or fabrication? The Second World War was a time when ordinary people did extraordinary things. Most were forbidden to talk about their work. Poston, naturally reticent, had no difficulty adhering to the terms of the Official Secrets Act. Throughout the rest of her life she said virtually nothing about her wartime career. It is only through one or two guarded comments of her own that we now realise that she was engaged in work of national importance.
Elizabeth Poston... a career at the BBC
But there is precious little hard evidence. Poston’s personnel file at the BBC’s written archives in Caversham is no longer extant, but we know she joined the corporation on 5 November 1940 as assistant to Kenneth Wright, then ‘overseas music director’. The department grew swiftly. Staff appointments within it changed with bewildering rapidity. Working alongside colleagues that included Lennox Berkeley and Arthur Bliss, Poston was promoted several times before being made European music supervisor (EMS) in 1943, based in Bush House.
Evidence of coded messages
Of secret work, there is no official mention whatsoever. I first heard of it in a 1991 interview given to the Musical Times by the late Malcolm Williamson, then Master of the Queen’s Music. Williamson succeeded Poston as the occupier of Rook’s Nest House in Stevenage, a house famous for being the childhood home of EM Forster and the model for Howard’s End. Here Dr Williamson discovered a large pile of ancient gramophone records with handwritten labels. The recordings, he claimed, consisted of old English music that Poston had edited for sending coded messages during the war.
Another reference is found in ‘Forster Country’ by fellow Stevenage resident Margaret Ashby. This fascinating local study contains chapters devoted to Poston, with passages such as: ‘She did secret service work, carrying out an idea thought to be originated by Churchill, whereby gramophone records were used to broadcast coded messages to resistance movements in Europe…’
What did Elizabeth Poston herself say about the messages?
Fleeting references to secret war work in Poston’s obituaries are clearly limited to what she was prepared to reveal. Simon Campion, as Poston’s executor, came close to the answer on ‘a golden summer’s day, as she talked with rare candour about her life. We got on to the war, and she mentioned the codes, but
I foolishly interrupted with a question: How did it work? “That’s secret,” she snapped back; the subject changed, and the moment was lost.’
In a recent programme on BBC Radio 4, Tinker Tailor Composer Spy, Ashby revealed that Poston had once demonstrated how the music code system required the gramophone needle to be placed at a point on the record, a skill once familiar to engineers. The records would be marked with chinagraph, indicating the music’s start point. But of the underlying messages, Poston revealed nothing further.
Secret messages and the BBC
Poston may prove elusive, but there is no doubt that the BBC was involved in a vast range of clandestine communications, much originated by the Special Operations Executive, an organisation set up by Churchill with the immortal instruction ‘And now set Europe ablaze’. In an age when wars are reported by satellite videophone, it is difficult to imagine the former importance of radio. For ordinary people in occupied countries, listening in secret, programmes from London brought hope of a free Europe and the only reliable way of finding out what was going on. For those engaged in resistance, public broadcasts offered an ideal opportunity to insert a private message.
How does aural code work?
Most code systems relied on words, not music. For instance, scripts from the ‘Radio Padre’, Canon Selby Wright, always arrived late in the studio because they had to be both censored and encoded before broadcast. The BBC’s French service evolved a system in which frequently bizarre secret messages were hidden among genuine family enquiries about missing people.
As for music, critics have frequently ridiculed the idea of music codes as too cumbersome and unreliable. But there is at least some evidence that the French, Belgians, Czechs and Poles all used music to send messages from London. The composer Francis Chagrin is thought to have composed a coded version of ‘Babar the Elephant’ for the French language programme Les Français parlent aux Français. Chagrin, who was the programme’s musical adviser and composer from the outbreak of war, was decorated by the French government in 1948. Why? Not, I imagine, for his services to orchestration.
The Belgians had a programme called Radio des Beaux Arts, which on the surface was little more than a sequence of well-loved classical pieces. But an agent, now dead, once confided to an official at the Imperial War Museum that messages were conveyed by the choice of composer and broadcast order of the pieces. In BBC archives, this mysterious programme has vanished without trace.
'Jodoform' and the Polish air force
The only wartime musical code system that we can clearly identify was operated by the Poles, using a system invented by Czeslaw Halski, a musician in the Polish air force. ‘Jodoform’ was, in essence, very simple: the music at the end of the news bulletin carried a single message, according to a pre-arranged code, such as the time or location of an arms drop into Poland. The music was chosen to be instantly recognisable, and consisted of ‘reserved’ tunes, which carried messages, and ‘covering’ tunes, which were a decoy to confuse enemy monitoring services.
Every day a different record was taken from Polish military headquarters in Buckingham Palace Road to the BBC. The courier was Lieutenant Zubrzycky, who now lives in Canberra. In an interview, he recounted how he delivered ‘marked up’ records daily to Room 6 in Bush House. He also recalled how he and two others making regular deliveries were issued with a pass in the name of Peterkin, a name that may prove significant.
Jodoform worked well from 1941 onwards. The late Jan Nowak was an agent who flew into Poland as part of Operation Wildhorn on 25 July 1944, a mission to pick up a V2 rocket captured by the Polish resistance. He was delighted that the code music for his return to Poland was Chopin.
Was Elizabeth Poston involved with Jodoform?
The technical operation of Jodoform used gramophone records precisely as described by Poston. But where was she? The Poles have no record of her involvement. Maybe her job as European music supervisor required her to ensure that Polish code music did not interfere with other broadcasts, or vice versa.
The Jodoform code book contains a list of music under the heading ‘Nie moga byc grane w audycjach biezacych’ – not to be played during current broadcasts. If other countries operated a similar scheme to the Poles, then international liaison would have been crucial. We also know that the post of EMS was transferred to London to avoid political ‘gaffes’. For instance, the BBC was forbidden by the French to play anything less than the full two minutes of the ‘Marseillaise’, and there was a general policy to play music banned by the Nazis.
Elizabeth Poston... spying for the BBC?
In a revealing comment, Poston once said that she worked ‘more or less under the Foreign Office direct, because there had to be a musician there…’. This fragment suggests another possibility: that the job of EMS was a cover to allow Poston to provide intelligence to Whitehall from within Bush House. Why spy on the BBC?
By setting up the SOE, Churchill had effectively sanctioned a huge range of clandestine activity. Much of this was undertaken with minimal British involvement (missions to Poland, for instance, were organised by the Polish Sixth Bureau). With the development of coding systems, it would have been essential for Whitehall to have someone within Bush House to ensure that messages sent by foreign language services within the BBC were a bona fide part of the allied effort. If messages were musical, it was clear that a musician would be required.
What do Elizabeth Poston's diaries reveal?
Corroboration comes from Poston’s diaries, crammed with the names of composers, pieces, recording sessions, notes of festivals and national days. Among these is a regular entry, every other Friday, consisting simply of the word ‘Poles’. At the climax of the Warsaw uprising there is the enigmatic entry: ‘Poles l.pole.radio.signal?’ What could it mean? There are regular references to the Czechs, to Denmark, and a single entry for 4 November that suggests a meeting with Belgian Intelligence. She meets ‘Peterkin’ on a regular basis. She had a friend called Norman Peterkin but if this refers to him, why is he not ‘Norman’, and why give such a particular name to the Polish couriers?
Then we have Poston’s frequent hair appointments. She was not vain, her hairstyle was plain, and in wartime, visits to the hairdresser were a luxury. Could these appointments be a cover for a regular debriefing from Whitehall? Stranger things have happened, even in wartime…