According to "The Listener" in ABC Weekly "At first glance, this play looks like the
beginning of another naughty-Nazi fantasia, but although there are plenty of naughty Nazis in the piece, and plenty-naughty Nazis at that, the story works up to one of those ingenious Afford surprises that make you wonder whom the man with the red beard would be like if he had a red beard."[4]
Leslie Rees called it "an effective, sprightly, persuasive play" that was different to other Afford plays like Grey Face, Mr. Lynch and the Owl, "those dark walkers of the moors, those macabre and sinister purveyors of limping feet, whistled theme tunes or the hooting calls of night birds... Albert Jones belongs to a different, a more usual but in the long run a no less interesting world. An inoffensive little English clerk addicted to water-colour painting, he yet finds himself help-lessly caught up in the ruthless march of events in the Nazi Germany of just before the war... a story that still has power to make the blood pleasurably clot, along with its cameos of humour: so don't miss it."[5]
The play was produced again in 1943.[6]
