by Hamish Ross
Now, Mayne had had no leadership experience in his work before the war; and the management models that he observed in the legal practices in which he worked were professional-bureaucratic. In style, the culture would have been friendly, characterised by a paternalistic courtesy, where one worked on one’s own after being given a case, referring to a more experienced colleague occasionally, either to air an idea or discuss an interpretation. But where Mayne had been a leader before the war was on the sports field; from that background he had to develop ‘a new and powerful personality’. And such was the quality of Mayne’s leadership that it was appreciated by his superior officers and by colleagues in other units of the SAS Brigade. One of the reasons why Brig Calvert suggested putting the Belgian SAS Squadron under Mayne’s command during the latter stage of the war – a proposition that the Belgian squadron readily accepted – was so that that unit would benefit from Mayne’s leadership.
His leadership was not, however, simply intuitive; and as his role changed, he thought about leadership behaviour and how people are motivated. That he was a reflective leader can be seen from his analyses of field reports and from the journal he kept after the war while he was with the Antarctic Survey. One of the important characteristics of a good leader in different kinds of organisation is the ability to ‘know oneself’. In his journal Mayne showed that he had the ability to be detached and to view others and himself critically. When he considered the survey team, the new unit that he had joined, the style in which it would be managed and his role – second-in-command – he reflected, ‘I am not certain just how good I will be at being an underling.’ However, in his assessment of his new leader he was balancing ambiguities, suspending final judgement, and prepared to alter his initial assessment: ‘I am prepared and hope to find myself completely wrong.’26 But he had sensed rightly that the contrast between classical authoritarian military principles, under which the survey team was managed, and the participative style of control of the SAS was irreconcilable. And Mike Sadler later came to the same conclusion.
That brief period with the Antarctic Survey also picked up an echo of a quality that is particularly relevant in Mayne’s leadership. Antarctica was the setting, early in the twentieth century, where Ernest Shackleton achieved lasting fame. Shackleton’s is usually considered to be one of the outstanding examples of leadership. Thirty years after Shackleton’s party was rescued, on 19 January 1946, Mayne wrote in his journal that he had wanted to go ashore on Elephant Island, from where Shackleton and his companions had set out in an open boat for South Georgia to bring rescue to their colleagues. In that frail coincidence of place, there are parallels in their leadership attributes and how each of them was regarded by his men. Worsley wrote of Shackleton: ‘His outstanding characteristics were his care of, and his anxiety for, the lives and well-being of all of his men.’27 McLuskey wrote of Mayne:
It wasn’t his legendary exploits alone or his signal disregard for his personal safety. It was all of these things together, plus a sense of this man’s greatness. He was great in the quality of his compassion. He really cared for those under his command and never spared himself in their service.28
Mayne’s style of attachment to his men was the product of a number of factors. He was not hidebound by hierarchy; a participative style of management suited him; he had a fine sense of empathy for others; and he was secure in himself to the extent that he had great inner reserves on which he could draw. But above all, his combat capabilities created in him such a degree of self-efficacy that he was able to give tremendous support. His presence, therefore, in times of stress was very important to his men. As a senior officer, his continued exposure in combat (which surprised some outsiders) was a source of support and motivation to his men. But at times they talked about it in the regiment. Roy Close gave an example:
I recall that the officers talked about Paddy’s apparent indifference to his own safety. We wondered was it because he couldn’t care less; was it that he had calculated that, in the light of all the fire, an individual’s chances were reasonable.29
In a photograph of the squadron under mortar attack in a pine forest in north-west Germany in the last months of the war, Mayne can be seen – while his men are taking cover – propped against a tree, watchful. By this time he had had a great deal of combat experience, and, as a result, he had come to terms with it; and he adopted that fatalism that others have described. One of the early records of this coming to terms with the emotional impact of impersonal, mechanised warfare comes from a remarkable diarist who wrote of his experience of combat in the early nineteenth century. Usually referred to as A Soldier of the Seventy-First (the parent regiment of Lt Col Pedder, Commanding Officer of No. 11 Commando), the diary records an incident the soldier witnessed under fire in 1806:
