Tales from the Arsenal — PIPS BEYOND COINCIDENCE Sherlock Holmes, in The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor, spoke of “unwelcome social summonses which call upon a man to be bored or to lie.” Did he regard the society pages of newspapers very differently from their agony columns? At first glance, society-page contents are products of romance; and Holmes the unsentimental reasoner had, we know, scant interest in love stories or elopements worked into the fifth proposition of Euclid. But this is a superficial notion. Someone as acute as Holmes surely saw the society pages, burbling with news of engagements and weddings, for what they were: announcements of the latest alliances of financial and political power governing the kingdom’s and empire’s affairs. He surely paid attention to the society page, then; and so shall we, over the next few minutes, to see what it can tell us about The Five Orange Pips — which our founder Richard Clarke was already calling in 1940 the most exclusive organization in the world. I sometimes wondered what he meant by that. On another occasion, he assured Irregular hoi polloi that the Pips were not a secret society, at the same time he declined to send the Baker Street Journal reports of Pips dinners. I have found reason to wonder about that secret-society angle, especially after analyzing The Pips in terms of its generations. My late friend John Gardner, writer of novels about the world of secret intelligence as well as about Professor Moriarty, wrote an excellent trilogy about a family inside MI5 and MI6 called The Secret Generations. I shall lay before you tonight evidence that The Pips had a secret generation too. Its first generation, of course, were our five founders in 1935. Clarke was a stockbroker, Norman Ward a banker, and Gordon Knox Bell a Wall Street lawyer. Frank Waters and Owen Frisbie came from the business world. Perhaps you sense a theme there: money. Well, it was a long time ago. Sic transit gloria mundi. The second, overlapping, generation arrived with Edgar W. Smith, a corporate executive, and Benjamin S. Clark with the Wall Street investment firm of White, Weld & Co. There was a third new Pip then as well about whom we sadly know little, because E. Chauncey Anderson died in 1941 at age thirty-seven. Beyond the obvious facts that he was married, a Freemason, and part of the Wendell Willkie draft movement during 1940’s Presidential campaign, I can tell you little. But I do know he attended St. Paul’s School in Concord N.H., and then Yale. And you shall see that this was a harbinger. After the war a third generation arrived. Two were architects, William Beers at the end of his career, and Ellery Husted with years left of his. Clarke had known Husted before the war, and in the Navy; Beers he may have met at their mutual club, the Racquet & Tennis, where Clarke sponsored Edgar Smith, and to which Smith moved the BSI’s annual dinner in 1948. But an additional newcomer was James Ramsay Hunt, Jr., known to The Pips as McMurdo. Hunt had been with Wall Street’s Lee Higginson firm before the war, returning to it in 1945. But he had spent the war in Naval Intelligence, and in 1947 he joined a New York element of the CIA’s precursor Central Intelligence Group. As I’ve related elsewhere, in 1951 Jim Hunt relocated to Washington D.C., and CIA’s HQ there. The onset of the 1950s saw a fourth generation’s arrival with James Montgomery, invited by Clarke to join, and Thayer Cumings, an old kinsprit of Christopher Morley’s who may have been suggested by Morley as a consolation when Morley failed to attend the 1950 Pips dinner as Clarke had hoped. But now something strange happened. Clarke had already stated that “the limit of our organization is ten members,” but at the very same time that he reminded Pips of that, in a memo dated May 2, 1951, he went on to inform them that a Lyttleton Fox Jr. was under serious consideration for the Pips. Fox, said Clarke, had studied the Sacred Writings for many years, and had contributed articles of importance. If any such articles of importance are known to you, I would love to see them. They are unknown to De Waal, who records no contributions to the literature by Lyttleton Fox Jr. prior to 1966, and after that only twice, neither of them notably important; though I note that our comrade Langdale Pike did anthologize a rather fanciful one entitled “Mycroft Recomputed” some years ago, in Sherlock Holmes by Gaslight. In 1953, two years later, Clarke issued a new membership list showing The Pips at ten: the five founders; Edgar Smith and Ben Clark; James Hunt and Ellery Husted (Colonel Beers having died); and James Montgomery. But in fact the Pips were really now eleven. While Thayer Cumings went unnamed in this list, he was a Pip already, or at any rate expected at that year’s impending dinner where he was enpipped. Yet alongside that column of names was a second headed “Associate Members,” with four names. The first two were distant honoraries: Lord Donegall, editor of the Sherlock Holmes Journal in England, and A. D. Henriksen in Denmark — both, I suspect, due to Edgar Smith, the