Red Empress, Red Colonel and Me

Alex didn’t know that Betty’s husband had tried to have him tortured and murdered. Neither did Eileen, Alex’s wife. By the time this was revealed in Peter Hruby’s book Dangerous Dreamers (2010) they had all died natural deaths. I knew these people at the time of the Vietnam War when Whitlam was just moving into temporary power. We occupied a small world back then. Like most of my jobs it began accidentally when Gallimard, a major French publisher, decided not to renew its paperback publishing licence with Hachette but create its own paperback imprint, Folio. The decision in Paris gave me, with slightly above zero French-language skills, a job in Sydney.

The distant publishing divorce gave custody of the minute wholesale French-language market in Australia to two competing companies—Vistula (Hachette) in Sydney and River Seine Publications (representing Gallimard and other publishers) in Melbourne. Sheppard’s Bookshop acted as the Sydney distributor for River Seine. It was commercial competition and also political. Vistula, on the Right, was owned by Quadrant founder Richard Krygier, and we represented the Left.

Working in a loathed public service job I was a regular customer at Sheppard’s Bookshop and a browser and occasional buyer of the French paperbacks they had on show in the shop and a disorganised larger range kept on an upper floor. The books seemed unloved, and unsold. One day I casually asked the bookshop owner, Colonel Alex Sheppard, if he needed anyone to look after the French books. He did, and also needed someone to sell Alpha book titles, which he published, into Sydney book stores. Two half-time sort-of-jobs produced a single one for me, for a time.

Sheppard’s Bookshop was at 104 Bathurst Street. The ground-floor shop was run by Alex and Mrs L, who I think may have been Czech: assertively European, blond-haired, and aggressive bun. She did some secretarial work and looked after sales when Alex wasn’t present. I never thought she had much interest in books, but I may have been wrong.

The wholesale and publishing side of the business operated on a floor higher up in a small office cum storeroom. Open the door and on the left was Betty, the secretary, sitting behind a high counter with a typewriter and phone. To the right was a space for Peter, the packer. I was somewhere straight ahead. The rest of the space held tall metal shelves with stocks of books from Melbourne University Press (mainly Manning Clark), the Folio Society, and our own Alpha books. Somewhere near me was the changing stock of French books. Periodically the very North Shore Mrs Sheppard came in to work, looking after the upmarket mail order Folio Society books.

I never called the Sheppards Alex or Eileen, though Betty did. To me they were Mrs and Mr, or perhaps Colonel to customers. I was a different generation from the people I was working for and with. In our office Betty, Peter and I would talk among ourselves and then switch to careful best behaviour when the Sheppards or Mrs L from the shop came in—I don’t think our angelic performances fooled them. Peter was short, lined and worn. He seemed a troubled, lonely man. Sometimes he mentioned the Greek island he came from. He was very supportive of Alex, but would frequently burn with fury and mumble some non-classical Greek when he felt himself being imposed upon—which did happen when parcels had to be urgently delivered.

Sometimes the enemy rang, for there were occasional business dealings between us and Krygier’s company, and I usually took the call. Most often I dealt with a woman we called the Baroness. It was such a joke. She was mitteleuropéen, she had a very superior voice, and she did not like dealing with us. Only much, much later did I learn her title wasn’t an office joke. The rank may have been slightly amiss, but she with the peasant-commanding voice was Princess Michael of Kent’s mother. A champion skier and one-time wife of an aristocratic SS officer she had also, in post-war Australia, been a hairdresser, bed-and-breakfast proprietor, Angus & Robertson sales clerk, and now worked for a Polish Jew. But we also had our royalty, for Betty was the Red Empress of Australian communism.

You probably know that famous photo of Betty—the one showing her and husband Rupert Lockwood outside the Royal Commission on Espionage in 1953. Betty has a large handbag and Rupert holds a hat. By 1972 she looked older, naturally, but her chin was just as forthright. In the coming years Rupert would be surrendered like a library book and she would recreate herself as the freewoman Betty Searle. She died in Canberra in 2003, aged eighty-seven, and the ACT Legislative Assembly heard obituaries marking the death of a feminist, author, academic and “social justice activist”. They politely overlooked the narrow-mindedness and bigotry of her communist life. There is now an affordable-housing property for women named after her in Canberra.

Betty was fascinating. She, Rupert and their children had spent several years in Moscow in the 1960s and learnt that the sensible Russians did not trust the foreign willing helpers who betrayed their own peoples in the Soviet interest. She talked of music recordings, possibly the best things she had found to buy in Moscow, and described Wilfred Burchett’s spacious flat, which her family had occupied. She did not talk of the Gulag. Work had been found for her with an English-language magazine and the children attended school and university. As she told us, Peter and me, of her life as a communist, I thought it was all in the past, that she was no longer a member of the Communist Party of Australia, but some obituaries claimed that she had stayed a member until it evaporated in 1991.

