Beaulieu

by Cyril Cunningham

  And finally I wish to thank my sister, Pauline Cunningham, for checking many versions of the manuscript for errors and my wife Mary for her constructive advice on structuring many passages, proof reading, and her support throughout this project.

  Prologue

  THE PLAQUE IN THE BOOKCASE

  On a chilly February afternoon I stood alone in a mood of veneration in the quadrangle within the medieval ruins of Beaulieu Abbey. Before me in the ancient cloister wall was a recess known as the ‘Bookcase’, where hangs a large, modern, circular plaque which reads:-

  Remember before God

  those men and women of

  the European Resistance

  Movement who were secretly

  trained in Beaulieu to fight

  their lonely battle against Hitler’s

  Germany and who, before enter-

  ing Nazi-occupied territory

  here found some measure

  of the peace for which

  they fought.

  These words commemorate over 3000 men and women of at least fifteen different European nationalities and a number of Canadians and Americans who, during the Second World War, had been trained as secret agents of various sorts, at what was officially known as the ‘Finishing School’, a complex of twelve country houses in the Beaulieu area that had been requisitioned by a secret British organization called the Special Operations Executive.

  Lord Montagu had asked me to undertake the task of discovering as much as I could about this extraordinary school, which had ceased functioning half a century ago. He knew of me only through my reputation as a local historian and was unaware that I had been an intelligence officer and was uniquely well qualified to carry out the research. In an early phase of my professional career, at the height of the Cold War, I had spent a decade working for a number of intelligence agencies and had actively participated in the training of secret agents. And I had worked with several men, and one or two women, who, during the Second World War, had risked their lives as spies and other kinds of secret agents. I had also worked with spycatchers and had been trained as an interrogator.

  The Bookcase is not visible to anybody ambling past the doorway of the cloisters. Visitors to the National Motor Museum, in the grounds of which the abbey ruins stand, must have wondered why a tall, elderly man with grey hair and spectacles, casually dressed and with his hands stuffed for warmth into the pockets of his blouson, was standing bareheaded and shivering in the cold for so long, staring at an ancient wall! But I was shaking, not, as a casual observer may have thought, from the cold, but from the haunting of my private ghosts and the sense of loss and mourning that I felt for all those courageous people I had known whose lives had been packed with high adventure. Most of them had died of old age and their deeds long forgotten but one of them had been shot down while attempting to escape from his tormentors and I had been given the unpleasant duty of investigating the circumstances of his death.

  I am by no means alone in being fascinated by the exploits of secret agents. I am particularly interested in what sort of people they are, what traits of personality enables them to stay alive and cope with the enormous strains of leading a double life under the constant threat of exposure. And there is usually a good story in how they came to be agents or how they entered the less hazardous occupation of intelligence officers.

  I gathered my wits and began to think about the present. I was acutely aware that Lord Montagu’s request had catapulted me back into a business I had left long ago and would impel me to revive my knowledge of techniques that happen to be common to historians as well as intelligence officers. They both have to organize networks of sources and display a wary patience with scraps of information that must be carefully weighed for their validity before searching systematically for their place in a massive jigsaw.

  This spot in the tranquil surroundings of the ancient abbey was as good a place as any to gain a glimmer of inspiration as to how I should tackle the task of pursuing a very stale trail and build from scratch a network of sources to provide me with sufficient material for a reasonable history of the school. I was afraid that most of the people who could have enlightened me would now be dead, and if not dead, would be octogenarians with fading memories. As a seasoned researcher I was very much alive to the fallibility of the human memory when trying to recall distant events. I was conscious that gathering thousands of scraps of data is simple compared with the task of piecing it together into a meaningful whole, and I began to wonder if I still retained the knack of spotting the gaps in the fabric and tracing sources and material to make a seamless patch. A smart computer is still no substitute for a sharp eye and an inquisitive brain. I took courage from the fact that at least I had the advantage of some knowledge of the organization and methods of our secret intelligence services, even if I had long since lost touch with my contacts in that business.

  My mind was already grappling with the problem of how to convert a catalogue of personalities and events into a form that critics often describe as ‘a good read’, one which publishers are apt to judge in terms of the number of copies likely to be sold. My instant dread was a publisher who might require his editor to re-work and ‘pep up’ my manuscript into the modern idiom by transposing events that took place half a century ago into a conversational narration that any half-wit would recognize as an impossible feat of memory on the part of the alleged narrator. The narratives in this book are transcriptions of tape recordings and not figments of my imagination.

