The real SS-GB: Documentary reveals Hitler's plans for Nazi Britain including schoolboy spies scouting the land by bike and Noel Coward being on a kill list
What could have been more charming than a group of seven schoolboys, all smartly dressed in shorts and jackets, cycling along the sun-dappled lanes of rural Lincolnshire one Friday afternoon?
It was the middle of July 1937, a more innocent time, and on the backs of the boys’ bicycles were panniers that contained food and camping equipment for an old-fashioned expedition.
As they made good progress on their 180-mile ride from Grimsby to London, the party could hardly have known that they were being scrutinised by the British state – or, indeed, that the surprising instruction to keep them under close surveillance had come down all the way from the head of the Security Service, MI5.
He had written to chief constables informing them that ‘a party of young Germans are [...] intending to bicycle to London by easy stages… Should they pass through your area we should be interested in any details you can let us have about the route they follow’.
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