BSJ’s editor and pursuer of overseas links for the BSI. (I doubt either Smith the corporate executive or Clarke the stockbroker realized Henriksen was also a radical who’d penned a volume of political poetry entitled The Red Dawn of the East.) The other two “Associate Members” were Evan M. Wilson and Lyttleton Fox Jr. No information was provided there as to these gentlemen’s identities, or whence they came. Wilson happened to be a Foreign Service Officer who later became an active Pip for some years. I knew him in the 1970s, in Washington. His contributions to the literature greatly outnumber Fox’s, though he was often posted abroad when Pips dinners took place; on this occasion in 1953, for example, he was in London as First Secretary at the U.S. Embassy. In the event, 1953’s dinner had to be postponed. In announcing same, Richard Clarke reiterated Wilson’s and Fox’s candidate status. “When they have completed a thesis and attend one of our meetings,” said Clarke, “they will then join our ranks as full and regular Members.” What was going on here? Even allowing that Gordon Knox Bell was no longer attending dinners, and James Ramsay Hunt Jr. getting ready to go to Paris for four years as the CIA’s Chief of Station, this seems peculiar, especially for someone as prickly and prideful about Holmesian credentials and Piphood as Clarke. What mysterious influence was at work? I believe Lyttleton Fox Jr. signals, not the origin of the Pips’ secret generation — for that, we must look to James Hunt, our McMurdo — but its accession inside The Five Orange Pips. We haven’t known much about Fox, though his father had been a prominent New York lawyer who died suddenly one day in 1934 at the Racquet Club. Mentions of Lyttleton Jr. in the Times come mainly before the war, mostly from the society pages: in the 1930s, as a young bachelor, he had been the escort of many a New York debutante. And Fox was soon followed into The Pips, by someone equally unknown to the Holmesiana of that era, Rowland Stebbins Jr. We don’t know much about Stebbins either, though his numerous clan, back to colonial days, was prominent in the social affairs of Boston and New York. Now follow me closely as I return to Hunt, whose move to Washington in 1951 I once took to mean the end of his time as a Pip. This seems to have been true for his BSI dinner attendances, but not for the more exclusive and discreet Pips. Not only is Hunt still on the 1953 membership list, one or two surviving dinner programs in the first half of the 1950s are signed by him as McMurdo. And I have discovered in old newspaper society pages some interesting connections I wish to reveal tonight. Young Jim Hunt, son of a well-to-do Manhattan neurologist with a home in Katonah, was sent to St. Paul’s School in Concord N.H., and then to Yale — just like the ill-fated E. Chauncey Anderson, though I know of no other connection between them. Hunt graduated from St. Paul’s in 1927 and from Yale in 1931, took a M.B.A. from Harvard, and entered the world of high finance. But close to the end of his junior year in 1930, we read in that May 16th’s Times society page, in an article entitled “Yale Tap Day Held,” that Hunt was tapped for Scroll & Key. That, you may know, is the second oldest and wealthiest of Yale’s secret societies after Skull & Bones, with its own off-campus “tomb” shielding its secret rituals from curious and perhaps censorious eyes. Exclusive, you betcha; and indisputably a secret society. Fifteen juniors were tapped each year to be the next year’s Keysmen. And along with Jim Hunt that day in May 1930 were none other than Lyttleton Fox Jr. and Rowland Stebbins Jr. Fox had also gone to St. Paul’s, in same class as Hunt, and so had Stebbins — all three St. Paul’s Class of 1927. All three went on to Yale, and in their junior year all three were made Scroll & Key. Hunt married his college sweetheart, Miss Eleanor Pratt of the Glen Cove, L.I., Pratts — money and social standing there too — shortly after graduation, on June 13, 1931. The event was heralded by a May 22nd Times article, “24 Attendants Chosen by Miss Eleanor Pratt,” though I presume Hunt chose own his Best Man and other groomsmen. His Best Man was Rowland Stebbins Jr. Lyttleton Fox Jr. was an usher. Christian names were frequently recycled in the Stebbins family, and in a July 19, 1936, Times article, “Edith Parker Wed in Massachusetts,” we read of the wedding of Richard Rowland Stebbins of New York City. That is not our Rowland Stebbins Jr., but a cousin. But our Rowland Stebbins, Pip to be, was one of the ushers. So was Lyttleton Fox Jr. And so, fellow Pips, was one Benjamin S. Clark of New York. The plot thickens. Four years later, Clark would become the seventh Pip, and one of the longest lived. In his 1987 article “Some Brief Recollections of a Pip,” he described how he and Richard Clarke had discovered their mutual devotion to Sherlock Holmes one day while meeting in the course of business, and how he had bested the boastful Clarke on a point about The Hound of the Baskervilles. In The Pips, he became Sir Henry Baskerville. So Ben Clark attends his first Pips dinner