378 • MORRISON, WILLIAM
MORRISON, WILLIAM.In April 1935 Stephen Wheeton handed
over the task of communicating with Moscow to William Morrison,
a fellowCommunist Party of Great Britain(CPGB) member op-
erating a transmitter from his home at 215 Earlsfield Road, SW18.
His broadcasts were monitored byGovernment Code and Cipher
Schooland circulated asmask. Morrison’sMI5personal file reveals
that after World War II he supplied the Security Service with some
very valuable intelligence and disclosed that Morrison also had trans-
mitted from a site at Hersham, near Walton-on-Thames in Surrey,
and then from Buckhurst Hill in Essex where one of his former pupils
at the Lenin School in Moscow, Sally Friedman, had run the station.
Morrison never read any of the traffic, which was handed to him
encrypted in five-figure groups by Alice Holland, but his story, as
recounted to MI5’sMax Knightat the end of August 1939, was re-
markable. Something of an adventurer, Morrison explained that he
had joined the Royal Navy at the age of 16 at Chatham and was
trained as a telegrapher, but, under somewhat of a cloud after being
disciplined for drunkenness, he had deserted from the light cruiser
HMSConstancein Mobile, Alabama, in 1926. Thereafter he became
involved in smuggling bootleg Canadian whiskey into California but
was arrested and deported in early 1928. After a further spell in Hong
Kong and Australia as a seaman on a Swedish ship, the S.S.Heron,
he returned to Edinburgh. Failing to find any work, in 1931 he settled
in North Shields and was recruited into the CPGB by a well-known
activist, William Spence, and was then persuaded by Alec Robson to
participate in the Seaman’s Minority Movement. As secretary of the
party’s local branch in Tyneside, Morrison was introduced to George
Aitken and took over responsibility for the party’s antimilitarist cam-
paign in the north of England. It was in that role that he had distrib-
uted seditious literature at Catterick Camp, an act that resulted in the
prosecution of a soldier there who was found in possession of it.
Early in 1932 Morrison was invited to London, where he was inter-
viewed by a senior CPGB figure,Bob Stewart, who was in charge
of the party’s clandestine activities. Stewart invited him to undertake
a secret mission to Moscow, instructing Morrison to travel first to
Berlin. He was to go to a back-street tobacconist, who would ex-
change his own passport for one identifying him as an Australian
named Ernest Bell. Morrison went to Moscow, where for the next