Walter Arthur Charles Dicketts (31 March 1900 – 16 August 1957) was a British double agent[1] who was sent by MI5 into Nazi Germany in early 1941 to infiltrate the Abwehr and bring back information about any impending invasion of Britain.

At the age of thirty, Dicketts eloped with a sixteen-year-old girl named Alma Wood and married her, prompting a nationwide search to catch him before the marriage could take place.

As part of the Double-Cross System[1] Dicketts role was to convince the Germans he was a traitor[3] who was willing to sell out his country in return for cash, whilst continuing to report to MI5.

Given the codename Celery, Dicketts accompanied Britain's first double agent Arthur Owens (Snow) to neutral Lisbon where he was introduced to Major Nikolaus Ritter of the Abwehr.

[15] In his business life, Walter Dicketts used up to twenty-three different aliases[16] and served several prison sentences for fraud (forging cheques and obtaining money by false pretences) in the UK, as well as one in Austria and one in France.

When his businesses began to fail, Dicketts and his wife Judith fled to East Grinstead, where he established himself as a wealthy philanthropist called Charles Stewart Pollock.

[19] In October 1957, John Bull magazine published an article called "Hitler's Wartime Spies in Britain"[20] which named Arthur Owens but not Walter Dicketts.

Dicketts was described by his German codename Brown, and was pictured being drugged by the Abwehr who removed his opening signet ring[9] to see if any hidden secret code was written behind the photograph of his girlfriend Kay.

In 1972 John Cecil Masterman published The Double Cross System in the War of 1939 to 1945, an intimate account of wartime British military deception, in which Celery is mentioned, but not identified as Walter Dicketts.