in 1940. The 1941 dinner is cancelled because of Pearl Harbor. The dinners resume in 1945, and now include Ben Clark and Jim Hunt, both returned from the war. Within a few years, Hunt’s Scroll & Key friends Lyttleton Fox, by now a lawyer in Washington following wartime Navy service, and Rowland Stebbins, also practicing law following wartime service (though the less socially elevated Army Air Corps), are Pips as well. And though Harvard instead of Yale, and a bit older than the others, Ben Clark had known them previously. Merely as fellow groomsmen at Stebbins’ cousin’s wedding some twenty years before? It this all coincidence? No, no: as Sherlock Holmes said in The Adventure of the Second Stain, “the odds are enormous against its being coincidence. No figures could express them.” Clark – Hunt – Fox – Stebbins: something more was going on here. Nor is this the end of the web of relationships: — During the war, Stebbins contracted a second marriage in 1943 with a socially-connected young Englishwoman in Washington whose father directed a wartime procurement commission there. Are you surprised by now to hear that his Best Man was Jim Hunt? — And all but Stebbins became members of the Century Association in New York, a very Establishment club indeed. (One of Hunt’s two proposers was Nelson Rockefeller.) And I daresay there is a good deal more waiting to be declassified. After the war, Stebbins practiced law in Washington, mostly military contracting work, then returned to New York in the 1950s to do other government-related legal work, and became a Pip. Lyttleton Fox had already moved back to New York, and was already a Pip. Their fellow Keysman Hunt, in and out of New York and Washington throughout his CIA career, preceded them both into the Pips. They must all have loved Sherlock Holmes very much. Perhaps they had read Sherlock Holmes stories to each other in the Scroll & Key tomb back at Yale in 1931. Except that none of them have any record of the scholarship for which Pips are famous. In an era of over five decades when the editors of the Baker Street Journal were all Pips, its pages filled by what first had been Pips papers at our dinners, we find none by Hunt or Stebbins, and by Fox only the two from the late 1960s. Nor have unpublished papers by them been found among the Pipsarchives of their contemporaries. This blank record of unclassified writings is a far cry from previous Pips, or the next generation that included H. C. Potter, a two-time Morley-Montgomery Award winner, William S. Baring-Gould, turning his chronology of the tales into his biography of Sherlock Holmes and then into his annotated edition, and of course Julian Wolff. No, we have been witnessing an alliance of financial and political power, and a secret society. Hunt entered CIA’s orbit in 1947 in its so-called “New York Contact Branch,” collecting economic and industrial intelligence from well-placed contacts in the financial and corporate spheres, such as the executive vice president of General Motors Overseas Operations, codenamed Thorneycroft Huxtable. I am sure Hunt found The Pips a useful clandestine network, and that he proposed Fox and Stebbins for membership as a cover for other collaboration during the Cold War, based on old school ties, the right clubs, the management of money, wartime military service, and the discretion in Fox’s and Stebbins’ cases that goes with the practice of law as well as with secret intelligence.* Dare we, in fact, wonder if The Five Orange Pips as a whole in their day had become a secret society during the Cold War, with yet another high-finance former Naval officer, Richard W. Clarke, as presiding officer? Because I cannot suggest a better reason for his peculiar admission of Fox and Stebbins to the Pips except at Hunt’s behest — let alone Hunt himself — on privileged grounds since none of the three were scholars making The Pips what Christopher Morley called Sherlockiana’s “Institute of Higher Studies.” Fox died in 1969, Hunt in 1979, and Stebbins in 1985, taking their secrets with them. Other Pips who might be able to answer our questions, Richard Clarke, Ben Clark, and Edgar Smith, are gone too. These are deep waters, though at times not so much a pool of H2O as Uncle Scrooge’s swimming pool filled with cash, into which he would immerse himself betimes, and do the breaststroke. I hope we get to the bottom of it someday too. Arthur Cadogan West, Junior Clerk. * I leave out of consideration here our beloved Edward F. Clark, Jr., whose work as a Wall Street lawyer led to his selection as an Ultra officer in MIS Special Branch during the war. I doubt he ever disclosed such matters to other Pips, until later to me, given my work at the Arsenal. I also hesitate, without further data, to include Ben Clark as part of this secret generation — because despite his having known them in the 1930s, he was not Yale, but Harvard, because his scholarship is a matter of record, and also because in the war he was a paratrooper, and a sergeant at that. Those familiar with life at the Arsenal will realize the social gulf involved for Former Naval Persons like Hunt and Fox.

