by Hamish Ross
Mayne’s journal reaffirms what was already evident from his analyses of field reports during the French campaign – that he was reflective. It illustrates his cognitive and rational side; his writing shows, too, that he had the ability to deal with ambiguity and cope with the frustration of working with a commander whose leadership calibre he questioned. He had clear ideas about good leadership; he believed that successful leadership styles could be cultivated; and, in the case of Bingham, he made allowances for his rawness to a position of command. Moreover, he demonstrated self-knowledge and intellectual honesty.
But the journal reveals more about the man. The extent of the pain he suffered from his damaged spine he had never acknowledged before, so no one knew of it. He referred to it in entry after entry in a matter-of-fact way; it did not dominate his thinking, but it was a severe problem for him. The journal also suggests that Mayne had difficulty sleeping, for many of the entries were made in the early morning. (Sadler’s first remark when he saw the journal’s transcript was, ‘Where did Paddy get time to write all this?’) His inability to sleep would partly have been the result of pain, but not completely. He was often awake and writing without making any reference to his back.
Those who have claimed that Mayne was a misogynist did not know that he had kept a journal during his time with the survey in which he clearly revealed an attraction to and an appreciation of women. The first entry reveals that when he arranged a party for Sadler and Tonkin it was not to be a male rebonding session, but a mixed group, with a local contact bringing two more girls. During the first week in Montevideo, until the weather broke, he went swimming with men and their wives, with the McCormicks and the Swans. He was attracted to someone called Eileen. When he met her he was about to depart for Antarctica for two years; when he returned, he expressed the wish to have had another week in Montevideo. And while Mayne showed contempt for crudity, he himself wrote of matters sexual, though he did so lightly – in his amusement at the other-worldly clergyman’s honeymoon experience and in the jingle of the young man’s sexual initiation. But in his version of the song, he showed that he responded sensitively to women, and he wrote without lewdness.
The journal clarifies the pattern of his drinking. Sometimes he had a binge, if he was in the right company; more often it was social drinking with friends. But he had his standards; for he considered that six preprandial gins were over much. He did not appear to drink because of pain – although he referred to its anaesthetic properties – and he did not tend to drink alone. However, references to drinking are all contained in the short period between 15 and 27 December; the last, ‘Drank some whisky in my room with the Swans, and Bingham afterwards’. After that there is none.
It has often been claimed that Mayne did not want to go back to practising law. But his own words refute that. The steps in his decision-making process are laid out in his different journal entries. First of all, projecting that he would be thirty-four if he returned to complete the two-year contract, he wrote that he was not particularly worried. So at that stage he was flexible; he considered the job offer from the Governor of the Falkland Islands Dependencies, but it did not appeal. A week later, he had been giving the matter more thought: whether to return to complete his contract with the survey or to settle down in some job, though he acknowledged that he did not know what he really wanted to do. Finally, ten days later, he had made up his mind: ‘Today I have been mapping out my future career.’ His decision was to return to the law – not in a subordinate capacity but in partnership: ‘With or without a partner, no more subservience.’ He was definite on that, and he reckoned that he had the skills and ability to earn a living.
But the journal reveals something else about Mayne: not through what he wrote, but in what he did not write. While he began it in Montevideo, its opening entry is set that Sunday in Chelmsford five weeks earlier. Yet, not once in the journal did he allude to his part in the war, nor did he refer to the war directly; there is no backward glance. He allowed himself no anecdote from his military experience; nor did he permit a comment on his war experience in relation to the calibre of personnel he was with now, compared to those in the unit he had commanded. Perhaps in one comment it is implied that he had been in the military: his reference, ‘Berry a typical old QM’. However, avoiding any direct reference to the war was not simply a case of writing a journal focused on the expedition, because he did refer to a prewar incident. In the entry of 19 January 1946, after the ship had changed course for Stanley, he wrote that he had borrowed a pen from a South African meteorologist, Niddrey, whom he had met and had a drink with in Pietermaritzburg in 1938 when he had toured with the British Lions. But he maintained strict control over mind and his feelings concerning the war period. So controlled was he that it suggests avoidance.
He did, however, make four allusions to the war. The first was the image of Orion’s steadfastness as an old friend, which he conjured from sitting in the open-air cinema in Natal. The second was the reference to writing ‘The Growth of a Unit’ and the third was to David Stirling’s masterly command of a useful leadership technique. But the fourth is poignant, because it alludes to the impact of the war. He had recalled his last St Patrick’s Day in Ireland in 1940, before going overseas. ‘Lot of everything flowed under the bridge since then.’ Not only was there a lot compressed into that statement, there is the suggestion of emotional numbing.
