Circus Impresario and Spymaster – Cyril Bertram Mills (1902-1991)
By Alison Bailey
The Bertram Mills Circus founded by Bertram Wagstaff Mills of Chalfont St Giles, was world famous for half a century. Bertram’s eldest son, Cyril Bertram Mills, a director of the circus, was one of the best-known names in the British entertainment business.
But for forty years, Cyril had also enjoyed a top-secret career in intelligence with the circus providing the perfect cover. In the 1930s, whilst flying over Germany to recruit new acts, he obtained important aerial information on Nazi rearmament for MI6. During WWII, he joined MI5 and recruited Juan Pujol Garcia, codename ‘Garbo’, a German spy who was secretly taking orders from Mills and feeding misinformation back to Germany. Cyril’s skills managing temperamental international stars such as acrobats, clowns, and lion tamers proved invaluable when running spies and double agents!
During the Cold War Cyril continued to work part-time on a voluntary basis, i.e. “without being paid a penny”. For 15 years, he even lived with his family at 17 Kensington Palace Gardens, opposite the Soviet Embassy, so that British Intelligence could monitor Russian activity from the attics above his children’s bedrooms.
Unfortunately, Cyril’s identity as a clandestine agent was already known to the KGB as he had been betrayed by the traitor Anthony Blunt who had worked with Mills at MI5. However, it remained a complete secret in Britain until 87-year-old Mills was feted on the television programme This is Your Life in1989, when it was briefly mentioned. The real story was finally revealed last year with the publication of an excellent book, The Spy Who Came in From the Circus, by the historian Professor Christopher Andrew.
Cyril Bertram Mills
Cyril was born the eldest son of Bertram and Ethel Mills, 27 February 1902. Like his younger brother Bernard, he was educated at Harrow, where he showed a real gift for languages and at Corpus College Cambridge. Awarded an MA in engineering, he worked as an engineer in the oil industry.
However, Cyril was involved with his father’s new venture from the start. As a teenager he accompanied Bertram to the continent to find new circus talent for the first Christmas circus at Olympia in 1920, and helped with the subsequent Christmas productions.
When Cyril returned to England in 1925 after working in Burma (now Myanmar) he accepted his father’s offer of a full-time job in the business and by 1927 both Cyril and Bernard were directors in the circus. Cyril’s first major assignment was to arrange the transportation from Paris to London of his father’s star attraction for the 1925/1926 season, Captain Alfred Schneider’s 70 lions, which caused a huge sensation in all the papers at the time. Cyril and Bernard launched the touring circus in 1930, applying the same strict quality standards as for the Christmas production at Olympia.
The Flying Director
1933 became a pivotal year in Cyril’s career. He obtained a private pilot’s licence and purchased the first of his three aircrafts, a single-seater de Havilland biplane. His bravery and calmness under pressure, important skills for his later career in espionage had already been proven. He helped round up three escaped tigers in a crowded tent without anyone being injured and prevented a disaster in Gloucester when fire threated the big top and he had it drenched with water before the flames could reach it.
Also In 1933, Cyril took over the annual Christmas show, which he continued to produce for the rest of his career. Every year he would therefore embark on an extensive tour of Europe in search of new circus talent and carried out most of his talent-spotting by air, often flying up to 35,000 miles a year in search of new performers.
Among the spectacular acts he discovered for the circus over the years were Coco the Clown (a Russian by the name of Nikolai Poliakoff) and Koringa, “the only female fakir in the world able to mesmerise crocodiles and survive burial in a snake-infested pit”. Reported to be from Rajasthan in India, she was in fact a dancer from Bordeaux named Renée Bernard who joined the Free French during WWII and carried out secret missions in France.
Espionage
Whilst flying over Germany to see circuses in Dresden, Munich and Hamburg, Cyril identified 30 aerodromes being constructed by Adolf Hitler’s new regime in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles that ended WWI. He reported his findings to British Intelligence and started his second, top-secret career as an undercover agent.
Between 1936 and 1938 he flew 23 trips across Nazi Germany and produced 30 maps that showed the growing strength of the Luftwaffe.