A young officer ran backwards and forwards, as if he would hide himself; an old soldier said to him, with all the gravity of a Turk, ‘You need not hide, sir; if there is anything there for you, it will find you out.’ The young man looked confused, stood to his duty, and I never saw him appear uneasy again: so soon was he converted to the warrior’s doctrine.30
However, Mayne’s undoubted adherence to the warrior’s doctrine and his capabilities as a soldier and leader do not account for what he was able to rise to time and again: heroism. And his heroism was not the product of personal revenge (as the Boy’s Own tradition had it) nor was it blind rage (as some have suggested). Heroism is something that comes from within the individual. ‘Self-trust is the essence of heroism,’ wrote Emerson, and comes about in obedience to an individual’s inner character. When Brig Calvert submitted the citation for the VC for Mayne, he wrote, ‘One almost expects these things from Paddy.’ Here, Calvert – an experienced guerrilla fighter himself by this stage in the war – was not referring to a tendency to display berserk behaviour on the battlefield; he was referring to qualities and characteristics that he himself recognised. That time and again Mayne was able to call on depths within himself is something one can only revere.
In postwar years, as we have seen, distortion characterised much of what has been written about Mayne, particularly with regard to what manner of man he was. Exaggeration of his reputation, as Mike Sadler reported, became widespread. An excellent illustration of this is contained in the two letters, referred to earlier, written by Lady Jean Fforde with a gap of fifty-eight years intervening. She wrote the first in 1944, on behalf of her parents, the duke and duchess of Montrose, inviting Mayne to visit them – Mayne was simply regarded as one of the former officers of No. 11 Commando. She wrote the second to the author – having been informed of the existence of the first – in 2002, expressing disbelief that her mother could have allowed her to write to someone with such a wild reputation. But, subsequently rereading the first, she concluded that in the intervening five decades there has been exaggeration.
But it is of little wonder, for in our culture fascination with military heroes has a long history; and in recent time this has been added to by inordinate media interest in the SAS. The fiction about Mayne progressing from the Commandos to the SAS via a prison cell where he awaited court martial was recycled for decades, which surely cannot simply be explained away as failure to check its accuracy; there was no need: the legend was consonant with people’s expectations. Which is not to say that Mayne was never in a rough house, although the verifiable accounts that we are left with are pallid by comparison with what had been put about. They are of the kind such as the nightclub incident in Cyprus, when Mayne handled the manager in a way reminiscent of films of the Old West, where a rough justice is dished out to the bartender who has been found watering the whisky. And the perfunctory punishment Mayne received – forty-eight hours open arrest under the supervision of Tommy Macpherson – reflected the lack of gravity with which the incident was viewed. What often happens in normal social settings in a time of war with off-duty soldiers is not something with which we are familiar in our time; but it is brought to mind by Jimmy Storie:<
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One night we went to a cabaret show in Cairo and there were Australians there who were drunk on one side of the room; and on the other side were men from English regiments, and we were sitting at a table stuck right in the centre. Next thing, tables and chairs were going through the air. The MPs came in and started to clear out the hall and here are Phillips and I still sitting at the table with our drinks – we were the only people still sitting at a table – and an MP said to us, ‘You buggers get the hell out of here.’31
Trouble could flare up over a personal slight; and uniform and unit loyalty could do the rest. Not all military police were as sensitive as the one who let Storie and Phillips off. David Lloyd Own of the LRDG quite early on claimed that many a provost marshal regretted getting on the wrong side of Mayne. But as he progressed in rank and assumed responsibility for the unit, Mayne was very conscious of the fragility of a unit’s reputation; hence the concern he expressed to Tony Marsh, lest someone do something silly and bring the squadron into disrepute when they were stationed in Brussels.
