124 • CROCKER, SIR WILLIAM CHARLES
CROCKER, SIR WILLIAM CHARLES.A distinguished solicitor
and future president of the Law Society, William Charles Crocker
traced the notorious prewar London fireraisers and identified a West
End wigmaker, Willie Clarkson, as one of the culprits responsible for
11 separate insurance claims. Crocker accumulated enough evidence
for him to be prosecuted in October 1934, but Clarkson died before
he could be convicted and the case dragged on for another four years
until Crocker proved that Clarkson’s will had been forged and his
fellow conspirator, William Hobbs, was imprisoned for insurance
fraud.
Crocker’s reputation as a skilled investigator with excellent con-
tacts in Scotland Yard was established by this episode, which was
concluded by Lloyd’s and the other insurance companies being re-
paid. In May 1940, whenWinston ChurchillsackedMI5’s elderly
director-general,Sir Vernon Kell, he appointed Crocker, together
with Sir Joseph Ball and Lord Swinton, to a highly secret committee,
theHome Defence (Security) Executive, to supervise the transfor-
mation of the Security Service from a hidebound peacetime organi-
zation into a body more appropriate for the task of combating Nazi
subversion and espionage. Crocker died in September 1973, but not
before he had written two volumes of memoirs,Far from Humdrum
(1967) andTales from the Coffee House(1973).
CROSS, JOHN.In January 1941, shortly before the fall of Singapore,
the regional chief of theSecret Intelligence Service(SIS) in Malaya,
Major Rosher, inserted a group of volunteers into the Malayan jungle
equipped with radios and instructions to report on enemy troop
movements. The first party, led by Major James Barry, included John
Cross, a sergeant from theRoyal Corps of Signalswho had arrived
in the Far East from Catterick only three months earlier. Cross had
been called up at age 29, while he was working for a firm of chartered
accountants in London.
Operating under SIS’s military cover of theInter-Services Liai-
son Department, Rosher had established a training school desig-
nated STS 101 on an island outside Singapore. There, in anticipation
of a Japanese invasion, he had supervised the transformation of se-
lected Chinese members of the Malayan Communist party from po-
litical activists into well-armed saboteurs. The mission he entrusted