Jul 30, 2026 · 27 min · 10 segments
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Phil ThompsonHost
His father was reported missing in action at Pozière during World War I in March 1918.
What stability Crabb had came from his mother's wealthy cousin, Frank Jarvis, founder of the Conway Stewart Pen Company, who paid for his schooling and became the father figure he'd lost.
He trained on the merchant navy ship HMS Conway in the early 1920s, then apprenticed on the SS Bonheur sailing between New York and South America.
But embarrassed by a family scandal involving his aunt running off with another man, he jumped ship at New York in the mid 1920s and then drifted through a string of dead end American jobs.
He worked at a gas station in Pennsylvania and at a funeral parlor in Manhattan.
One of Lionel's wealthy relatives from the Jarvis clan saw that the young man had nothing better to do and so sent him to China as a chaperone for a cousin.
This particular cousin had a drinking problem and the Jarvis family paid Crabbe to do his best to set him on the straight and narrow.
He stayed on for months anyway and did manage to cut back his own drinking and found work.
Within a couple of years he was back in London, doing well for himself as a salesman.
For the first time in his adult life, he had money and nobody to answer to, and by 1936 he decided to go back east.
For nearly 18 months he worked as a mercenary and intelligence agent for Chinese nationalist forces.
He used his small stature and dark colouring to pass as a local, often dyeing his hair and skin and he used his undertaker's training as cover, carrying secret messages hidden in his hair or bamboo poles and moving weapons and ammunition beneath bodies few people wanted to inspect too closely.
In Shanghai, he was introduced to Morris Two Guns Cohen, bodyguard to revolutionary Chinese military commander Chiang Kai-shek who hired him to serve as a go-between for receiving foreign supplies.
The Chinese nationalists were in touch with the British secret intelligence services who, by some accounts, were helping to fund the conflict against the Chinese communists.
He left the Far East in 1938, returning to London where he worked briefly for an art gallery co-owned by none other than Antony Blunt.
His father was reported missing in action at Pozière during World War I in March 1918.
What stability Crabb had came from his mother's wealthy cousin, Frank Jarvis, founder of the Conway Stewart Pen Company, who paid for his schooling and became the father figure he'd lost.
He trained on the merchant navy ship HMS Conway in the early 1920s, then apprenticed on the SS Bonheur sailing between New York and South America.
But embarrassed by a family scandal involving his aunt running off with another man, he jumped ship at New York in the mid 1920s and then drifted through a string of dead end American jobs.
He worked at a gas station in Pennsylvania and at a funeral parlor in Manhattan.
One of Lionel's wealthy relatives from the Jarvis clan saw that the young man had nothing better to do and so sent him to China as a chaperone for a cousin.
This particular cousin had a drinking problem and the Jarvis family paid Crabbe to do his best to set him on the straight and narrow.
He stayed on for months anyway and did manage to cut back his own drinking and found work.
Within a couple of years he was back in London, doing well for himself as a salesman.
For the first time in his adult life, he had money and nobody to answer to, and by 1936 he decided to go back east.
For nearly 18 months he worked as a mercenary and intelligence agent for Chinese nationalist forces.
He used his small stature and dark colouring to pass as a local, often dyeing his hair and skin and he used his undertaker's training as cover, carrying secret messages hidden in his hair or bamboo poles and moving weapons and ammunition beneath bodies few people wanted to inspect too closely.
In Shanghai, he was introduced to Morris Two Guns Cohen, bodyguard to revolutionary Chinese military commander Chiang Kai-shek who hired him to serve as a go-between for receiving foreign supplies.
The Chinese nationalists were in touch with the British secret intelligence services who, by some accounts, were helping to fund the conflict against the Chinese communists.
He left the Far East in 1938, returning to London where he worked briefly for an art gallery co-owned by none other than Antony Blunt.
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