  On my way home I decided to follow the well-tried research formula of starting by making a systematic search of the literature while simultaneously building a network of people who might be able to help. My first step was to contact the Special Forces Club with a letter of enquiry about SOE training. It produced a response from the Foreign Office and arrived in time to save me from looking, in my ignorance, in the Public Record Office for information on SOE. It was not encouraging. It informed me that 87 per cent of the official records of SOE had been destroyed, that the remaining 13 per cent is buried in the archives of the Foreign Office and is not open to the general public. It said that the SOE Adviser would attempt to answer any questions put to him but made no suggestions as to how one could frame penetrating questions from a basis of utter ignorance. It also stated that the residue of the official records was unlikely to contain very much about the organization and nuts and bolts of agent training. However, I was sent a seven-page handout giving a skeleton outline of the organization of the Finishing School, the names of a few key members of the staff, a broad outline of a few aspects of the syllabus and some information on training problems. Unfortunately it was ambiguous or uninformative on a number of key issues such as exactly what topics were included in the curriculum, and which of them had been taught at which of the schools in the Beaulieu complex, and by whom. And, I was to discover, much of it referred to the situation that had prevailed at the end of the war and did not correspond with eye-witness accounts of what had existed during the earlier years.

  When I started my search of the literature, I found that most of the books about SOE had long been removed from the shelves of the public library and had been consigned to a central store and could now only be obtained on payment of a fee, accompanied by an exasperating delay in delivery.

  I soon realized that the lack of official records was not, unfortunately, supplemented by the enormous number of books that have been written about SOE. All of them concentrate upon the organization, politics and operations, with brief, if any mention of training. One book, Specially Employed, written by Maurice Buckmaster, the former Head of the French Section, which was said to contain valuable information on training, turned out to be very disappointing. It gave only a vague outline of the principles of agent training. Even M.R.D. Foot’s official history, which is otherwise very thorough, deals cursorily with the subject of training and is inaccurate in some of the details.

  The awkward truth is that there is no authoritative pu
blished account of the activities of the British training schools, how they came into being and how they were organized and run. Consequently from the outset my task appeared to be daunting to say the very least. It dawned on me that I had stepped onto a roller-coaster of frustration and elation which would only be endured by a gritty determination to succeed and hopefully a few dollops of downright luck.

  As an experienced researcher, I should have expected a bumpy ride in my quest for original data. There were bound to be arid periods when I would make no progress at all after expenditure of immense effort, leaving me with the feeling that I had run up against a brick wall. I ought to have realized, but did not, that there would be unexpected breakthroughs. Sometimes these came by letter and sometimes by phone; in one instance a phone call from the south of France produced a mass of material – in French! But for the most part I acquired data frustratingly slowly, painstakingly, chip by chip, creeping usually towards another dead end and another bout of despair. And on each occasion, just when I had reached the point of abandoning the whole project, another breakthrough would land on the doormat with the morning’s post.

  While working my way systematically through the personal reminiscences and biographies of agents who had been caught by the Nazis and had suffered horrible experiences, I found that a high degree of emotional detachment was required in order to examine the facts objectively and carefully to discover whether they had put their training into effect and whether it was effective against routine or stealthy German counter-espionage techniques. Here my experiences as a former intelligence officer and my lifetime of professional knowledge of scrupulous and unscrupulous investigation, interrogation and interviewing techniques proved invaluable.

  Most of the British-trained agents took several courses in different establishments; the Beaulieu Finishing School did not have the monopoly of training in certain subjects. Many of the published accounts of training by former agents do not recount with accuracy which particular topics were taught at which schools.

  The Special Forces Club put me in touch with a number of survivors who in turn passed my enquiries on to others and brought me into contact with many war heroes and heroines of several nationalities. It was a trail that was to lead to numerous parts of France, to Spain and Norway, to the Norges Hjemmefrontmuseum in Oslo, and to the Polish Stadium Polski Podziemnej in London which sent me photocopies of some very interesting original documents. I also managed to contact such distinguished former members of SOE as the legendary Vera Atkins, formerly the Chief Intelligence Officer of the French Section, now in her eighties, who told me in no uncertain terms that my quest was twenty-five years too late! Nevertheless she put me in touch with an invaluable and generous source of information about the staff and administration of the Beaulieu complex, one of its former secretaries, Mrs Ann Sarrell. Also, thanks to the Special Forces Club, I was able to meet a former Chief Instructor of the Beaulieu training staff, Cuthbert Skilbeck, now sadly dead. I spent many enjoyable hours in his company.

  Some former secret agents who survived the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps did not wish to be reminded of their wartime experiences. Others have long forgotten the details of their stay in Beaulieu, or, if they recollected significant events, were quite unable to pinpoint them in time.

  At a very early stage of my research I discovered that wartime security measures in the Beaulieu area were so tightly enforced that people living on the doorsteps of the houses requisitioned by SOE had no idea of what was going on in them. The trainees living in the SOE houses were forbidden to talk about their activities and were forbidden to wander outside the bounds of their schools, though some of them did. Field Security personnel were sent into the nearby villages and especially into local pubs to monitor the conversations of members of the School staff and seek out and return erring students to their houses.