Tales from the Arsenal —

PIPS BEYOND COINCIDENCE

Sherlock Holmes, in The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor, spoke of “unwelcome social summonses which call upon a man to be bored or to lie.” Did he regard the society pages of newspapers very differently from their agony columns? At first glance, society-page contents are products of romance; and Holmes the unsentimental reasoner had, we know, scant interest in love stories or elopements worked into the fifth proposition of Euclid.

But this is a superficial notion. Someone as acute as Holmes surely saw the society pages, burbling with news of engagements and weddings, for what they were: announcements of the latest alliances of financial and political power governing the kingdom’s and empire’s affairs. He surely paid attention to the society page, then; and so shall we, over the next few minutes, to see what it can tell us about The Five Orange Pips — which our founder Richard Clarke was already calling in 1940 the most exclusive organization in the world.

I sometimes wondered what he meant by that. On another occasion, he assured Irregular hoi polloi that the Pips were not a secret society, at the same time he declined to send the Baker Street Journal reports of Pips dinners. I have found reason to wonder about that secret-society angle, especially after analyzing The Pips in terms of its generations. My late friend John Gardner, writer of novels about the world of secret intelligence as well as about Professor Moriarty, wrote an excellent trilogy about a family inside MI5 and MI6 called The Secret Generations. I shall lay before you tonight evidence that The Pips had a secret generation too.

Its first generation, of course, were our five founders in 1935. Clarke was a stockbroker, Norman Ward a banker, and Gordon Knox Bell a Wall Street lawyer. Frank Waters and Owen Frisbie came from the business world. Perhaps you sense a theme there: money. Well, it was a long time ago. Sic transit gloria mundi.

The second, overlapping, generation arrived with Edgar W. Smith, a corporate executive, and Benjamin S. Clark with the Wall Street investment firm of White, Weld & Co. There was a third new Pip then as well about whom we sadly know little, because E. Chauncey Anderson died in 1941 at age thirty-seven. Beyond the obvious facts that he was married, a Freemason, and part of the Wendell Willkie draft movement during 1940’s Presidential campaign, I can tell you little. But I do know he attended St. Paul’s School in Concord N.H., and then Yale. And you shall see that this was a harbinger.

