Margalit Fox: The Confidence Men

What three things would you want for a prison escape? Would a Ouija board, a strong imagination and a credulous captor be on your list? 

They were key tools for two prisoners of war in the World War I who carried out one of the most remarkable escapes in history.

 They're the subject of author and journalist Margalit Fox's latest book The Confidence Men. 

Fox came across the story by chance she told Emile Donovan.

“When I finished my previous book, Conan Doyle for the Defense in 2018. I took down from my library, one of my most cherished volumes It's an anthology called Grand Deception, published in the 1950s that is full of essays by different authors about all sorts of trickery, and hoaxes and imposters.

I was thinking of writing a book about pathological imposters people like the Catch Me If You Can guy but when I opened the book, as if directed to by the spirits, it fell open to a chapter with the most tantalizing title I've ever seen The Invisible Accomplice.”

This was the title of an essay written in the 1930s by a man called Harry Jones describing his and his comrade Cedric Hill’s audacious escape plan.

It’s a story with “buddy movie” written all over it, she says.

The two men were from entirely different backgrounds.

“Harry Jones was a Welshman, the son of Sir Henry Jones, his father was an eminent philosopher. Jones had been educated in Scotland and at Oxford University, he was a barrister.

“In his mid-30s, he was a family man, he was married with a baby and another one on the way. He was taken captive in the summer of 1916, after the devastating siege of Kut al-Amara in the Mesopotamian theatre, where Ottoman forces surrounded and besieged the British for five months, and it essentially starved them out until the British raised the white flag.”

A man he never would have met otherwise, a “scrappy, young Aussie” named Cedric Hill, was then in his mid-20s, and flying for the Royal Flying Corps.

“He was stationed in Egypt, and on a reconnaissance mission in 1916 he was shot down.

“So, separately, each of these two men, the Welshman, Jones and the Australian, Hill, were transported thousands of miles through desert and over mountains, to Yozgat in modern-day Turkey.”

It was one of the remotest POW camps in the Ottoman Empire, she says.

“Hemmed in by desert and mountains, it literally had no barbed wire around it because it was considered escape proof.”

Both Jones and Hill longed to escape, she says, but the urgent question was how to do it without compromising their countrymen because the camp's iron-fisted commandant had made it clear If any one man tried to escape, severe punishments will come down on the rest of the men.

The men were housed in houses that would have been occupied by Armenians, she says.

“The captives, about 100 British officers, were housed in adjoining empty houses that tragically had belonged to local Armenian families who had been routed and very likely killed in the genocide of the previous year 1915.

“They were in these by tumble-down, drafty, barren, dirty, empty houses. Once they got their housing situation more or less sorted, they started to get some parcels from families on the home front, once they had their basic needs attended to the real problem for these men, because for all they knew the war was going to drag on for 10 more years, was how to fill their long, empty days in captivity.”

The men made chess boards and even a roulette wheel, then one day Jones gets a postcard from his aunt suggesting they try a Ouija board which was all the rage at the time.

So they fashioned one from found objects and as they played more and more an idea formed.

“Jones, who was a great practical joker, at first uses it only to cheer up his fellows and to give everyone something to do.

“He has almost a photographic memory. So, he very quickly has internalised the position of these random 26 letters around the board. So he, with his eyes closed and even blindfolded can subtly coax this drinking glass to different letters spell out, supposedly communications from the spirit world, and he is a very bright guy he knows who would men stuck in a POW camp most want to hear from, so the first ghost that he conjures is a saucy wench named Sally who says, all sorts of racy things. So racy that Jones is too much of a Victorian gentleman to include them in his own memoir, so we can only guess but the men loved it.”

Gradually the men came to believe these voices form the other side and even the captors became embroiled, she says.

“Little by little Jones gradually reels in his captors, they come to believe that he can commune with the spirits. And so, like any good conman, he appeals to that basic human impulse, avarice.

“He reels them in over many months, gradually recruiting Hill who is a brilliant amateur stage magician, and that comes in very handy when you want to stage a con game, Jones and Hill together spin, a tale supposedly channelled directly from the spirit world of a vast treasure, a hoard of gold, buried somewhere in Turkey.”

This wasn’t as implausible as it sounds, Fox says.  

“Many wealthy Armenians anticipated the coming genocide, and buried their wealth in the hopes that they would survive the war, and later be able to dig it up.”

Their Ottoman captors swallowed the hoax whole, she says.

“Jones and Hill over many months spun the tale of clues that taken together would lead to the treasure’s whereabouts, they actually went out and made up fake clues hid them in the surrounding countryside.

“And this was the genius part. This was the life insurance policy for their fellow captives. They knew that if they could get documentary proof that their captors were in not only in league with them, but actually helping facilitate their escape plan that that would buy life itself for their fellow captives.”

Jones, using a tiny hidden camera, snaps three clandestine photos of their captors, with Hill, digging for clues to the treasure’s whereabouts, she says.

“They pass the negatives to one of their confederates, that will protect them because what kind of a camp commandant should be leading his own captives to freedom after all.”

But like all best laid plans things go awry at the last moment, she says.

“Jones and Hill are literally on the eve of getting their captors to escort them out of camp, the captors believe they have to go far away to find this last clue, the third of three that together will tell them the whereabouts of this glittering buried treasure.

“What they're really going to do is have the captors escort them 300 miles south to the Mediterranean coast, they have a plan for getting a boat, drugging and binding the captors and sailing away with their captors now as their kidnap victims, and joining the British forces in Cyprus, where they're going to turn their captors over, and what a coup that would be turning basically the entire staff of an Ottoman prison camp over to the British.”

Just as they're about to leave, they are inadvertently betrayed by one of their own people and the entire plan is blown “up in smithereens,” Fox says.

The two men quickly adopt a “dark and devastating Plan B”.

 “This is Act III of the story and as I say this is where the Great Escape or Stalag 17 meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, their last hope, something they have been aware of, but never been forced to consider until now.

It's now early in 1918 but again, for all they know, the war could last for another 10 or 12 years. Their last hope is to feign insanity.”

They manage to get themselves committed to a mental asylum in Constantinople now Istanbul, she says.

“If they can con the highly-trained psychiatrists at this hospital in Constantinople, and be certified as having gone insane, there is the slender chance that they will then be repatriated to Britain in a government exchange of sick prisoners.

“So, this their last hope they embark on an early 1918. They expect maybe to have to spend a couple of weeks in this hospital …they wind up having to be there, shamming insanity, 24/7 for six months.”

The two men suffered tremendously over those six months, she says.

“These six months in the hospital really took a toll on them and almost drove them mad for real.

“They were in terrible physical condition, and not such great mental condition when they got out. But in the end, they won their freedom at long last.”

And what became of Jones and Hill after the war?

“Jones died sadly fairly young. He died in the 1940s. Hill died in the 1970s. He went on to a long career distinguished career with the RAF rising to the rank of Group Captain, which is equivalent to a colonel and lived the rest of his life in England.

“This has given me a chance to recreate I hope, with justice and with all of the colour that this remarkable story deserves. These two amazing lives of these two resourceful and incredibly brave men.”