Lord Jowitt, either with a belated desire to do Justice to Captain Ramsay or now cautious of repeating he fabrications of the past, has admitted in his memoirs of the War Trials, published in the London Evening Standard of May 13th, that the defendants in the Tyler Kent affair were all along acting in good faith.
Lord Jowitt, in order to publish these memoirs at all, has been forced to make a point which neither Captain Ramsay nor Anna Wolkoff are even yet permitted to make in their own defense, the nature of the documents concerned in the case having been declared an Official Secret which they may not divulge.
Others, however, are now free to state what they have known from the beginning, namely, that Captain Ramsay was never at any time endeavouring to communicate with Germany but was trying to communicate certain information to the then Prime Minister, Mr Chamberlain, which Mr. Chamberlain was expecting and which, because of Captain Ramsay's arrest, never reached him.
Something of this information later reached Mr. Chamberlain by other channels, however, for it was disclosed in the Forestall Diaries that Mr. Chamberlain had become convinced, and actually told Mr. Forestall, that powerful Jewish circles in New York were solely responsible for maneuvering Britain into the war, unsuspected by him at the time although he was Prime Minister and ought to have been informed of what was going on.
The wedge that was driven between Mr. Chamberlain and Captain Ramsay was the lock-up and the abuse of the Official Secrets Act, followed by the elaborate dissemination of the complete fabrication by the Home Office that
"the said Captain Archibald Maule Ramsay, M.P. . . had expressed his desire to do-operate with the German Government in the conquest and subsequent government of Great Britain."
Later the Lord Marley added further to this fabrication by stating in the House of Lords that he had it on good authority that Captain Ramsay had agreed to become Gauliter of Scotland under a German occupation of Great Britain. He ignored the challenge of Captain Ramsay's lawyers to repeat the charge outside the House.
For fourteen years Lord Jowitt must have been well aware that Captain Ramsay was conducting an investigation in order to satisfy Mr. Chamberlain that there was documentary evidence for the facts already disclosed to him by Captain Ramsay, and that Captain Ramsay's arrest was made to prevent that documentary evidence from being presented to the Prime Minister. But it has taken all these years for Lord Jowitt to concede that Captain Ramsay is an honest man who
"would never have countenanced any act which he recognized as being against the interests of his country."
G.P.