After the war a third generation arrived. Two were architects, William Beers at the end of his career, and Ellery Husted with years left of his. Clarke had known Husted before the war, and in the Navy; Beers he may have met at their mutual club, the Racquet & Tennis, where Clarke sponsored Edgar Smith, and to which Smith moved the BSI’s annual dinner in 1948. But an additional newcomer was James Ramsay Hunt, Jr., known to The Pips as McMurdo. Hunt had been with Wall Street’s Lee Higginson firm before the war, returning to it in 1945. But he had spent the war in Naval Intelligence, and in 1947 he joined a New York element of the CIA’s precursor Central Intelligence Group. As I’ve related elsewhere, in 1951 Jim Hunt relocated to Washington D.C., and CIA’s HQ there.

The onset of the 1950s saw a fourth generation’s arrival with James Montgomery, invited by Clarke to join, and Thayer Cumings, an old kinsprit of Christopher Morley’s who may have been suggested by Morley as a consolation when Morley failed to attend the 1950 Pips dinner as Clarke had hoped.

But now something strange happened. Clarke had already stated that “the limit of our organization is ten members,” but at the very same time that he reminded Pips of that, in a memo dated May 2, 1951, he went on to inform them that a Lyttleton Fox Jr. was under serious consideration for the Pips. Fox, said Clarke, had studied the Sacred Writings for many years, and had contributed articles of importance.

If any such articles of importance are known to you, I would love to see them. They are unknown to De Waal, who records no contributions to the literature by Lyttleton Fox Jr. prior to 1966, and after that only twice, neither of them notably important; though I note that our comrade Langdale Pike did anthologize a rather fanciful one entitled “Mycroft Recomputed” some years ago, in Sherlock Holmes by Gaslight.

In 1953, two years later, Clarke issued a new membership list showing The Pips at ten: the five founders; Edgar Smith and Ben Clark; James Hunt and Ellery Husted (Colonel Beers having died); and James Montgomery. But in fact the Pips were really now eleven. While Thayer Cumings went unnamed in this list, he was a Pip already, or at any rate expected at that year’s impending dinner where he was enpipped.

Yet alongside that column of names was a second headed “Associate Members,” with four names. The first two were distant honoraries: Lord Donegall, editor of the Sherlock Holmes Journal in England, and A. D. Henriksen in Denmark — both, I suspect, due to Edgar Smith, the BSJ’s editor and pursuer of overseas links for the BSI. (I doubt either Smith the corporate executive or Clarke the stockbroker realized Henriksen was also a radical who’d penned a volume of political poetry entitled The Red Dawn of the East.)

The other two “Associate Members” were Evan M. Wilson and Lyttleton Fox Jr. No information was provided there as to these gentlemen’s identities, or whence they came. Wilson happened to be a Foreign Service Officer who later became an active Pip for some years. I knew him in the 1970s, in Washington. His contributions to the literature greatly outnumber Fox’s, though he was often posted abroad when Pips dinners took place; on this occasion in 1953, for example, he was in London as First Secretary at the U.S. Embassy.

In the event, 1953’s dinner had to be postponed. In announcing same, Richard Clarke reiterated Wilson’s and Fox’s candidate status. “When they have completed a thesis and attend one of our meetings,” said Clarke, “they will then join our ranks as full and regular Members.”

What was going on here? Even allowing that Gordon Knox Bell was no longer attending dinners, and James Ramsay Hunt Jr. getting ready to go to Paris for four years as the CIA’s Chief of Station, this seems peculiar, especially for someone as prickly and prideful about Holmesian credentials and Piphood as Clarke. What mysterious influence was at work?

I believe Lyttleton Fox Jr. signals, not the origin of the Pips’ secret generation — for that, we must look to James Hunt, our McMurdo — but its accession inside The Five Orange Pips.