She spoke of her life in the 1930s and 1940s and public speaking in Hyde Park. Lacking the opportunity of a bloody civil war, Betty was unable to play her role of an antipodean La Pasionaria as her comrades in an Australian KGB carted off our parents. Betty recalled bursting into tears when Stalin died. This was a time when it was acceptable to believe Stalin was bad or had made many mistakes but Lenin had been good. Betty, who had always worked in books, gave the impression that the history of Red Sydney should have a chapter on book trade communists and she named names—probably well known, but I was fairly new in Sydney. In Russia she had learnt that the famed “rivers of gold” were a reality. That expression, of red money flowing into foreign subversion, stayed with me because at the time I was not sure what it meant. I enjoyed her conversation. It was a past I had not known and I did not know the questions to ask. Perhaps if I had she would not have been so forthcoming.

Betty talked of the Petrov affair, recalling the problems of dealing with harassment from journalists and security when the story became public. What she told us then was very much what she later included in an open letter in the National Times to Meena Combe, whose husband David was at the centre of another spying affair in 1983. In her letter Betty hit the familiar notes of battling outrageous opponents “whose overriding ambition is to deny Labor power”—which, as members of the CPA, was a cause to which she and her husband had devoted much of their lives. She never mentioned that both the Petrov and Combe affairs had rather a lot to do with covert Soviet security intrigues. In his book The Petrov Affair Robert Manne suggests that Rupert Lockwood “responded to the knowledge of his involvement in the Petrov Affair with defiance and bravado”. This may not have been how Betty judged her husband for going into hiding, leaving her and the children unprotected. I’m not sure how it was that Betty came to be working for Alex.

I liked my employer, who could erupt with marvellous fury which I, fortunately, generally avoided stimulating. He was five foot six, roundish, his eyes were blue, and his thinning hair had been dark. He was somewhat uncomfortable in conversation. He was also, as ASIO agreed, nicely mysterious. Much of his past was self-made. When he enlisted in the Militia Forces on his birthday in 1930 he was an eighteen-year-old despatch clerk born in Collingwood in 1912—actually he was born in 1913 and was celebrating his seventeenth birthday. In September 1939, when Nazi Germany and its Soviet ally invaded Poland, Alex joined the Australian Army and Betty’s future husband Rupert joined the Australian Communist Party. In his enlistment documents Alex describes himself as a married barrister at law and has moved his birthplace to Welbeck, London. He also gained several years of maturity by claiming to have been born in 1910. A typed biographical note at the beginning of his military file in the National Archives claims he was the “son of a Scottish colonel, was born in 1910 in London and came to Australia as a boy. He was educated at The King’s School near Sydney.” A long way from his real working-class origins in Melbourne, of which he spoke to me. His legal studies, never completed, may only have begun after the war. He fought bravely in Greece, was an efficient and respected officer and won the Military Cross. It was presented to him by the Duke of Gloucester in 1942, but stolen from his hotel room in Vichy, France, in 1964 and never recovered—it cost him three pounds eleven shillings and threepence for a replacement medal and case.

After the war Alex was with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and the British Economic Mission to Northern Greece, from which he resigned. He was sharply critical of Britain’s activities during the Greek Civil War and publicly supported the communist side. In 1948 he was in Prague seeking support for the Greek guerrilla movement, which he supported in lectures and articles. Back in Sydney he became a bookseller when he purchased Morgan’s Bookshop in Castlereagh Street in November 1950. The familiar signature A.W. Sheppard, Alexander William, appeared under book reviews, letters and articles and pronouncements from the Booksellers’ Association. Alex was also a principal actor in the campaign to overturn Australian censorship law and in the local publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Radical 1940s Sydney student, educationist, author and Quadrant contributor Alan Barcan, who knew my employer in the 1940s, called him an “interesting figure … a non-communist, anti-Catholic Christian radical but sympathetic to communism”. Those eleven words in Barcan’s book Radical Students are a far closer appraisal than ASIO arrived at after thirty years of spying.

In the office we enjoyably acted as though we believed ASIO was listening to our dull phone calls. Years later I wondered if it was just a game we had been playing. Three volumes of the ASIO investigation of Alex, covering the years 1949 to 1970, are now available in the National Archives. In 1967 Sir Charles Spry, ASIO’s Director-General, answered a query from a mysterious “P” who had made inquiries about Alex: “I have taken some interest in the activities of this individual over the years and you may rest assured that I do keep him well in mind.” What had ASIO expected to find? Their files on him could have been assembled by a newspaper cutting service. He was a public man and a prolific writer and ASIO wasted all those years collecting newspaper cuttings and some gossip. One informer told them that the bookshop was “the headquarters of the anti-Catholic movement in Sydney”. Another disclosed that in conversation at the time of the Royal Commission into Espionage, “Sheppard referred to our Director General (Operations) Mr Richards as ‘just a mug cop from the West, and we will get him’.”

