580 • WILLIAMS, VALENTINE
intercepted in Operationgold, theBerlin tunnel. While SIS ran a
translation center in Regent’s Park staffed by Russian e ́migre ́s, Wil-
liams established a GCHQ office at Smithfield Market with the in-
nocuous name of the London Processing Centre.
Williams retired from GCHQ in 1972 to pursue his interests in art
and music, and he restored a medieval hall in East Malling Kent. He
wrote several scholarly monographs on medieval agricultural history
and moved to Puddletown in Dorset, where he publishedPuddletown
House: Street and Familyfor the Dorset Record Society. Williams
died in 1999.WILLIAMS, VALENTINE.The eldest son of the chief editor atReu-
ter’s News Agency, Valentine Williams was to make his reputation
as a journalist before turning to writing thrillers. He went to Berlin
first as a correspondent for his father’s agency and then to Paris for
theDaily Mail. Williams covered the 1910 revolution in Portugal and
was in the Balkans when World War I broke out in 1914. In March
1915 he was accredited to GHQ in Flanders but joined the Irish
Guards in December 1915 and won the Military Cross. Two books of
nonfiction document his experiences:With Our Army in Flanders
andAdventures of an Ensign.
After the war, Williams traveled the world to file reports from the
Versailles Peace Conference and from the expedition that discovered
the tomb of King Tutankhamen. Numerous assignments in America
and North Africa followed, but his fame was achieved as the author
of such classics asThe Man with the Clubfoot,The Secret Hand,The
Return of Clubfoot, andThe Three of Clubs. Aged 56 when Hitler
invaded Poland, Williams was too old for military service, so just as
his novelThe Fox Prowlswas released, he joined theSecret Intelli-
gence Service(SIS), where he checked the credentials of new re-
cruits. One of the aspiring intelligence officers he interviewed was
Malcolm Muggeridge, who had worked with Williams’s younger
brother Douglas on theDaily Telegraph. Muggeridge later recalled
the encounter in which ‘‘Williams spoke darkly of the dangers in-
volved in a service which, by the nature of the case, a blown agent
had to be discarded.’’ Williams’s gloomy strictures failed to deter
Muggeridge, who subsequently ‘‘disappeared into the limbo ofMI6,
the wartime version of the Secret Service.’’ In his autobiography,