The PGS Pupil Arrested as a Spy

 by John Sadden

Photo Caption: Daw as a Southampton player in 1912

As a suspected spy, Leonard Sydney Dawe was an unlikely candidate. A popular headmaster, he was also a First World War veteran, wore spectacles and compiled crosswords. But the MI5 officers who knocked on his door were probably aware that the best spies are people whom no one would ever suspect. Dawe’s profile was so respectable and inconspicuous as to be suspicious.

But the Secret Service had other grounds for believing that he was involved in espionage. The evidence seemed irrefutable.

Dawe was born in Hounslow, Middlesex in 1889. According to the 1891 census, his father was an auctioneer and valuer. By the time of the 1901 census, the family had moved to St Andrew’s Road, Southsea, and the following year the boy started at Portsmouth Grammar School. He quickly established himself as an excellent all-rounder on the sports field.

Dawe played a straight bat for the Cricket First XI, and his ability as a bowler to make the ball turn was worthy of comment in the school magazine, The Portmuthian. He became a popular captain of cricket, providing “an excellent example in the field” as well as a powerful bat.

As a forward in the Football First XI, Dawe’s shooting “gained an accuracy and sting” and he was noted for his ability to hit the target from unlikely and difficult positions. He demonstrated strategic skills, was a “versatile dribbler” and was “invaluable to his side”. According to The Portmuthian of November 1906 he was “one of the best purely individual players of recent years, and scores many goals by going clean through himself.”

So, Dawe was competitive and an individualist. A maverick, perhaps?

He also excelled in the classroom and was awarded the Grant Memorial Scripture Prize and the School Drawing Prize. He achieved the highest marks in the school in the London Matriculation exams. Too clever by half, perhaps?

The world was at Dawe’s feet, and it was no surprise when he went up to Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Twenty years later, Cambridge was to become the seedbed for a group of communist spies, amongst them Philby, Burgess, Maclean and Blunt. But Dawe was only interested in his studies and his sport. He gained his football “blue”, scoring in a match against Oxford that Cambridge won 3-1.

In 1912, Dawe signed for Southampton, scoring on his debut appearance against Plymouth Argyle. He was a member of the Great Britain football squad for the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, but was not selected to play. He appears to have made one appearance for the England national amateur football team in the same year, and a further ten games for Southampton, before concentrating on his teaching career.

In 1913, he took up a position as a science master in Walthamstow from which he progressed to a post at St Paul’s School, Barnes in 1919. He became Head of Science in 1924 and left, two years later, for Strand School in Tulse Hill where he rose to become headmaster. In the pre-decimal currency days, Dawes’ initials, L.S.D., landed him with the nickname “moneybags”.

Dawe began compiling crosswords for the Daily Telegraph in his spare time, and created the first to appear in the newspaper in July 1925. It soon proved immensely popular and Dawe made things more interesting, pioneering the cryptic clue. An indication, perhaps, of a devious mind?

In 1936, a party of boys from Strand School, on a school trip to the Black Forest, was trapped in a sudden snowstorm. Five of the boys died and, as headmaster, Dawe went to Germany to bring the survivors home. The coffins, made of timber from the Black Forest, were returned with scores of swastika-adorned wreaths with the message “for our English comrades”. Wreaths were also sent to the boys’ funeral from Adolf Hitler personally, and from the Hitler Youth. Three years later Dawe evacuated his school to Effingham in Surrey to escape the bombs of the Luftwaffe.

Dawe kept up his Telegraph crosswords through the war. It was noticed that the word “Dieppe” appeared as the answer to a clue in one of them. Two days after publication the disastrous Allied raid on Dieppe took place. Over half the men who made it ashore were killed, wounded or captured. Dawe’s inclusion of the word was dismissed as a coincidence.

Two years later, during the months leading up to D-Day, the words Juno, Gold, Sword, Utah and Omaha appeared, and the link was quickly made with the top-secret codenames for the assigned D-Day beaches. On the 27^th May 1944, eight days before D-Day, the code-name for the whole operation, Overlord, appeared, followed by Mulberry, code name of the floating harbours (some of which were under construction in Gosport). Finally, three days before D-Day, the code-name for the naval assault phase of the operation, Neptune, was revealed by one of Dawe’s clues.

 The evidence, then, seemed irrefutable, and the MI5 agents appeared on the doorstep of his Leatherhead home. Dawe described later that he and another compiler were “turned inside out” but that “eventually they decided not to shoot us”.

 Forty years later, Ronald French, a 14 year old schoolboy at the time of D-Day, revealed that his headmaster at Strand School, Mr Dawe, occasionally invited pupils into his study, where, as a mental discipline, he would encourage them to help fill in blank crossword patterns for use in the Telegraph. Dawe would then create clues for the boys’ solution words. The codewords, Mr French explained, were common knowledge because American and Canadian soldiers who were camped nearby, awaiting the D-Day operation, used them casually in their conversation. What was not known was where and when the invasion would take place.

After the Allied success, Dawe questioned the boy about the origins of the words that had resulted in him being interrogated, but fortunately not shot, as a spy. Horrified by the boy’s explanation, Dawe made him swear never to reveal what had happened. Dawe died in 1963, his many achievements as a teacher, headmaster and footballer overshadowed by his brief and completely innocent stumble into the dangerous realm of espionage.

Sources:

The Portmuthian (Portsmouth Grammar School Magazine)

The Times 23 April 1936

Invasion – the D-Day Story (1954)

The Daily Telegraph  3 May 2004

Thanks to Alexandra Aslett, Archivist at St Paul’s School