The students seem to have mixed freely with the Durey family. Some of them used to play football with the two boys and on their recreation night, Friday night, after they had received their pay, ‘they used to invite the whole family over to the house and the beer would flow and we would have a lively evening.’ Hendy also stated that the women students sometimes visited his mother and borrowed her clothes, to disguise themselves during practical exercises. On one occasion one of the male students borrowed Mrs Durey’s clothes to disguise himself as a woman before going out on an exercise.
Living in The House on the Shore at this time were three Spanish-speaking NCOs from the Field Security Wing of the Intelligence Corps, Corporal C.G. Holland and Lance Corporals Dicky Warden and Bernard Ettenfield.
Lance Corporal Warden was what would have been called a ‘gentleman ranker’ during the 1940 era, an old Etonian later to reach the rank of major in the Intelligence Corps. His Eton education left a lasting impression on some of those whom he met.
The SOE houses in the area had no resident medical officer. If any member of the staff or any of the students was too sick or incapacitated to visit an army clinic, a local GP was sent for. This was a well-known Lymington doctor, Dr Basil Thornton, who was unfit for military service. He was a partner in a practice which in pre-war days dealt with the gentry in the Beaulieu area. On the first occasion that he was called to attend to a patient at The House on the Shore he was met outside the house by Lance Corporal Warden. Warden charmingly warned him that when he stepped through the door into the house he would be entering another world and one which, afterwards, he would have to forget, and forget everything that he had seen or heard, on pain of dire but unspecified penalties.
During the war Dr Thornton visited several of the SOE houses to attend to patients and was occasionally invited to cocktail parties and social events held from time to time during change-over periods between student intakes at The Vineyards and The House in the Wood, which was soon to be requisitioned for use as the officers’ mess.
There is clearly no doubt that before the Finishing School officially came into existence, piecemeal training was already taking place at Beaulieu. Munn’s arrival marked the integration of these fragmented arrangements and the absorption of The Rings teaching team of Philby, George Hill and Professor E.J. Patterson into the team of instructors brought down from the Intelligence Corps depot at Matlock.
Within three months of the requisitioning of The Rings it had become too small to accommodate the school’s administration as well as housing the administrative and teaching staff and students. A house near The Rings called The House in the Woods, which had been one of three of Lord Montagu’s four residences on the Beaulieu estate, was requisitioned for use as an officers’ mess for the administrative and teaching staff of the school. And the students were moved out of The Rings and into the other houses in the complex.
The House in the Woods had been built in about 1910 and contained over thirty rooms. At the time of its requisitioning it belonged to Vivian Drury who had gone to the Bahamas as First Equerry to the Duke of Windsor. It is the only one of the houses used by SOE that is still remembered locally, and incorrectly, as a house where spies were trained during the Second World War.
Almost a year later more student accommodation became necessary and early in 1942 the piecemeal requisitioning began of four more houses on the Montagu estate. Saltmarsh was acquired on 6 January, Warren House, on to the west of the Beaulieu river overlooking the Solent near Needs Oar Point, was taken over on 6 March; Blackbridge, adjacent to Saltmarsh was requisitioned on 7 June and finally, Clobb Gorse, also to the west of the Beaulieu River, close to Buckler’s Hard, was acquired in October, 1942.
Saltmarsh is the only one of these houses visible to the public; it is situated on the outskirts of Beaulieu, by the road to Lyndhurst. It was built in 1931 by Captain G. Rockingham Gill, a yacht designer who was called up at the outbreak of the war. Blackbridge was the home of Lady Austen Chamberlain, but it had been rented to the Hon. Mrs Murray. Its furniture had been put into store before it was requisitioned for the sum of £260 p.a.
Warren House is near The House on the Shore and was originally known as Warren Farm House. It had been substantially renovated in the 1920s and 30s and had been let to a businessman, Mr C.R. Coomber, a year before war was declared. It was to become a school for training agents in the use of carrier pigeons and micro-photography. Clobb Gorse, which is near The Drokes, was built in 1927 and at the time it was requisitioned was occupied by Mr and Mrs J. Wilby.
These acquisitions provided the new school with nine houses for student accommodation and were sufficiently dispersed to keep students of different nationalities segregated for security purposes, so that if any of them had the misfortune to be caught on operations they could not identify agents of other Occupied countries.
In theory the new school’s capacity was now eighty students undergoing training simultaneously. However, official records state that this number was never reached. One reason was that for tuition purposes the students had to be segregated not just by nationality but also according to the type and length of training they were receiving. They were being trained for at least five different types of secret service.
Inchmery House, the Rothschild property situated at the mouth of the Beaulieu river overlooking the Solent, requisitioned at about the same time as The Rings, was originally occupied by twenty-five Free French parachutists, who had recently obtained their ‘wings’ from the British parachutist school at Ringway near Manchester. They were soon to be placed under the control of the BCRA. Although Inchmery House was part of the Beaulieu SOE complex and drew some of its instructors from the Finishing School, it was not regarded as an integral part of the Beaulieu school. It was later to be used by the Polish secret services and by British commandos working for SOE and has a particularly interesting wartime history.
