Enemy Alien, Student, Spy

Abstract

Looking back Max realized how difficult it must have been for the family to let him go, but as he slipped into his new identity he felt no particular worry. Mary Wraith was in Ladbroke Grove, friends from HEC were elsewhere in London and Stathy was in Cambridge. He rented a bedsit in Bayswater and got on with setting up Fimex Limited, an acronym for Finance Import Marine Export — which was what he had been groomed to do. His Spicer and Pegler acquaintances put him in touch with British companies and the Darrs were soon the agents in Turkey for the steel plate conglomerate Richard Thomas & Baldwin and the Dewhurst cotton concern. He joined the grand Baltic Exchange — he later said because ‘the food was better there than anywhere else in the City’¹ — and transferred his family’s business account from the Lothbury branch of the Wesminster Bank to the St Mary Axe branch opposite the exchange, then to Mincing Lane, following the assistant manager, Stanley Whitbread, who would help him almost to the end of his publishing years. When Whitbread became the manager at Lombard Street, Max’s account went with him.