Then there was life within the unit, an area where MPs did not normally get involved. Here there was a degree of licence, and the mess could be a rough place at times, as Roy Close described:
Arm-wrestling; or a game called Moriarty, when blindfold, lying on the floor and grasping outstretched hands, you tried to hit an opponent on the head with [a] rolled-up newspaper; or cockfighting, where you lie facing north alongside someone facing south and you try to hook legs to roll your opponent over. The adrenalin is pretty high in wartime, and has to stay high. It was boisterous from time to time, but not violent.32
This was the context in which Brig Calvert in later years recounted that he carried out a rugby dive on the unsuspecting Mayne during a boisterous session in the mess. It happened when the unit was in Norway, at the time they believed they were soon to be heading for the Far East – so the adrenalin was still high. Mayne, according to Calvert, picked himself off the floor then grabbed Calvert bodily and threw him across the room; Calvert sustained severe bruising as a result. But Calvert was not aggrieved by the way he had been bested: it was part of the code by which he lived. Indeed, by 1945 Calvert seems to have mellowed with promotion. Before the war he had been a light-heavyweight boxer of some note in the Army. In mid-1941, he was a Captain in the Bush Warfare School in Burma; the Australian element that was to comprise the military mission had arrived; while the British contingent from the Commandos of Layforce was still awaited. According to Noonan (and since Calvert wrote the Foreword to Noonan’s book, it can be assumed to be accurate), one night Calvert got well plied with liquor and came back to the Australian lines much the worse for wear, and issued a challenge that he would take on any six Australians.33 Such was the off-duty world of men-at-arms; it was one in which Mayne could more than hold his own. But that is all. It does not point to a propensity for violence. Indeed, within weeks Mayne was taking part in the social life of the British community in Montevideo: he had signed a contract to work where there would be no bar or mess life for two years; and he was second-in-command to a naval commander who was much more alarmed by the temperament of the Trepassey’s diesel engines than by the reputation of the former commander of 1 SAS.
At an early stage, in the 1950s, before exaggeration, legend and myth developed to the extent they did, folk memory became implanted in the reborn SAS: Johnny Cooper, Bob Bennet and Pat Riley and others brought their memories of the Western Desert, Sicily, Italy, France and Germany. The regiment was now operating in a very different world of conflict from the Second World War. Mayne, however, in the minds of some, would not have been out of place in such a setting, where, to paraphrase one commentator, the type of person who was wanted was someone with a postgraduate degree who could use himself in a bar fight.34 So it was not surprising that in 1969 members of the regiment’s D Squadron, who were stationed in Northern Ireland at Newtownards, carried out what appeared to be a spontaneous mark of respect at Movilla Cemetery: they paraded in uniform, fired a volley in salute over Mayne’s grave and laid a wreath.35
But if the ceremony over Mayne’s grave in 1969 was purely military in character, and undertaken without publicity, that which took place in 1997 was both civic and regimental. Newtownards was the town where Mayne had been born, educated, lived and died. The community had been important to him, and it in turn was proud of his sporting and military achievements. Ards Borough Council took the initiative in proposing to have a statue raised to commemorate one of its most illustrious sons, and a public subscription was launched. Such was the response – with donations from home and abroad – that, in addition to paying for the memorial, a bursary was established – The Blair Mayne Bursary – to help young people from the Ards pursue their interest in academic, sporting or adventure-training activities.