1. The Plaque in the Bookcase (Montagu Ventures Ltd.)
2. Special Training School (STS) 31: The Rings, HQ of the Finishing School. (Intelligence Corps Museum.)
3. The House in the Woods, Officers’Mess for the School Staff. (Intelligence Corps Museum.)
4. STS 35: The Vineyards, where many radio operators did their security training. (Intelligence Corps Museum.)
5. STS 34: The Drokes, first used for the Spanish Republicans, and where many Norwegian and Polish agents were trained. (Intelligence Corps Museum.)
6. STS 33: The House on the Shore, also first used by the Spaniards and favoured by the Poles. (Intelligence Corps Museum.)
7. Part of STS 31, Hartford House was the smallest of all the houses and used for the very first students. (Intelligence Corps Museum.)
8. STS 36: Boarmans was favoured by the French Section and was where the first intake of women agents were trained. (Intelligence Corps Museum.)
9. Inchmery House, BCRA agent training centre, later occupied by SOE’s Small Scale Raiding Force, then by the Polish 6th Bureau. (C. Cunningham.)
10. Former RF Section agents and Special Forces personnel. Left to right: Georges Ledoux (see p. 41), Pierre Pradere, General Bourdis, General Kerjean (see p. 41), Marcel Sourez, Cornel Desrousseaux (ex SAS). (Ron Hansford & Mme Alma Kerjean.)
11. Louis Kerjean in 1940. He was later parachuted into France, captured by the Gestapo and imprisoned in both Buchenwald and Dachau.
12. He survived to become a General in the French Army. (Both photographs: Ron Hansford & Mme Alma Kerjean.)
14. Brigadier George Hill, one of the first instructors. (Special Forces Club.)
15. Kim Philby (standing) and Paul Dehn, the Propaganda Warfare and Unattributable Sabotage Instructors, in the garden of The House in the Woods. (Courtesy of Mrs Ann Sarell.)
Chapter III
THE FINISHING SCHOOL
The Finishing School actually evolved over a period of twenty-two months, between January, 1941, and October, 1942, but by the spring of 1941 it had taken a form that was familiar to the th
ousands of people who trained there.
By April, 1941, each of the houses in the complex was being officially described as a Group B Special Training School (STS). The Rings became STS 31, Hartford House STS 32 (but later renumbered 31, part of the HQ), The House on the Shore STS 33, the Drokes STS 34, The Vineyards STS 35 and Boarmans STS 36. In March, 1941, The House in the Wood was requisitioned as the officers’ mess for the school staff and became part of STS 31. The later acquisitions which occurred between January and October, 1942, long after Munn’s departure, were grouped in pairs to form two additional ‘schools’. Saltmarsh and nearby Blackbridge to the north of the tidal part of the Beaulieu River became STS 32a and b respectively, a single administrative unit. Warren House and Clobb Gorse, west of the Beaulieu River, became STS 37a and b, again a single administrative unit. Inchmery House became STS 38.
The first Commandant of the new school, Lieutenant-Colonel J.W. Munn, had started his career with SOE teaching map-reading and fieldcraft at the commando school at Arisaig, and was subsequently promoted and put in command of it. Philby described him as a young colonel of the sensible military type and added that at Beaulieu ‘Jimmy’ Munn had ‘held together a school of pretty odd fish in a net of personal authority’. Munn stayed at Beaulieu for only six months, barely enough time to set up the school and get it running before he was posted to Canada to set up a similar school there. Later he was sent to Algeria, at that time a French colony, to take charge of the SOE operational base called Massingham on the coast of North Africa near Algiers. But he was essentially an administrator and had no previous experience of teaching spy crafts or of running operations. He is said to have come unstuck at Massingham, unable to cope with the task or with the diplomacy required to deal with the political cross-currents and rivalries of various French political factions. He was eventually transferred to the Secret Intelligence Service to take up a senior training post.
He arrived in Beaulieu in January with a small staff which at first lived and worked in The Rings. Among the new arrivals was the school’s first Adjutant, the rotund and balding Captain (soon to be promoted to Major) Palmer, a veteran of the First World War. He did the donkey work in organizing the school and was helped by Captain Parsons, the Administrative Officer. Also among the first batch of officers were four or five to act as adjutants, that is, ‘housemasters’, of the student houses, among them Captain R. Carr, who remained at Beaulieu for the rest of the war.
The size of the staff needed to man the schools in the Beaulieu complex had been determined by an Army manning schedule, called a War Establishment. It specified the number of cooks, batmen, clerks and drivers, NCOs and officers considered necessary to meet the predicted needs of each school. Many of the men detailed to staff the houses had already settled into them by the time Munn and his team arrived and they had been drawn from all sorts of regiments and corps. The original War Establishment, later adjusted, ‘allowed, in addition to the permanent staff, a lieutenant-colonel in command, a major administrative officer and second-in-command, a major chief instructor, a major assistant chief instructor, eight captain instructors and six subaltern instructors,’ a total of eighteen officers plus a captain-adjutant for each of the four main student houses. As the war progressed it was found impossible to find officers of the rank of subaltern with sufficient qualifications to act as instructors and they had to be replaced with officers of the rank of captain, giving an establishment of twenty-two captains in all. It was later increased to twenty-six.