  Most of the agents who were trained at Beaulieu are now unable to identify in which of the houses they had been trained, because the houses bore no names during the war years and because the agents were usually transported in and out of them in trucks that had their rear canvas flaps strapped down so that nobody could see who or what was being transported, curtailing the passengers’ view of their whereabouts. Nor could they remember, with a few exceptions, the names of those who had tutored them.

  It was with misplaced hope of obtaining information from residents in the New Forest area that I appeared on the Richard Cartridge show on Radio Solent and made an appeal for information from anybody who had any recollections of the Beaulieu School. The response was, as I should have anticipated, very disheartening. Only one person contacted me.

  After more than a year of probing and prodding, when I had accumulated a substantial amount of data and had already made some key surmises, the Foreign Office came up with information about the School’s organization. They had been unaware they possessed it and had found it tucked into the records of another school, STS 17 at Brickendonbury. It included a list of all the topics that had been taught at Beaulieu, but they were unable to name which instructors had taught which subjects. They also discovered the manuscript of the Commandant’s Opening Address to new students, and I was able positively to identify the author as Lieutenant-Colonel Woolrych; the alterations were in his distinctive handwriting, which I had come to know well through examining documents that he bequeathed to the Intelligence Corps Museum and by reading his correspondence with Captain Widnell, the Montagu estate’s land agent.

  Despite the expenditure of a great deal of time on the tedious task of combing through a large number of books, talking to survivors and painstaking research, there remains a shortage of data on recruitment and training policy, who taught what and where at particular periods of the war, who made the assessments of the trainees and how the assessments were made.

  I cannot therefore guarantee the veracity of everything that I have written. I have done my best with the material available.

  Chapter I

  THE SILENT SISTERS AND THE HOYDEN

  How do you begin to describe to the descendants of the wartime generation the scale of the calamity, the immensity of the atrocities and the extent of the destruction inflicted upon the world by Nazi Germany over a period of ten years? There are no words to express the magnitude of the evil and the havoc caused by the Third Reich, a nation of seventy million people, when it plunged the entire world into a war that was ultimately to consume the lives of forty million people and devastate most of Europe.

  With the exception of Sweden, Switzerland, Spain and Portugal, the whole of mainland Europe including much of Russia was conquered or annexed by Nazi Germany, and four hundred million people were held in brutal subjugation until liberated by the Allied Armies in 1944/5.

  The German conquest of Europe began in 1935, two years after Adolf Hitler and his gang of murderous opportunists seized power in the German Republic. By the summer of 1942 the German empire stretched from the shores of North Africa to the Arctic and from the English Channel to the doorsteps of Turkey, Persia (Iran) and the Caspian Sea. In North Africa the British Forces had been driven out of Libya and German armies were entrenched in Egypt poised to strike towards Cairo and the Nile, forming the southern arm of a huge threatening pincer movement aimed at linking up with the German forces in Russia through Asia Minor.

  The demands which these conquests made upon German industries, materials and manpower could not be met from its own resources and it ruthlessly plundered the occupied countries to support its war against the free world. The savagery with which it went about this task defies belief. Millions of able-bodied men and women were rounded up and consigned to forced labour in Germany or to slave labour camps and millions of the less able-bodied and those sections of the populations considered to be racially inferior, such as gypsies and jews, were put to death. The peoples of the more industrialized nations like Czechoslovakia and France were made to harness their industries to the production of implements of war, and their agriculture was pl
undered to feed the German forces.

  Those nations that made alliances with Nazism to avoid military conquest, such as Hungary and Bulgaria, were, like the subject nations of ancient Rome, compelled to raise armies to supplement the Nazi hordes in far-away provinces of the Nazi empire and provide oil and other essentials to the Nazi war effort.

  The hardships caused to the occupied countries by the diversion of their human and material resources aroused bitter resentment, but fearful retribution awaited dissenters and anybody attempting any form of resistance. The culprits, and often their entire families, were murdered and, as a warning, disproportionate numbers of innocent hostages were rounded up and slaughtered. The scale of the Nazis’ systematic slaughter of the peoples of Europe beggars description. Twelve million were murdered. Millions of them were consigned to gas chambers and their corpses cremated in ovens. Apart from the name Auschwitz, kept permanently alive by international Jewry, the world may soon forget the names of numerous other factories of death. Who, now, among the younger generation, will find any significance in the names of Belsen, where 100,000 people died, where the British liberating forces found 10,000 unburied bodies and 13,000 people died after their liberation? Or the names Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen, Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen and Treblinka, where millions of Europeans, including many British, perished by execution or from beatings, overwork and deliberate starvation, systematic neglect and disease? Miraculously, seven hundred thousand of the inmates of these camps survived.

  To these astronomical figures must be added the war casualties among the opposing armies and casualties among the civilian populations, many of whom had the misfortune to live in the path of the conquering and liberating armies.