An untold literary thriller

The Other Side of the Lake — Nicholas Bacon

Three orphaned brothers. One stuffed pheasant. The story the British establishment
buried for eighty years.

The author's uncle was Cyril Bacon — the youngest of those three brothers. He told this story once, a week before he died. This is it.

Read the opening chapter free

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City messengers, 1920s

The shoot, 1930s

Dungavel House, 1941

Section D, SOE

Geoff, Reg & Cyril, 1936

Geoff with the van, 1935

History & controversy

The key historic events the records don't explain.

I Why did Hess fly to Scotland — and what did he carry?

He landed on 10 May 1941. He brought documents. The Cabinet was not told for hours. The files on what he carried have never been fully released.

II What was the royal family discussing at Badminton House?

Queen Mary and the Duke of Kent spent 1940 at Badminton. The Duke kept contact with continental intermediaries. None of it was minuted.

III Why was the Duke of Kent's aircraft south-east of Loch More?

The approved flight plan ran north. The aircraft flew south-east. The inquiry said navigation error. No error of that magnitude, in good visibility, has been explained.

Explore the history chapter by chapter See the reader's companion →

Academic Endorsement (expected reactions)

Historian
Credentials

"Historians of the period will recognise the architecture immediately. The Desmond Morton thread, the Hess questions, the documented unease around Eagle's Rock — all handled with a scrupulousness that most non-fiction writers would envy. I found myself checking the author's note against sources I know well. The book earns its liberties."

Fellow, Royal Historical Society

Intelligence Historian
University of Warwick

"The British intelligence community's tolerance for covert domestic surveillance in the 1930s has been systematically underplayed in the literature. What this account suggests — the use of civilian assets, the deliberate avoidance of official records, the targeting of members of the royal household — is entirely consistent with what we know of Morton's methods. The operational architecture is credible."

Intelligence historian

Royal Biographer
Former Fellow, Magdalen College

"The Duke of Kent's presence at Dungavel on 10 May 1941 is documented. The telephone call to his brother is documented. What happened in that room, and what was communicated, is not documented — because the people who knew took care to ensure it was not. This novel takes a documented silence and makes it speak. That is an act of historical imagination I find entirely defensible."

Royal biographer

Deep dives

Life in 1930s Britain: the politics, culture
and world in which the book is set.

Country house · 1929

The shooting party: Britain's informal seat of power

In the 1930s, the country-house shooting weekend was not merely recreation — it was the principal venue for political decision-making that could not be conducted in Whitehall. Cabinet ministers, industrialists, press barons and foreign ambassadors moved through the same houses each season, their conversations unminuted and unrecorded.

Working class · 1920s London

The messenger economy: how London moved information before the telephone

Before secure telephone lines, before telex, the City of London ran on human runners. Boys as young as fourteen carried documents between banks, brokerages and government offices — invisible to the people they served, privy to everything they carried. The messenger economy was the intelligence infrastructure of early twentieth-century Britain.

SIS Section D · Intelligence

Section D: the intelligence service that officially did not exist

Established in 1938, Section D of the Secret Intelligence Service was charged with covert operations that the formal structure could not conduct without political exposure. It recruited outside conventional channels, kept no formal personnel records, and answered directly to a small number of individuals — among them, Desmond Morton.

GHQ Auxiliary Units · 1940–1944

Churchill's secret army: 4,000 civilians trained to kill

In 1940, Britain secretly trained thousands of farmers, gamekeepers and foresters as a stay-behind resistance force, ready to operate behind enemy lines if Germany invaded. Their life expectancy, once activated, was measured in days. Almost none of them ever spoke of it.

Packard Six wireless car, SIS Section VIII

SIS Section VIII · 1938–1945

The radio network nobody was supposed to notice

A covert wireless service built from a Barnes workshop, a country house in Buckinghamshire, and a fleet of American Packard cars — staffed largely by amateur radio enthusiasts recruited for a skill they had learned purely for fun.

Short Sunderland · RAF · 1938–1945

The Sunderland flying boat: Britain's long-range eyes over the Atlantic

The Short S.25 Sunderland entered RAF service in 1938 as one of the most capable maritime patrol aircraft of its era. Powered by four Bristol Pegasus XVIII radial engines, it could remain airborne for thirteen hours and operate at extreme range from conventional airfields.

Author's note

He said he wanted someone to know. Then he told me to sit down.

Geoff, Reg & Cyril, 1936

Geoff with the van, 1935

In 1963 my uncle Cyril bought a Jaguar Mk2 — not any Mk2 but a Coombs Special, 3.8-litre engine, gunmetal grey with red leather interior. As we drove past the largest house on Camden Park Road he said it quietly, almost to himself: "That one's a Nazi."

I was eight. I noticed, without having a frame to put it in, that Cyril seemed to know a great deal about a great many things that a greengrocer had no obvious reason to know about. The frame came later — in Valletta, in the spring of 2005, when he called and asked me to come. On the second evening he told me he had been diagnosed and that there was not much time. He said he had a lot to get off his chest. He said he wanted someone to know.