There was a continuous turnover of both officers and men throughout the war. The fitter regimental officers and men of the administrative staff were soon replaced by older men and the physically less fit and as the instructors gained experience they were sent abroad to set up similar schools. However, several of the original administrative and teaching staff remained at Beaulieu for the rest of the war.
STS 31, comprising The Rings, The House in the Wood and Hartford House, had a total staff of about seventy. It had three senior NCOs, including a Physical Training Instructor, eight batmen, five mess orderlies, four cooks, only three clerks, twelve vehicle drivers, including a mechanic, a storeman and seven general dutymen. It was allowed one 15 cwt truck, two cars, two pick-ups and one motor cycle.
The staffs of the houses allocated as student residences varied slightly in size according to the size of the house or houses, but the basic staff allowance for each ‘school’ was one sergeant-major or sergeant, one corporal, one clerk, two orderlies, two cooks, three or four batmen, one driver to drive the pick-up vehicle with which each school was provided and one motor cycle orderly to drive each school’s motor cycle. There were also a fair number of Field Security personnel sprinkled among the houses acting as instructors or interpreters and they had the additional burden of having to perform their main FS duties in the Beaulieu area, visiting local pubs to check on careless talk among all the service customers, to look out for, and listen to members of the SOE staff, and watch for students straying out of bounds of their houses.
It is estimated that the total complement of the Beaulieu Finishing School, excluding the staff of Inchmery House, and not counting a continuous stream of visiting instructors and conducting officers, was thirty officers, fifteen sergeants and about 130 junior NCOs and Other Ranks, a total complement of 175.
The identities of the first batch of NCOs and Other Ranks to man The Rings before Munn’s arrival is not known, but later arrivals included Sergeant Fielding, Corporal Don Butchers, the head driver, and Private Jock Flockhart who became the Commandant’s driver and drove a large American sedan car, a Hudson Terraplane. Don Butchers had been a steeplechase jockey and after the war returned to horse racing and eventually became a trainer.
The Rings had to provide office accommodation for about thirty-three people. The forty or so junior Other Ranks were dispatched to arrange their sleeping quarters in the cottages and outhouses within the grounds. Some time later barrack huts were built within the grounds for the ORs and the cottages were used for other purposes. It is believed that the senior NCOs lived in the main house. Office accommodation was allocated according to rank.
In the spring two civilian secretaries arrived from SOE’s London headquarters, Miss Dorothy Wickens, affectionately known as ‘Wicky’, the Commandant’s secretary, and Mrs Phil Spridell, whose husband was a corporal serving in North Africa. She was later replaced by Evadne Cull. They were housed in one of the cottages within the grounds of The Rings from which the soldiers had been evicted, and were well looked after by a civilian housekeeper, Miss Richardson, known to the secretaries as Rickie.
In August they were joined by a third secretary, Ann Keenlyside, who has provided a substantial amount of information on the organization of the school and the identities and roles of members of the staff. She had been recruited into SOE through a secretarial agency, which had offered her jobs with a gynaecologist, the Political Warfare Executive or the InterServices Research Bureau - the cover name for SOE. She chose the latter and was sent for an interview at Baker Street. On appointment she was immediately posted to Beaulieu.
The three secretaries were the only women on the school’s administrative staff. In many of the other SOE establishments the female staff – domestic, secretarial and drivers – was provided by the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, the FANYs, but there were never any of them at Beaulieu where the domestic and clerical chores and all the driving was done by soldiers throughout the School’s existence. Later in the war two Officers of the FANY joined the teaching staff.
The Rings became a functional headquarters. On the ground floor was the Commandant’s office, the Adjutant’s office and a room accommodating his three clerks. Also on the ground floor was the NCOs’ mess and the original kitchens. The Other Ranks are also thought to have had their mess on the ground floor, although their sleeping quarters were elsewhere.
On the first floor there was an office accommodating the three secretaries but was otherwise entirely occupied by the
training staff, including storerooms for their supplies, epidiascopes and articles used for demonstration purposes, such as wall charts and a collection of German uniforms. The two senior instructors shared a room and the rest were packed into the remaining bedrooms, three or four to a room.
In March The House in the Wood, which has over thirty rooms, had been taken over as an officers’ mess for members of the staff. The reception rooms are not large and must have been somewhat crowded when occupied by all the officers simultaneously. The House in the Wood is indeed buried in a wood and can only be approached by driving up a long track through woodland which, beyond the house, ultimately leads to an area known as Hartford Heath and a large gravel roundabout surrounding a small island of tall trees. Other tracks lead, in one direction, from the roundabout through the woods to The Rings and Hartford House and in another across Great Goswell Copse to The Vineyards and Boarmans. There are also tracks within the woods that lead westwards to Saltmarsh and Blackbridge, two more student houses. To the south is Palace House, the home of the Montagus. These houses are within walking distance of each other, although it is a fairly long walk, but it was often made in the dead of night by small groups of trainee agents sneaking along the gravel tracks trying not to make a noise when out on burglary and housebreaking exercises.
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