From the late 1930s until the mid-1960s, Percy Hoskins, longtime stalwart of the Daily Express who became its highly influential chief crime correspondent, had a contact list like nobody else in Fleet Street. It was said of him: “If you are in trouble, you should call Percy before your lawyer.”
Hoskins had long-term friendships with people as diverse as the film director Alfred Hitchcock and the FBI head J. Edgar Hoover. He knew everyone, and could get things done, and fast. This facility was certainly initially enabled and then enhanced by Hoskins’s close personal friendship with his newspaper’s proprietor, the formidable and powerful Lord Beaverbrook.
Like all great reporters, Hoskins built his reputation the hard way, producing scoop after scoop on the crime beat, allowing him to send titbits to other reporters in Fleet Street’s ‘Murder Gang’ group of crime reporters, who were given that moniker by Hilde Marchant in her 1947 feature article covering their crime-news-gathering activities in the Picture Post, with photographs by Bert Hardy.
It’s long been known that Hoskins and other crime reporters had close working relationships with officers at Scotland Yard and with its Press Bureau, which fed them information to produce their stories to make the front page when circulations ran in millions and the hunt for hard news, especially crime news, was ruthless. That Murder Gang reporters such as Norman ‘Jock’ Rae of the News of the World and Harry Procter of the Daily Mail and Sunday Pictorial met killers on the run and cultivated friendships with them – such as John Christie, John George Haigh and Neville Heath – to get their grisly stories, as I outlined in my book “Frenzy! How the Tabloid Press Turned Three Evil Serial Killers into Celebrities”.
Cultivating police informants was mandatory to get the fast inside line. Money (‘drinks’) and cases of scotch for a readymade tipple often changed hands to get the ‘gen’ or ‘dope’ before anyone else got to file the story. Percy Hoskins was a master of cultivating his police sources, probably the best. And recently declassified MI5 files show just how he operated.
By the early 1940s, Hoskins was living on Park Lane, his rent subsidised or the flat discreetly lent gratis by Beaverbrook. Although he had been a journalist for almost 20 years, this clearly illustrates Hoskins’s high status within the Daily Express firmament.
Hoskins sometimes used the pseudonym ‘Hawkins’ when fishing for information, and would at the end of the war forge a very close working relationship with Harold Scott, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, who enlisted Hoskins to help improve the force’s PR. Hoskins obliged with articles complimentary to the police and helped Scott create the BBC anti-crime crusading TV show called It’s Your Money They’re After.
By the early 1950s, Hoskins was firmly established as the police’s go-to man on Fleet Street, as other journalists in turn came to Hoskins for help and crime story morsels.
Hoskins bugged and followed by MI5
But back in the early 1940s, when he was in his late thirties, Hoskins had been the subject of wiretapping by MI5 and discreet surveillance, as the Britain’s domestic secret service was concerned by the stories he was producing, often connected to the Ministry of War and the war effort, black marketeering from war supplies, key military appointments and initiatives, information about captured spies, and inside knowledge about the flight to Britain and capture of the leading Nazi Rudolph Hess.
There was no suggestion that Hoskins was in any way traitorous, but there was a fear that he was somehow accessing and divulging dangerous information.
MI5 was anxious enough about the leaks and the identities of Hoskins’s tipsters that a file was opened on him in October 1938, but it wasn’t until early 1941 that proactive measures were taken against him. The reason for the bugging and surveillance of Hoskins was stated in an internal MI5 memo on 3 April 1941: “Percy Hoskins is the crime reporter to the Daily Express. He is said to be in possession of full details of cases of espionage about which the utmost secrecy has been preserved. It is desired to discover the source of his information by imposing a check on his telephone.”
Another memo written four days later reads: “I think we might start by placing a telephone check on Hoskins. If this looks promising, we might consider discreet observation and the covering of any suspicious meeting that he might arrange by telephone. I would not touch his correspondence.”
It was an article by Hoskins that the Daily Express ran on 14 February 1941 which had triggered MI5 into action. Headlined “School for German Spies Transfers to Belgium”, Hoskins’s file reveals that it had learned from highly placed “independent sources” that Hoskins had said that he had got his information from Special Branch, and that “further papers revealing the identity of Hoskins’s informant at Special Branch are held”. But the name of that informant is not openly recorded.
A warrant for the wiretap of Hoskins’s home phone was applied for and issued at the highest level. Transcripts show that he was in regular contact with the future Labour Party leader Michael Foot (then a journalist) on a friendly basis, and professionally, other leading crime reporters such as Stanley Firmin, then of the Evening Standard and Hugh Brady of the Daily Mail, and of course his own colleagues on the Daily Express, as they discussed stories in quick and veiled exchanges.
Tipped off about killing by the ‘Blackout Ripper’
At the end of January 1942, Hoskins becomes exasperated when talking to his Daily Express colleague, Redfern, who was chasing him on the progress of a story about “an undesirable milkbar”- milkbars were places where you could buy newspapers and groceries, but which also served “milk cocktails” and attracted a youthful clientele, which in some of them led to trouble.
