Hess and the Lady from Storey

Hess and the Lady from Storey's Way

Hess: The British Conspiracy by John Harris and M J Trow (Andre Deutsch, £16.99)

Review by Alan Kersey
Cambridge Evening News, 24th April 1999

There is a very good reason for going all over this bewildering business yet again - the Cambridge connection. Hess: The British Conspiracy tells how a respectable little lady from Storey’s Way played a large part in the bizarre attempt of Hitler’s enigmatic deputy to negotiate some kind of peaceful settlement with Britain at the height of the Nazi bombing blitz on London.

Mary Violet Roberts and the man thought to have been her father-in-law, Lord Roberts of Kandahar, the former British Viceroy of India, together built a house in Storey’s Way, with the help of architect Baillie Scott. It is now a listed building.

In the 1920s they went to Germany and in the mid-Thirties Mary Roberts received a visit from prominent Germans Karl and Albrecbt Haushofer in Storey’s Way, just before she moved to a house in Madingley Road.

It was these German connections which led to Mary’s involvement in the Hess story, although neither of the Haushofers were ‘true Nazis and Albrecht, who was later put to death on Himmler’s orders, was outspoken about the Nazi hierarchy.

He had his largely British audience in stitches over dinner one night mimicking Ribbentrop, but be could find nothing remotely funny about Goebbels, whom he called “a poisonous little man, who will give you dinner one night and sign your death warrant the next morning”.

In this convoluted but fascinating book, we read about Hess’s well-publicised but not so well-documented arrival by parachute in of Britain after apparently missing his assumed target of a country house in Scotland.

Photographs of the Fuhrer with British peacemaker Ian Hamilton and details about the Duke of Bedford’s involvement with the propaganda war waged from Woburn Abbey make this a story that is stranger than fiction.

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