Verschoyle is said to have published a book of poems in 1931, but I can find no record of it in the British Library Catalogue. Like many of the best literary editors – and all the best publishers – Verschoyle was no writer himself: his literary ambitions may have included editing and introducing The English Novelists: A Survey of the Novel by Twenty Contemporary Novelists, published by Chatto in 1936 and including Greene, Louis MacNeice, V.S. Pritchett, Edwin Muir, H.E. Bates, Peter Quennell and Elizabeth Bowen among its contributors, but that was about as far as it went. According to Alan Ross, he was ‘an impresario rather than a journalist by nature’: he was forever pondering the plays, poems and memoirs he planned to write, but ‘the gin bottle used to come out at an early hour, so I imagine Derek belonged to the company of those who took the wish for the deed’. But if he failed to advance his own career as a writer during his time at the Spectator, he may well have made contacts that would prove useful to him as a spy or double agent: the magazine’s editor, Wilson Harris, was an old-fashioned Tory, but those writing for the Spectator included Graham Greene, Goronwy Rees, later to be implicated in the flight to Soviet Russia of his friends Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, and Anthony Blunt, whom Verschoyle enlisted as the art critic.
Shortly before war broke out, Verschoyle married the willowy, elegant Anne Scott-James, who went on to become a well-known journalist, the mother of Max Hastings, and the wife of Osbert Lancaster. He had taken a cottage in Aldworth, the village in the Chilterns in which Richard Ingrams now lives, and used to invite her down for weekends. ‘In that summer of 1939 there was a fair amount of false emotion in the air,’ she wrote in her autobiography: Verschoyle left almost immediately to join the RAF, working in Intelligence, and ‘later, when we were divorced, it was as though it had never happened’. When I asked her to elaborate, she said she would rather not: ‘although Derek caused me a lot of anxiety one way and another’, she bore him no ill will after all these years; marrying him had been a ‘big mistake’, but she hadn’t had the nerve to back out of it. He had, she went on, ‘made a lot of mischief in his time’, but when, years later, they met occasionally, ‘all his spark had gone, and it was quite heavy going’.
I have no idea what Verschoyle’s war record amounted to, though he is said to have risen to the rank of wing commander; he was also enlisted by MI6, along with Graham Greene and Malcolm Muggeridge. In Coastwise Lights, the second volume of his autobiography, Alan Ross suggests that Verschoyle was somehow involved with a Partisan unit in Rome as the Allies fought their way up the spine of Italy. As such he was forever requesting his superiors in London to send out large sums of money to fund a particularly useful and well-informed secret agent. The information supplied by this mysterious agent was so valuable that it was decided to send out a senior officer to investigate: the senior officer chosen was Verschoyle’s old colleague and drinking companion Goronwy Rees, who soon realised that the secret agent didn’t exist, and that all the information being fed back to London was guesswork on the part of Verschoyle. Alan, who was a good friend of both men, reckoned it was a case of putting a thief to catch a thief, and that once the matter had been sorted out they felt free to spend their time carousing. Bald and with a ‘pinkish complexion’, Verschoyle was, Alan recalled, ‘dapper in appearance, though slightly moist and shifty about the eyes’, and ‘an entertaining fantasist with as little concern for the truth as his friend and contemporary Goronwy Rees’.
The war over, Verschoyle stayed on in Rome, and was the First Secretary to the British Embassy from 1947 to 1950. Theodora FitzGibbon, a colourful chronicler of post-war bohemian life in Chelsea, met him at the time, and remembered in her memoir Love Lies at a Loss how he invariably brought with him a bottle of wine or gin provided by Saccone & Speed, the wine merchants who in those days supplied British embassies with their every need. He was, she recalled, ‘very mondaine and charming, with an unusual face of regular features, a very attractive face and smile. His manners were impeccable, putting people at ease immediately.’ He spoke without seeming to open his mouth, and ‘talked in a lightly muffled voice on a variety of subjects – sometimes, as I was to find out later, Irish-fashion; that is, he tended to please rather than be factually correct. His walk was quick, but with a gliding motion; one almost felt he could disappear at will. His manner too was sometimes guarded, to cause one to think that his life held many secrets.’ He was always very secretive about his work, but one day he asked her if she would do a ‘job’ for him: she was to go to a particular café, carrying with her a walking stick as a means of identification. She went along to the café every day for a week, walking stick in hand, but no one ever approached her or contacted her in any way. At the end of the week she reported back to Verschoyle, who nodded in an appreciative way, told her she had done very good work, and paid her as agreed.