Then he told me to sit down.

See family story & photos

In the book

Locations and objects.
All of them real.

The BSA 500

1928 BSA Model S2 — gift from Churchill

A 500cc single-cylinder machine, delivered to St Mary Platt in late 1928. The boys' operational transport throughout the 1930s.

More about the BSA

The Stylo pen

SOE concealed device — Coleshill, 1941

A working pen with a small explosive charge in the barrel, issued at Coleshill. Activated by removing the cap with a half-turn.

More about the Stylo pen

Chartwell

Churchill's house — Westerham, Kent

Purchased 1922. Morton's house was 1.1 miles across the fields. The conversation that begins the operation takes place at the lake's southern bank.

More about Chartwell

Dungavel House

Ayrshire — 10 May 1941

Duke of Hamilton's seat. Cyril was in position from 20:00. The aircraft circled twice before Hess bailed out over Floors Farm.

More about Dungavel House

Read deeper

The history behind every chapter. Go as deep as you want.

This companion takes you through the book scene by scene — linking each chapter to the historical record, the documented evidence, and the questions that have never been answered.

See the chapter by chapter reader's companion →

Prologue Dungavel House, 10 May 1941 — Cyril in the woods

Section 1 Albert Ernest and the boys — Kent, 1861–1928

Section 2 The shoot and the recruitment — Mereworth, 1929

Section 3 The operation — London and the drawing rooms, 1930–36

Section 4 The appeasers — Ribbentrop, Wallis, and Kent, 1936–40

Section 5 Churchill becomes Prime Minister — May 1940

Section 6 Hess flies to Scotland — May 1941

In the book

The people who made history —
and the people who watched it being made.

Real figures, real roles, and the secret connections the official record never captured.

Desmond Morton

Churchill's spymaster. Lives one mile from Chartwell. German bullet in his chest since 1917. Controller of the Three Little Pigs. Never appears in any visitors' book.

Get to know Morton →

von Ribbentrop

Nazi Foreign Minister. Sends carnation bouquets to Wallis Simpson — one per encounter, seventeen in total. Each bouquet contains a coded intelligence message.

Get to know von Ribbentrop →

Winston Churchill

His house at Chartwell is under surveillance. The only place he can speak freely is the far bank of the lake. He names the brothers the Three Little Pigs. He calls himself Mr Bullfinch.

Get to know Churchill →

Duke of Kent

Fourth son of George V. The conspirators' preferred royal figurehead. His aircraft departs south-east from Loch More when the approved flight plan runs north. He does not survive the flight.

Get to know the Duke of Kent →

Rudolf Hess

Deputy Führer. Flies solo to Scotland, 10 May 1941. He believes he is the last rational actor in the Nazi hierarchy. He is Cyril's charge for eighteen months. He is not what he appears to be.

Get to know Hess →

Wallis Simpson

Her Mayfair flat at Bryanston Court receives Ribbentrop's bouquets. Her florist is a young woman from Kent who notices something inside the carnations that she cannot unknow.

Get to know Wallis →

More praise for the book (expected reactions)

"Where lesser writers would reach for bombast, this debut finds its power in restraint. The novel's greatest achievement is making the reader understand, with creeping certainty, that the civil war being described was real — and that one side very nearly won."

Stephanie Merritt — Books Correspondent, The Guardian

The Sunday
Times

"A debut of extraordinary assurance. The stuffed pheasants alone — those listening trophies in the drawing rooms of men who thought themselves untouchable — are worth the price of the book. But it is Cyril, the quiet one, who will haunt you. Long after you have closed the cover you will find yourself watching greengrocers."

David Sanderson — Books Editor, The Sunday Times

The Daily
Telegraph

"Part thriller, part documentary, entirely gripping. The author writes with the controlled fury of someone who has known this story their whole life and waited too long to tell it. The class inversions are handled with a precision that Len Deighton would recognise and admire."

Jake Kerridge — Fiction Critic, The Daily Telegraph

The
Spectator

"The British establishment's wartime conduct towards its own people is a subject that authorised biographies have circled for eighty years without landing. This novel lands."

Philip Ziegler — Historian and Biographer, The Spectator

Times Literary
Supplement

"The author's family history sits at the heart of this story, and it shows — not as sentiment, but as a quality of knowledge that research alone cannot buy. On one side of the lake: the public performance of power. On the other: the actual exercise of it, by people whose names appear in no official record."

Frances Wilson — Literary Critic, Times Literary Supplement

New
Statesman

"These are not gentleman spies. They are a taxidermist's grandsons from a Kent farm, doing things that the officers who recruited them would never have been asked to do themselves — and doing them better."

Johanna Thomas-Corr — Literary Editor, New Statesman

Richard &
Judy Book Club

"We have been looking for a book that does what Double Cross did but from the ground up — from the ordinary people rather than the officers. This is it. It is pacey, it is furious, it is scandalous in the best possible sense, and the moment you meet Cyril you will not put it down."

Richard Madeley — Richard & Judy Book Club

Free chapter

Read the opening chapter.

The story begins at Mereworth Castle, January 1929.