Fully aware of the risks he was running, flying into prohibited zones, he disguised German airfields and factories as circus layouts in his notes, just in case he was arrested and needed to plead his innocence.
Grounded by the war, Cyril was disappointed to be turned down by the RAF as a bomber pilot. They considered him too old at 38! The circus also closed down for the duration of the war so he was grateful to be offered a position in MI5, where his skills could be put to good use. Here he played a leading role in the Double Cross System. This was the network of German spies who had been turned to work as double agents, misleading the enemy with false intelligence. In the event of Britain being invaded, it was his designated task to shoot any double agent if there was a risk of them falling into German hands and identifying their MI5 masters to the Gestapo.
Charles Andrew said: ‘Mills thus became, on the direct instructions of MI5’s Director General, the first of the service’s staff to be given what James Bond novels and films later called a licence to kill’ — though he never needed to use it.
Cyril gave his most famous double agent, Juan Pujol Garcia, the codename ‘Garbo’ in honour of Greta Garbo, his favourite film star, famous for her performance as the spy Mata Hari. Garbo headed up a totally bogus network of 27 fictional German agents mostly based in Britain and sent phoney reports back to the German intelligence agency, the Abwehr. Over the last three years of the war, he and his case officers composed more than 300 intelligence briefings, each of about 2,000 words, and posted them to a cover address in Lisbon. Garbo played an important role in the deception operation surrounding D-Day. Cyril’s role was also to forge links with United States security agencies, and toward the end of the war he became MI5’s representative in Canada.
The Cold War
With the defeat of Nazi Germany, Cyril returned to the UK and resumed his circus activities. He continued to go to Europe in search of new acts. He frequently travelled behind The Iron Curtain, usually with minders in tow, but was able to provide some intelligence into the role of the Soviet regime in the new Communist states.
Whilst no major Soviet secrets were discovered by the bugging operations at 17 Kensington Palace Gardens when the Mills family were living there, important information was still gathered about the behaviour and lifestyle of Soviet intelligence officers and diplomats in London. It provided proof of the massive growth in Soviet intelligence personnel which led to the mass expulsion in 1971 of 105 officers stationed in Britain under official cover. The Mills family left No 17 in 1975, bringing an end to Mills’s career in intelligence.
Circus Impresario Again
The circus returned triumphantly for the 1946 season, and the Christmas circus at Olympia was resumed in the winter of 1946/1947. In 1947, Cyril, with the aid of friends in the City, launched Bertram Mills Circus as a public company, with a quotation on the London Stock Exchange. It was the first circus in the world with such a quotation. Cyril and Bernard Mills remained joint managing directors of both the tenting show and the Olympia production.
Profits in the early post-war years were very high, but by 1964, the tenting circus was running at a loss and the brothers decided to close the show at the end of that season, while retaining the annual Christmas circus in London until 1966.
Family Man
In addition to his two children by his first marriage, Cyril had two children with his second wife, Mimi Meredith, a Canadian, whom he had married in 1950. Frederick Meredith, Mimi’s son by her first marriage, was Cyril’s assistant during the last years of the touring circus. Their son, Christopher, became a very successful financier in the City. In retirement, Cyril was guided by Christopher in his investments and said that he made far more money from these than he ever made with the circus.
In 1967, Cyril wrote a book, Bertram Mills Circus — Its Story, which was reprinted in 1983 in paperback. In October 1990, he appeared again on This Is Your Life, this time honouring his former ringmaster, Norman Barrett. For many years after his retirement, Cyril was Honorary Chairman of the Association of Circus Proprietors of Great Britain and continued to take a great interest in anything to do with the circus. Whilst keeping his career as a spy completely secret, he made no secret of his patriotism and was always proud of his friendship with Winston Churchill, a huge fan of the circus. The highlight of his circus career came on December 18, 1952, when Her Majesty the Queen attended a charity performance of the circus at Olympia. It was the first occasion on which a reigning monarch made an official visit to a public performance of a circus in Great Britain. Queen Elizabeth II eventually honoured the Bertram Mills Circus on twelve different occasions. Cyril Mills died in 1991, aged 89.
Sources
The Spy Who Came in from the Circus – The Secret Life of Cyril Bertram Mills, Christopher Andrew
Circopedia