But Mayne’s instincts in signing on for the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey were sound. There would have been time in the vastness and the solitude of Antarctica to think without the social pressures of ordinary living; and writing a fictional account of the reality he had gone through the previous few years could have been therapeutic. That his time in Antarctica was cut short was something that he came to terms with. He may have suspected for some time that there would be a future reckoning for the earlier damage to his spine. But that apart, he knew that when the two-year contract came to an end, decisions about the future would still have had to be made. The shortened time with the survey probably had some benefit as well: like the diver coming up from the pressure at great depth, it provided a period of ‘decompression’ before returning to family and local community.
9
MY USUAL QUIET LIFE
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Seamus Heaney, ‘Digging’
Mayne’s imminent homecoming was newsworthy in Northern Ireland; it was reported in the press on 23 February 1946,1 several weeks before he arrived. He was referred to as Col Mayne, for his record in the war years had been closely followed, and he was described as second-in-command of an Antarctic Survey. The gist of the letter he had sent to his family from the Falklands got about and, in the way these things do, reached the ear of a journalist. The reason for his early return was attributed to a back injury which he had received during the war, which Mayne only now revealed, reassuring his family that he had not had an accident in Antarctica. However, interest went beyond Northern Ireland: the national press reported when Mayne disembarked from HMS Ajax, linking his former rank and regiment with the secrecy that cloaked the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey. One headline proclaimed, ‘Mystery Men of the Ajax’: the paper’s readers were told that Mayne was a four-times winner of the DSO who had formerly commanded 1 SAS; that he and his four companions wore civilian clothes; that he was met by an official of the Colonial Office; and that he had been on ‘hush-hush’ government business.2 This was to be the start of postwar public interest in Mayne, which would dog him for the rest of his life.
The first priority was his medical condition. Mayne saw an eminent consultant and underwent an operation in a Belfast hospital; but his back was never satisfactorily treated. When Mayne wrote in his journal that he thought of doing ‘a bit of work about the place’ while he convalesced, the expression he used – ‘the place’ – had a new significance for him, for the situation at home was different from the one he had left
to go to war. In 1943 his father had died intestate. Two sons and one daughter were serving in the forces at the time, but the family duly reached agreement on the disposal of the estate. Billy was now the oldest surviving son and he elected to take, for his share, the family business, renouncing any interest in the rest of the property. So Blair, in effect, returned home to Mount Pleasant as the eldest son. But it was the family home: it was his mother’s home; it was Barbara’s, and, although Frances was teaching in England, it was still her base. And, according to the view of the time, it was seen as the male’s responsibility to provide a home, and therefore Mayne, as a result of his part of the inheritance, had a new set of responsibilities. When he came home from the war, he bought Barbara and Frances each a necklace. Their provenance is unknown – whether part of war booty or purchased – although the design, which is broadly similar in both, seems more European than Middle Eastern. They are quite substantial in weight but less so in monetary value: in 2001 their value was in hundreds rather than thousands of pounds.
So by choosing to return to the law, he was restricting himself to working in Northern Ireland, for he would not have been able to practise in the English or Scottish jurisdictions without further study and examinations. While there is no reason to assume that he wished to work elsewhere in the UK, he was also influenced by his family circumstances.
In April 1946, the month after his return, the post of Secretary of the Incorporated Law Society of Northern Ireland came up. From the way he revealed his thinking in his journal, it is certain that Mayne mulled over the options very carefully. While his inclination was to set up with a partner as a firm of solicitors, there was a degree of flexibility in his outlook, so long as the overriding condition was met – ‘no more subservience’. Now, the job of secretary of the legal profession met that criterion to a considerable extent. He would be the chief official of an incorporated body, responsible to its council, working most closely with its president, which was an office held in rotation by candidates drawn from among the legal profession.