Alex, like other Australian leftists, is also present in Czechoslovak State Security archives, a subject examined in Peter Hruby’s book Dangerous Dreamers. Hruby has drawn attention to documents regarding Alex compiled in late 1949 when he applied for a visa to return to Prague to lobby on behalf of the Greek communists. He seemed dependable but at the same time there was a mystery about him the comrades could not pierce, and his application was denied. After this disappointment Alex was back in Australia and involved in the establishment of an Australia-Yugoslav Cultural Association for which he was criticised in the communist newspaper Tribune, where he had previously published articles on Greek politics. In the secret files Hruby found a long letter from Rupert Lockwood, written in Warsaw in April 1950, and addressed to his Czech translator in Prague: “My Dear Edith”. The letter had been translated, classified “Secret!” and distributed in the Czech Ministry of Information. Lockwood aimed two paranoid and lethal sentences at Alex:

I suppose you heard that it was now definitely established that Colonel A.W. Sheppard, who visited Prague some time ago, is a bribed Titoite agent and Intelligence spy. He has been very disruptive in Australia and in Scandinavia. I have some interesting information about him.

After the CPA disappeared, lifetime communist Eric Aarons admitted that if his party had taken power in the 1940s or 1950s it would have acted just as other communist parties had done and “executed people we considered to be objectively, even if not subjectively (that is, by intention), helping our enemies”. When Lockwood was betraying Alex to the Czechs it was only a few years before he wrote the kill-list, known as Document J, which he prepared in Canberra for Soviet intelligence and whose existence was only revealed during the Royal Commission on Espionage. As Peter Hruby comments on events in Czechoslovakia at the time, “The comrades kept denouncing each other, and it was up to the authorities to decide whom to purge and whom to trust, at least for the moment.” It was a foretaste of what could have happened here.

In December 1952, as Czech communists were hanging other communists who had been tortured and sentenced to death in Stalinist show trials, Colonel Spry, in a clear abuse of his position, prepared a detailed four-page document, based on ASIO’s investigation of Alex, for the use of Liberal parliamentarian and anti-communist William Charles Wentworth. Those bloody events in Europe influenced a long letter from Alex which was published that month in the Jewish News. Recalling that only three years before, after visiting Eastern European countries, he had given public lectures offering “a very strongly held opinion that there was no anti-Semitism in the Communist countries, and that even though it was not officially encouraged everywhere, Zionism was not an offence”. Now, obviously disturbed by the brutal show trials, he has changed his mind: “I should make clear that my statements about the equality of Jews in these countries have been cancelled.” Alex mentioned two of the men who had just been murdered, Rudolf Slánský and André Simone (real name Otto Katz), as personal friends and “the main sources of my information that there was neither anti-Semitism nor official anti-Zionism in Czechoslovakia”. Slánský had been convicted of “Trotskyite-Titoist-Zionist activities in the service of American imperialism”. Alex had been assured that Czechoslovakia was free of anti-Semitism “by many Jews—not one of whom is at liberty now … knowing something of the Communist countries, I do not believe that an official policy of anti-Zionism can do anything other than encourage anti-Semitism”.

ASIO clipped the letter and placed it in its author’s file. There was no attempt to discuss his views or his warning for the safety of European Jews in communist hands. Neither did the security agents wonder if there was a real and seriously subversive side to the friendships he claimed with such high-level contacts, powerful and committed Stalinists until they became victims of what they helped to create.

Ostensibly Alex was a left-winger who mixed with left-wingers and did left-wing sorts of things. He was passionate about Greece, and we had some good Greek meals. In a public lecture ASIO noted him introducing himself in Greek: “My body is Greek—my heart, Greek—myself, Greek—except my name.” He was a bookseller, yet this held no interest for ASIO. It was at a small gathering in October 1954, to mark the move of Alex’s bookshop from one side of Castlereagh Street to the other, that Dr Evatt made public a statement he was about to release that would tear the ALP splittingly apart. At another time Alex was in partnership in a Canberra bookshop with a man he had previously published and who was also of interest to ASIO, Dr John Burton.

Bookshops are nice places for practical espionage usage: lots of people coming and going, parcels and letters in, parcels and letters out, and they employ all sorts of suspicious types. ASIO never looked seriously at the bookshops Alex owned. Perhaps their deepest comment was in an internal memo which stated that the shop, for which they gave the wrong address, “does not stock any particular type of book”. Alex would have been proud of that.