According to the spy writer Nigel West, Verschoyle’s activities as a secret agent took a more dramatic and sinister turn in 1947, when he was involved in an MI6 plan to blow up ships carrying concentration camp survivors to Palestine. Ernest Bevin, as Foreign Secretary, was determined to reduce the flow of Jewish refugees for fear of aggravating Arab sensibilities, and Count Frederick van der Heuvel, the head of MI6’s Rome station, was ordered to set the plan in motion. The man in immediate charge of the operation was Colonel Harold Perkins (‘Perks’), a legendary figure who had worked in the Polish section of SOE during the war, and would, the following year, work closely with David Smiley in an abortive scheme to land anti-Communist Albanians in their homeland as part of an attempt to subvert the regime of Enver Hoxha: all of them were rounded up and shot within hours of their landing after Kim Philby, then working for the Foreign Office in Washington, had tipped off the Russians, who had in turn alerted the Albanian authorities. Among those enlisted by Perks to prevent the Jewish refugees from reaching Palestine was, West claims, Derek Verschoyle. Posing as Adriatic cigarette smugglers, he and another MI6 operative were told to attach limpet mines to the hulls of the rusting and overloaded ships bound for Haifa from Trieste. The whole wretched story eventually inspired Leon Uris’s bestselling novel Exodus: and, in retrospect at least, Verschoyle seemed an improbable figure to find in a frogman’s uniform.
In the early fifties Theodora FitzGibbon and her husband Constantine set up house in Hertfordshire, where they gave weekend house parties famed for their drunkenness and riotous living. Michael Wharton, a regular visitor, described these massive debauches in A Dubious Codicil, the second volume of his funny, melancholic memoirs, and other participants included John Davenport, Nigel Dennis and, in due course, Derek Verschoyle. Every now and then Theodora FitzGibbon would cook a meal to soak up the booze, and so delicious were they that Verschoyle urged her to write a cookery book: he had just set up in business as a publisher, so she need look no further. After leaving the diplomatic service, he had gone to work for Michael Joseph as a literary adviser, and had persuaded the Duchess of Windsor to be published by the firm; he had also commissioned Alan Ross’s travel book about Sardinia, The Bandit on the Billiard Table, and when he decided to set up on his own this was one of the books he took with him, together with Theodora FitzGibbon’s proposed cookery book.
‘Derek’s ideas tended to run ahead of his capacity to deal with them,’ Alan Ross later observed, and Derek Verschoyle Ltd was no exception to the rule. Verschoyle’s partner in the firm, albeit of the sleeping variety, was Graham Eyres-Monsell, a rich and well-connected homosexual whose sister Joan was married to Patrick Leigh Fermor; and their offices were in an elegant, rickety Georgian house in Park Place, a cul-de-sac off St James’s Street. Although the firm lasted for little more than a year, and although most of the titles under contract were eventually published by other companies, the list of authors was extremely distinguished, and included Patrick Leigh Fermor, Alan Ross, Lawrence Durrell, Roy Fuller, James Hanley, Bea Howe, G.S. Fraser, Vernon Bartlett and Christopher Sykes. The firm’s colophon was a bristly boar’s head which looked as though it was about to be served up at a medieval banquet. The staff, many of them part-time, included Francis Wyndham, who joined the firm in April 1953 and remained with it until its collapse at the end of the following year, working as a reader and blurb-writer; John Willett, later to become an authority on East Germany and the works of Bertolt Brecht, who toiled in the attic; and Mamaine Paget, one of the Paget twins, famous beauties