Free Mrs Zigzag: The Extraordinary Life of a Secret Agent's Wife by Betty Chapman

Sunderland, north-east England. Based on this experience, he and Betty started a cargo business. Eddie and his brother Winston, a marine engineer, were in charge, carrying grain and commercial goods up and down the Bristol Channel.
    They bought a boat called the Sir James , a coal steamer, from the Harris Shipyard in Appledore, on the north Devon coast. 1 This gave birth to the shipping and travel business called Courtline, of which Winston was the director. Betty and Eddie invested heavily in it, with money left over from Eddie’s pay from the Germans, and from various different projects of Betty’s.
    In the early days the business consisted of the two brothers, a transient crew and one small steamer. Ever loyal, Betty followed them up and down the Devon coast as they shipped cargos back and forth. When work for small ships became thin, they moved to Newry in Northern Ireland and ran cargo from there to Glasgow. A transit office was built in Newry, where Betty worked for a while helping to arrange the manifests.
    Although it is hard to recall, this was Northern Ireland before the Troubles, 2 but with all the problems brewing: a Catholic minority who found it hard to get work, idealist republicans who had not yet moved into the terrorist era, strident and prosperous Protestants who comprised the majority of the employers, and many ordinary working people who did not promote the religious divide. Eddie and Betty, never ones to take the Establishment line, found themselves friends with both the Protestant bosses who became their clients, and with the republicans. Before they could start the shipping line they had to drain a canal that hadn’t been drained for ten years. There was a lot of trouble with the IRA (Irish Republican Army) at that time, and the crew made it a point to be difficult, so it was a stressful time for Betty.
    The crew was joined by Brendan Behan, an Irish poet, short story writer, novelist and playwright who wrote in both Irish and English. Behan was hiding out from the authorities: he was a republican and belonged to the Irish Republican Army, 3 and had been released from prison under a general amnesty for IRA prisoners in 1946. Aside from a short prison sentence he received in 1947 for his part in trying to break a fellow IRA member out of a Manchester jail, he effectively left the IRA. He wrote his first and much acclaimed play on board the Sir James – some of it on a toilet roll. In his memoirs, Behan refers to Eddie as ‘the Fixer’, suggesting that he was an agent for the Italians. ‘I personally think that he was an agent for himself, but Scotland Yard gave him the benefit of the doubt and freedom from all his sins, past, present and future.’ 4
    Eddie tells the story of hiring Brendan:
He could write, and he was a very amusing companion. He could walk into a pub and take it over – start singing Irish rebel songs. He had a tremendous sense of humour. The friend who asked me to take him on was Kathleen Ryan’s brother. He had never been to sea before, but I said don’t worry about it. We only had four other people on board – myself, my brother, the skipper and a fireman. It was a small cargo boat – only carried about 200 tons. His [Behan’s] parents lived in the slum district. We couldn’t get a taxi, so we walked miles, right into the slum district. We went up a little hill to a row of broken-down cottages, and when we got there, it was about 2 o’clock in the morning. He banged on the door, and banged and banged. After about half an hour of banging and kicking and shouting, finally his father opened the window and shouted ‘Who is it?’ Brendan said ‘It’s Brendan, father. I’m going to sea with Eddie Chapman.’ His father said, ‘Good,’ and put the window down.
    Betty also remembers these times:
Brendan was one day painting the ship, from the bottom upwards and only then did he start to question how he was going to get down! Bill Beamish was the skipper and Eddie got on