We haven’t known much about Fox, though his father had been a prominent New York lawyer who died suddenly one day in 1934 at the Racquet Club. Mentions of Lyttleton Jr. in the Times come mainly before the war, mostly from the society pages: in the 1930s, as a young bachelor, he had been the escort of many a New York debutante. And Fox was soon followed into The Pips, by someone equally unknown to the Holmesiana of that era, Rowland Stebbins Jr. We don’t know much about Stebbins either, though his numerous clan, back to colonial days, was prominent in the social affairs of Boston and New York.

Now follow me closely as I return to Hunt, whose move to Washington in 1951 I once took to mean the end of his time as a Pip. This seems to have been true for his BSI dinner attendances, but not for the more exclusive and discreet Pips. Not only is Hunt still on the 1953 membership list, one or two surviving dinner programs in the first half of the 1950s are signed by him as McMurdo. And I have discovered in old newspaper society pages some interesting connections I wish to reveal tonight.

Young Jim Hunt, son of a well-to-do Manhattan neurologist with a home in Katonah, was sent to St. Paul’s School in Concord N.H., and then to Yale — just like the ill-fated E. Chauncey Anderson, though I know of no other connection between them. Hunt graduated from St. Paul’s in 1927 and from Yale in 1931, took a M.B.A. from Harvard, and entered the world of high finance. But close to the end of his junior year in 1930, we read in that May 16th’s Times society page, in an article entitled “Yale Tap Day Held,” that Hunt was tapped for Scroll & Key. That, you may know, is the second oldest and wealthiest of Yale’s secret societies after Skull & Bones, with its own off-campus “tomb” shielding its secret rituals from curious and perhaps censorious eyes. Exclusive, you betcha; and indisputably a secret society.

Fifteen juniors were tapped each year to be the next year’s Keysmen. And along with Jim Hunt that day in May 1930 were none other than Lyttleton Fox Jr. and Rowland Stebbins Jr. Fox had also gone to St. Paul’s, in same class as Hunt, and so had Stebbins — all three St. Paul’s Class of 1927. All three went on to Yale, and in their junior year all three were made Scroll & Key.

Hunt married his college sweetheart, Miss Eleanor Pratt of the Glen Cove, L.I., Pratts — money and social standing there too — shortly after graduation, on June 13, 1931. The event was heralded by a May 22nd Times article, “24 Attendants Chosen by Miss Eleanor Pratt,” though I presume Hunt chose own his Best Man and other groomsmen. His Best Man was Rowland Stebbins Jr. Lyttleton Fox Jr. was an usher.

Christian names were frequently recycled in the Stebbins family, and in a July 19, 1936, Times article, “Edith Parker Wed in Massachusetts,” we read of the wedding of Richard Rowland Stebbins of New York City. That is not our Rowland Stebbins Jr., but a cousin. But our Rowland Stebbins, Pip to be, was one of the ushers. So was Lyttleton Fox Jr.

And so, fellow Pips, was one Benjamin S. Clark of New York. The plot thickens.

Four years later, Clark would become the seventh Pip, and one of the longest lived. In his 1987 article “Some Brief Recollections of a Pip,” he described how he and Richard Clarke had discovered their mutual devotion to Sherlock Holmes one day while meeting in the course of business, and how he had bested the boastful Clarke on a point about The Hound of the Baskervilles. In The Pips, he became Sir Henry Baskerville.

So Ben Clark attends his first Pips dinner in 1940. The 1941 dinner is cancelled because of Pearl Harbor. The dinners resume in 1945, and now include Ben Clark and Jim Hunt, both returned from the war. Within a few years, Hunt’s Scroll & Key friends Lyttleton Fox, by now a lawyer in Washington following wartime Navy service, and Rowland Stebbins, also practicing law following wartime service (though the less socially elevated Army Air Corps), are Pips as well. And though Harvard instead of Yale, and a bit older than the others, Ben Clark had known them previously.

