FAMOUS WW2 PHOTOGRAPHER’S BUDLEIGH VISIT MYSTERY

 

It’s summer 1941, in the small coastal town of Budleigh Salterton. Its famous pebble beach empty except for miles of barbed wire defences, for Britain is at war. Empty, except for the pair of secret agents from British intelligence service MI5 observing the guests at a very large house which overlooks the beach. One guest is of special interest: a known criminal convicted of spying for Soviet Russia and now staying at the house with five women, one of them being the wife of the secretary of the British Communist Party.

Another guest of particular interest to the watchers was Elizabeth Miller Eloui, seen above. An MI5 report of that year had noted her description as ‘a strong Communist’ who wore ‘queer clothes’ and ate ‘queer food’. Four years later, in June 1945, the former Mrs Eloui, as one of the few U.S. Army photographers who saw combat, would see her photos of the atrocities in Buchenwald and Dachau concentraton camps published in American Vogue. We know her better as Lee Miller, the former Vogue model born in New York in 1907, and portrayed in the 2023 film Lee by Kate Winslet.

Her host at the house on Marine Parade in Budleigh was the author and former convict Wilfred Macartney, seen below, whose book describing his ten years in prison had been published in 1936 as Walls Have Mouths.

Budleigh Salterton seems an unlikely location for such a gathering. That very summer, on 2 July 1941, Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit had opened in London. The play famously ridiculed the town by name for its quiet gentility, its ’potted palms’ and ’damp golf course.’ Lee Miller’s son, Antony Penrose, was not aware of his mother’s link to Macartney, who later befriended the WW2 double agent Eddie Chapman.

One possible answer for the choice of Budleigh as a meeting-place for the group may have been their acquaintance with the author and journalist Maurice Richardson, who had reviewed Macartney’s second book, Zig-zag. Richardson’s family lived in the town, on Coastguard Road. Maurice Richardson himself was yet another Communist Party member.

The major exhibition ‘Lee Miller: trailblazing surrealist photographer’ is at London’s Tate Britain until 15 February 2026. www.tate.org.uk

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