Hoskins had been assigned a special “job” involving Air Ministry Intelligence by his overall boss Lord Beaverbrook (whom Hoskins habitually refers to as “the old man”), and the conversation shows that Hoskins wasn’t pleased when being pressed on such a low-level story:
Hoskins: “For Christ’s sake! The old man gives me a job and I’ve got people in my flat now and I have to go and talk to them and keep them entertained and try and get something out of them, and all I get is a lot of series of calls about some milkbar in Leicester Square. It makes me sick.”
Redfern: “All right, Percy. I’m only trying to find out what the position is about the story, that’s all.”
As Hoskins’s file states elsewhere, the “job” that Hoskins was doing for Beaverbrook was most probably a secret investigation into a bribery and racketeering scandal at the Ministry of Supply, which of course was imperative to the British war effort.
In one conversation in early February 1942, Hoskins is recorded giving information about a very recent murder to a journalist named Hyde on the Evening Standard. It was about the killing by strangulation of Evelyn Hamilton, who was later found to have been a victim of the “Blackout Ripper” Gordon Cummins, who terrorised wartime London, claiming four victims. After tipping off Hyde about Hamilton’s murder, the transcript relays:
Hyde: “Is this out yet?”
Hoskins: “No, nobody knows except the CID- just gone round there.”
Hyde: “Right! Can I keep that do you think?”
Hoskins: “I don’t know- don’t know how long it will be…”
Hyde: “When was she found?”
Hoskins: “Only about an hour or two ago.”
The information about the murder came to Hoskins from his contact Detective Inspector Frank Mulvey, the War Duty Officer at Scotland Yard, who was recorded as telling Hoskins in an earlier phone call that day, “Keep it quiet, where you got the information from…Mum’s the word”.
Cash payouts to police informants
In mid-1942, Hoskins was heard speaking to an unknown source at Scotland Yard, showing concern that an eager and unnamed Fleet Street journalist nicknamed “Teacher” was set to try to muscle in on a murder scoop for which the source was supplying information to Hoskins.
It was the killing of Pauline Barker (erroneously named ‘Baker’ in the secret service file) who had been shot dead in London by her long-term partner Arthur Anderson at the end of May that year, for which Anderson was later hanged.
Police Source: “You’ll have to watch your step for a week or so if old ‘Teacher’ gets on the job- fresh man you know.”
Hoskins: “Yes, he’ll be able to do us.”
Police Source: “Oh yes, he’ll be able to make a show. I think the only people he knows are the fingerprint people.”
Hoskins: “Oh well, we’ll probably be able to fix something.”
Police Source: “We’ll give him a run for his money.”
In one recorded call to his lover Jean at his Park Lane flat (Hoskins’s wife lived in Beckenham, Kent with their two children), Hoskins gloated about being given a £50 bonus cheque by Arthur Christiansen, his editor at the Daily Express, whom Hoskins called ‘Chris’. It was a nice reward for an unnamed scoop, worth the equivalent of almost £3,000 in 2024.
Hoskins was recorded in calls with several police contacts, arranging meetings and trying to glean information. One key police contact with whom Hoskins was on very friendly terms was Detective Chief Inspector Peter Beveridge at Scotland Yard. Beveridge would later rise to the rank of Chief Superintendent, lead the Criminal Investigation Department, and in 1957 published a book, Inside the CID.
On 29 August 1941, Hoskins called Beveridge at Scotland Yard, telling him that he had some money for him, and they discussed where they could meet that evening. Rendezvous spots considered were the Piccadilly Brasserie, the Yorkshire Grey pub and the elegant Princes restaurant- they finally agreed on the latter. Beveridge is recorded as saying: “I’ve got a bit of news for you. Nothing you can use, just for your own information…”
There’s no record of any action being taken against Beveridge or any of Hoskins’s police contacts, and as they continued to be promoted to higher ranks, any serious attempt at reprimanding them internally within the police is unlikely.
Regarding surveillance, Hoskins was seen going about his daily, and late nightly, business, spending a lot of time at the Scotland Yard Press Bureau where he and the other crime reporters jostled for story leads, and meeting contacts in hotels, bars, restaurants and pubs, as well as entertaining at home.
He was seen frequenting a club known as “the Grey House”, where he often used the public call box. The clientele of the establishment was described in the files as “inmates” and “a strange collection, mostly a common drinking lot, some of whom seem to be crooks”. An MI5 agent overheard a man and a woman in conversation there, she saying to him, “I’ll tell you something, I’ve pinched a beautiful ashtray for you, from the Ritz new bar…”
A late entry in Hoskins’s file is a press cutting of an article he wrote for the Daily Express in mid-April 1956, regarding “two big changes” being made in the top ranks of MI5 amid the preparations for the visit of the Soviet premier Khrushchev to Britain. Hoskins’s activities were still obviously of some interest.
The MI5 Hoskins dossier was finally closed on 8 May 1963, by which time Hoskins was retreating from frontline reporting. No official action was ever taken against him, and the active wiretapping and surveillance had lasted less than 18 months during the heat of war.
MI5 found that Hoskins got his information from his police sources, and at that time he had broken no laws. But this window into his methods and lifestyle gives us a fascinating insight into the milieu in which he operated.
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