Then there was the nature of the post itself. It required a qualified, competent solicitor who possessed administrative and social skills. The Council of the Law Society considered that he had those, and, doubtless, felt that his military distinctions and title carried an additional aura. From what we learn from the war diaries, the reports that he wrote and his Antarctic Survey journal, he had a logical and penetrating mind. However, the crucial thing is that Mayne himself felt that he had the requisite experience and skills for the job, for he had the self-knowledge of a man who would not overreach himself. His wartime colleague Fraser McLuskey said, ‘I wasn’t at all surprised when he became secretary to the Law Society. One of the things I marked about him was his ability to sum it up – opportunities.’3 Mayne made his decision; and the appointment met with the warm approval of the law profession.4
Although, in part, the job met the criteria he had set, that did not mean that he would find the work satisfying and so the transition from soldier to solicitor was difficult. The earliest recorded references to Mayne at his work with the Law Society come from a colleague, James Lindsay, probate registrar. He wrote of Mayne’s discomfort. ‘The transition from the limitless battlefield to the confines of a world [of] council chamber and library was not without its pains.’5 Some members of the law profession were also aware of it and gave him support. Samuel Cumming was president of the Law Society at one point in the late 1940s, and years later he told his son William that Mayne quite frequently had come to him and told him that he was unhappy in the role; he felt like a square peg in a round hole. During the period that his father was president of the Society, William was about nine or ten years old; he has a vivid memory of Mayne. Once his father and mother had to attend a daytime function and left William in the care of Mayne, in his office. The boy was playing and the two got on quite well; at one point Mayne asked him what he wanted to do when he grew up. On the reply, ‘a solicitor’, Mayne reached for the office rubber stamp, saying, ‘We’ll make a solicitor of you.’ And, in the quick way that children sense a game is afoot, William rolled up his sleeves and Mayne stamped LAW SOCIETY OF NORTHERN IRELAND on the boy’s arms and chest. But however tedious Mayne found the work in the early stages, right from the beginning there was one aspect of it he carried out solemnly and with considerable presence. Mrs Cumming witnessed some of these occasions during her husband’s presidency; and she told her son that when Mayne played the figurehead role of the Law Society in the Great Hall of the Royal Courts of Justice, his bearing was very impressive. Lindsay also noted this:
On formal occasions he represented the Society with dignity and poise. Each Armistice Day he led his brethren into the Great Hall of the Royal Courts of Justice, a figure of towering strength adorned with a gleaming array of decorations. During the two minutes’ silence each heart had its own thoughts; through his mind great tides of memory must have flowed of which his calm, impassive countenance gave no sign.6
Here Lindsay added something from his knowledge of the man, suggesting that Mayne carried a burden of his war experiences, for he echoed the expression that Mayne had written in his journal, ‘Lot of everything flowed under the bridge since then.’
To the extent that Mayne came to terms with his work Lindsay observed:
But adjustment took place – never ended completely, but helped greatly by the return to the profession of many who had served in the war and who in some measure were faced with similar problems to his own. To these he gave all the assistance in his power, especially to those whose studies had been interrupted by the conflict.7
However, Mayne was not just an impressive figurehead, he was an efficient and effective administrator. Lindsay wrote that he often had ‘an insight that brought him directly to the heart of the problem’. And a professional summary of his effectiveness in the job put it simply that he was fully endowed with the qualities necessary for the discharge of his duties.8 Among his responsibilities was arranging social functions for the Law Society, and in this respect, according to Lindsay, he had ‘great gifts of organisation’. None of which is surprising considering the evidence that we have seen. There was a wider liaison role to the post of Secretary of the Law Society, and, according to the feedback the council received, Mayne’s courteous manner and efficient methods of working gained the respect of professional colleagues in the rest of the UK and Eire.9
But what of Mayne the relentless judge of character in both the SAS and the Antarctic Survey; how did he relate to his colleagues in the legal profession? In part, the structure of the Law Society helped: it had a fairly flat hierarchy, and the presidency was a rotational post. Then there was the professional nature of work which was not closely directed by others. Yet he had to relate to many colleagues. Lindsay, the insider, commented:
Though courteous, considerate and tolerant, he often maintained an air of aloofness. Sometimes those who presumed upon his courtesy by showing an undue familiarity were withered to silence by his glance or a dryly spoken word.10
Malcolm Pleydell, the unit’s first medical officer, could have written those words in 1942, for he observed the same trait in Mayne in the SAS; clearly, Mayne did not change over the years. It meant, though, that some people learned to be wary of him.
Even had he wanted to, Mayne could not put his wartime past behind him. Mrs Margaret McGonigal gave him the initialled, silver cigarette case that had belonged to her son Eoin – Mayne’s close friend who had been killed on the first SAS operation at Timimi and Gazala. The cigarette case, with a short note inside simply stating that it was given to him by Mrs McGonigal, still remains today in Mayne’s former home. Then recognition kept coming from official quarters. When he commanded 1 SAS, Mayne had been a temporary lieutenant-colonel; but on 30 January 1946, while he was in the Antarctic region, the War Office wrote thanking him for his services to his country and informed him that, in the light of them, he was being given the honorary rank of lieutenant-colonel.11
Then the following year, Mayne went to Buckingham Palace to receive the third Bar to the DSO from King George VI.12 This was also a time when communities inscribed memorials to their war dead. Such was his standing that when his old school, Regent House, commemorated former pupils who had died in the war, the unveiling ceremony was carried out by Col Mayne.13 However, there were some invitations he did not accept. The military invited him to become involved in the Territorial Army, but the peacetime army or the reserve were of no interest to him.14
After the best part of seven years away from home, Mayne was welcomed back to the social circles he had earlier been part of. He had already been to the Belfast Arts Club during his short leave before joining the Antarctic Survey; and he rejoined the sailing and golf clubs. The honours he had achieved brought a sense of pride to the wider community. A respondent who wrote to Mayne from Down County Infirmary summed up this feeling: ‘By your bravery you have added lustre to your regiment, to your native land, your home County of Down,’15 Fame inevitably brought out those who now wanted to be seen in his company for their own self-esteem; but we have seen examples of his contempt for insincerity and vanity. So he made enemies.