On Friday 2 May 1997, early-summer evening sunlight bathed Conway Square, Newtownards, as civic dignitaries, the Mayne family and a large crowd gathered. In front of the veiled memorial ten veterans of L Detachment and seven of 1 SAS paraded, wearing their beige berets – that symbol of the early unit that Mayne continued to wear up until the end of the war. Earl Jellicoe unveiled the statue; and the Very Revd Dr Fraser McLuskey carried out the dedication. Afterwards, the band of the Royal Irish Regiment beat retreat and included in its repertoire the haunting melody which L Detachment first heard in the desert, broadcast over the German forces radio – ‘Lili Marlene’, sung by Lale Andersen. It was a soldier’s song that crossed the boundaries of the warring sides, and the unit adopted (and adapted) it as their own. The sculptor of the monument had been well briefed: the statue shows Mayne in the garb he wore in the desert, holding a book in his right hand. The following day, the veterans of L Detachment went to Movilla Cemetery and laid a wreath at Mayne’s grave. Afterwards, the Mayne family invited them to Blair’s old home, Mount Pleasant. Their former leader might perhaps have been disappointed in them, for Jimmy Storie felt that ‘the lads’ seemed to be unusually temperate when they were offered drinks.
The modern regiment operates in very different circumstances from those of its wartime predecessor and, because of the nature of its work, the names of its members are not usually revealed – even after their retirement. A recently retired WOI offers an insight into how Mayne is regarded by the present-day generation of the regiment:
When I first joined the regiment, it was the era before it became property of the tabloid newspapers (i.e. before the Iranian Embassy and Falklands War), but even at that early stage I can remember that Paddy was spoken about with affection and respect by all ranks – something which was to continue throughout my time with the regiment. The present-day basic principles of the regiment, although more developed and refined, still find their origins in the standards developed by David Stirling and Paddy’s generation.
David Stirling will always, quite rightly, be the founding father of the regiment, but Paddy Mayne will always be seen as the true SAS warrior of his time – one of those exceptional individuals from whom come myths and folklore. He is one of the few personnel, I feel, within the short history of the regiment, whose exploits have been at times underestimated; it would not be exaggerating by saying that he was seen almost as a legend of his time.
During the 50th regimental anniversary, which was a unique event, where the present-day members hosted the old and bold ex-members of the regiment – who flew from around the world for a weekend of various events – I was a RQMS with 21 SAS, and because of the value (both monetary and sentimental) of the medals and pictures which I had sent from London to Hereford for display at the event, I was made responsible to ensure none of it went missing. I can remember feeling extremely put out by having this menial task, which was way below my assumed status. It ended up being one of the most enjoyable and humbling things I have had to do, and I still feel very privileged to have been in the company of so many who were involved in the various actions that have made the regiment what it has become today. It was one of those events
, even with fifteen years of present-day experience, where one just kept quiet and listened in awe at the old boys’ tales. Many regimental tales were spoken about during the course of that weekend and of course Paddy’s escapades were, as you would expect, spoken about at length by many of the WWII personnel who had personally served alongside him.
Even when some of the tales of his adverse antics were mentioned – he had a habit of dishing out his own brand of unconventional discipline – the one thing I can remember still was the sense of total respect and loyalty that his contemporaries had towards him. To the point that they had a faith and belief that, I believe, they would have followed him anywhere without question. Like all soldiers, he was human and had his flaws, but he was still a soldier’s soldier and, as with the past members, the present-day personnel of the regiment still hold him in utmost esteem and will dream of the opportunity to emulate him.
I am in no doubt that Paddy Mayne will be talked about in the messes and barrack rooms with admiration as long as there is a Special Air Service.36
Almost fifty-five years to the month after the wartime SAS was disbanded, the regiment again commemorated Mayne, and this time with an enduring symbol: an oak tree in his honour was planted in the grounds of its new quarters at Hereford. This ceremony in September 2000 was part of purely a regimental occasion to which all members of the Regimental Association were invited. Following the official opening of the barracks by the Earl Jellicoe, and before a crowd of perhaps 4,000 – including serving members of the regiment and some from the regimental association whose service had been during the war – Johnny Cooper gave a brief address, and then he and Jim Almonds, both of the original L Detachment, performed the tree-planting ceremony. The oak stands in front of a small plantation of trees to the left of the main entrance to the camp; its plaque states that it is dedicated to Lt Col Blair Mayne DSO (3 Bars) Croix de Guerre, Légion d’Honneur, who commanded 1 SAS during the period 1944–5.37