Merely as fellow groomsmen at Stebbins’ cousin’s wedding some twenty years before? It this all coincidence? No, no: as Sherlock Holmes said in The Adventure of the Second Stain, “the odds are enormous against its being coincidence. No figures could express them.” Clark – Hunt – Fox – Stebbins: something more was going on here.

Nor is this the end of the web of relationships:

— During the war, Stebbins contracted a second marriage in 1943 with a socially-connected young Englishwoman in Washington whose father directed a wartime procurement commission there. Are you surprised by now to hear that his Best Man was Jim Hunt?

— And all but Stebbins became members of the Century Association in New York, a very Establishment club indeed. (One of Hunt’s two proposers was Nelson Rockefeller.)

And I daresay there is a good deal more waiting to be declassified.

After the war, Stebbins practiced law in Washington, mostly military contracting work, then returned to New York in the 1950s to do other government-related legal work, and became a Pip. Lyttleton Fox had already moved back to New York, and was already a Pip. Their fellow Keysman Hunt, in and out of New York and Washington throughout his CIA career, preceded them both into the Pips. They must all have loved Sherlock Holmes very much. Perhaps they had read Sherlock Holmes stories to each other in the Scroll & Key tomb back at Yale in 1931.

Except that none of them have any record of the scholarship for which Pips are famous. In an era of over five decades when the editors of the Baker Street Journal were all Pips, its pages filled by what first had been Pips papers at our dinners, we find none by Hunt or Stebbins, and by Fox only the two from the late 1960s. Nor have unpublished papers by them been found among the Pipsarchives of their contemporaries. This blank record of unclassified writings is a far cry from previous Pips, or the next generation that included H. C. Potter, a two-time Morley-Montgomery Award winner, William S. Baring-Gould, turning his chronology of the tales into his biography of Sherlock Holmes and then into his annotated edition, and of course Julian Wolff.

No, we have been witnessing an alliance of financial and political power, and a secret society. Hunt entered CIA’s orbit in 1947 in its so-called “New York Contact Branch,” collecting economic and industrial intelligence from well-placed contacts in the financial and corporate spheres, such as the executive vice president of General Motors Overseas Operations, codenamed Thorneycroft Huxtable. I am sure Hunt found The Pips a useful clandestine network, and that he proposed Fox and Stebbins for membership as a cover for other collaboration during the Cold War, based on old school ties, the right clubs, the management of money, wartime military service, and the discretion in Fox’s and Stebbins’ cases that goes with the practice of law as well as with secret intelligence.*

Dare we, in fact, wonder if The Five Orange Pips as a whole in their day had become a secret society during the Cold War, with yet another high-finance former Naval officer, Richard W. Clarke, as presiding officer? Because I cannot suggest a better reason for his peculiar admission of Fox and Stebbins to the Pips except at Hunt’s behest — let alone Hunt himself — on privileged grounds since none of the three were scholars making The Pips what Christopher Morley called Sherlockiana’s “Institute of Higher Studies.”

Fox died in 1969, Hunt in 1979, and Stebbins in 1985, taking their secrets with them. Other Pips who might be able to answer our questions, Richard Clarke, Ben Clark, and Edgar Smith, are gone too. These are deep waters, though at times not so much a pool of H2O as Uncle Scrooge’s swimming pool filled with cash, into which he would immerse himself betimes, and do the breaststroke. I hope we get to the bottom of it someday too.

Arthur Cadogan West,

Junior Clerk.

* I leave out of consideration here our beloved Edward F. Clark, Jr., whose work as a Wall Street lawyer led to his selection as an Ultra officer in MIS Special Branch during the war. I doubt he ever disclosed such matters to other Pips, until later to me, given my work at the Arsenal.

I also hesitate, without further data, to include Ben Clark as part of this secret generation — because despite his having known them in the 1930s, he was not Yale, but Harvard, because his scholarship is a matter of record, and also because in the war he was a paratrooper, and a sergeant at that. Those familiar with life at the Arsenal will realize the social gulf involved for Former Naval Persons like Hunt and Fox.