They seek him here…

Karen Neville

Accidental spy John Merrett had an uncanny knack for being able to evade capture as author and journalist Michael Smith tells us

John Merrett was an accidental spy. One of a number of British expatriates who had built up businesses in St Petersburg, the capital of Tsarist Russia.  

The owner of a large and successful engineering company, he was a longstanding member of the city’s British expatriate business community. Their lives were changed completely by the 1917 Russian revolution.  

In September 1918, the Bolsheviks stormed the British embassy, in what was now called Petrograd, and arrested a number of British intelligence officers. With the British spy networks under threat, one of the few secret service officers still around handed Merrett 200,000 roubles and asked him to keep the networks running, collecting their reports and handing them to couriers who would smuggle them across the Finnish border. Merrett had absolutely no experience as a spy but he did have a good deal of common sense and ingenuity. He not only kept the networks running, he began using the courier lines to smuggle British citizens out of Russia to safety.  

At one point he was arrested by the paramilitary Red Guards. “Fortunately, I succeeded in escaping on my way to prison,” he said, “and was thereafter only able to avoid rearrest by adopting disguises and sleeping in ever-changing and out-of-the-way quarters.” One of the British businessmen Merrett got out of Russia described him as a “Scarlet Pimpernel” never where the Bolshevik agents who were trying to track him down expected him to be. 

When Paul Dukes was sent from London to take over the networks, he was told Merrett had been arrested. But he reached out to some of the British agents and a few days later, one of them turned up with what Dukes described as “a huge fellow, whose stubble-covered face brimmed over with smiles, beaming good nature and jollity. This giant was dressed in a rough and tagged brown suit and in his hand, he squeezed a dirty hat”. It was Merrett.  

In his report to London, Dukes said Merrett was in constant personal danger. “I found him in hiding, changing his abode every night, in various disguises. I formed the judgement in those days that Mr Merrett was actuated partly, perhaps, by a love of adventure, but mainly by a sense of duty towards the British in Petrograd.” Dukes had Merrett and his wife Lydia swiftly smuggled out of Russia down the same escape lines the businessman had himself created.