Beaulieu

by Cyril Cunningham

  George Hill was also in his late fifties and held the rank of major. Known to his colleagues at Beaulieu as ‘Uncle’, a term frequently used in service officers’ messes for an officer well above the average age for his rank, he was in fact none other than the former Brigadier G.A. Hill, DSO, OBE, MC, who had been a very successful British spy in Russia during the First World War and one of a famous trio of British spies in Russia at that time, the other two being Paul Dukes and the fabulous Sidney Reilly.

  Hill was the son of a British merchant who, early in the present century, had business interests spreading from Siberia to Persia (Iran). George had travelled extensively in this area with his father and learned to speak Russian well. He had spent the earlier years of the First World War in the Intelligence Corps before transferring to the Royal Flying Corps. He had been one of the first men ever to land a plane carrying secret agents behind enemy lines, in Bulgaria. He had been sent to Russia to join an RFC mission two months before the Bolshevik revolution. By the end of the war he had already done everything that the SOE agents would be required to do in the Second World War, and more.

  Following the revolution and the Russo-German peace treaty of March, 1918, he became a sub-agent of the local Secret Service station chief, Ernest Boyce, whose duties involved working with the Bolsheviks on the one hand while on the other making mischief with, and spying upon, German Missions and troop movements in Russia. Hill claimed to have won the confidence of Trotsky and to have helped him to develop the Cheka (later the KGB). He also claimed that he had set up an Intelligence service in the Bolshevik army (later to become the Soviet Military Intelligence Service, the GRU) and trained them in the well-developed British technique of train-watching and how to identify German units in transit. He sent information on the troop movements by telegraph to London. He also taught the Russians how to intercept the mail of the German Missions in Petrograd and Moscow, and how to decode the intercepts.

  Despairing of ever getting any real co-operation from the Bolsheviks he set up his own secret organization for monitoring German troop movements, operated his own secret courier service to convey his information back to England and created a special section of Czarist officers to work behind the German’s lines, derailing German troop trains and supply trains, arming Russian peasants and inciting them to insurrection. Unfortunately for him, the Bolsheviks managed to penetrate this organization.

  Later Hill linked up with Sidney Reilly in the latter’s plot to disaffect the Lettish bodyguards of the Bolshevik leaders and use them to assassinate Lenin and the top Bolsheviks, an operation timed to coincide with an Allied landing of troops at Archangel to prevent Allied war materials and shipping from falling into German hands. The coup came unstuck in August, 1918, when other people with similar ideas but different motives for bumping off Lenin and his associates, beat them to it and made a hash of it. The head of the Petrograd Cheka was assassinated and Dora Kaplan, an extreme left-winger, shot and severely wounded Lenin, unleashing a reign of terror. The British were blamed by the Bolsheviks, the British Embassy was stormed, the naval attaché was shot and killed and Robert Bruce Lockhart, a British diplomat, was arrested and subsequently became the victim of the first ever Soviet attempt, made by a Cheka interrogator by the name of Peters, to brainwash a foreigner. The Secret Serviceman, Ernest Boyce, for whom Hill worked, was arrested and Reilly and Hill were driven underground to escape arrest. Eighteen of Hill’s secret couriers and agents were caught and shot by the Cheka.

  Hill, Bruce Lockhart, and the imprisoned Boyce, were eventually released via a diplomatic swap, but on reaching Finland Hill was ordered to go back into Russia on a sabotage mission, which he carried out very successfully. Philby said that Hill was the only man he had ever met who had actually sabotaged trains by pouring sand into their axle boxes. Experiments by SOE during the Second World War proved that this method of sabotage was ineffective!

  Hill was the only one of the original Beaulieu teaching team who had actually been a spy (excluding Philby), had experience of living the underground life of a secret agent and had survived to tell the tale. We do not know what subjects he taught. Not long after he joined the staff at Beaulieu, Winston Churchill, in a puckish mood, sent him back to Russia, to Moscow, with a small team of Beaulieu-trained officer-agents, to act as the senior SOE liaison officer with the Russian Secret police, the NKVD, who were well aware of his impeccable credentials! According to Philby, the SOE liaison team’s offices were thoroughly bugged, i.e. fitted with monitoring microphones, by the NKVD.

  Philby’s comments on the choice of staff at Beaulieu are worth recounting. He remarked that experienced secret service officers were in desperately short supply and of course could only have been obtained from the Secret Intelligence Service, which was hostile to the whole idea of SOE. Philby opines that had the SIS been asked to supply suitable instructors it would have off-loaded its duds, and had it done so it would have produced results too awful to contemplate. In the event, the denial of experienced SIS instructors forced SOE to find its own instructors from its own resources. Subsequent experience convinced Philby that in the circumstances the choice of raw instructors was wise, since the men chosen as instructors for the new school had more than their fair share of intelligence and imagination. He considered that they made the old hands look asinine!

  His assumption that the first batch of instructors at Beaulieu were totally inexperienced in the task of training spies is largely correct, but with one very important exception.

  The man chosen by Lieutenant-Colonel J.W. Munn, the first Commandant at Beaulieu, as his Chief Instructor was Major S.H.C. Woolrych, the Chief Instructor of the FS Wing of the Intelligence Training Centre at Matlock in Derbyshire. Woolrych was close on fifty years of age, was rather short and thick-set in stature, nearly bald and a veteran of the First World War. He claimed that he had security in his bones, and Philby was evidently very uneasy in his company for obvious reasons and described him as ‘a nuisance’, probably because he was too inquisitive for Philby’s comfort. Six months after the school was set up he replaced Munn as the Commandant and remained in that post, except for one brief interlude, for the rest of the war.

  Stanley Woolrych was a dark horse. He was an old spycatcher and spymaster, a gamekeeper turned poacher, whose activities in the First World War were to be repeated in the Second World War. The story of his career is a history of the Intelligence Corps and two of its principal activities: Field Security and military secret service work.

  Born in Blackheath, London, in 1891, he was one of a large family and had four brothers and two sisters. His father was the headmaster of a local school who lost his job when the lease of the school ran out. He took his family to the Continent where the cost of living was cheaper and settled for a time in Chamonix in the French Alps close to the Italian frontier where the young Woolrychs learned to speak French fluently. They moved to Switzerland where Stanley became equally fluent in Swiss German. He was sent back to England, to be educated at Marlborough School, but his family’s financial circumstances did not permit him to move on to university. Instead, he obtained a job with an insurance company and later with the West India Committee.

  Soon after the outbreak of the First World War, at the age of 23 and already fluent in French and German, he visited the War Office and volunteered his services as an interpreter to the British Expeditionary Force. He was told to go home and wait for a reply which, when it arrived, informed him that no interpreters were needed because they were being provided by the French. However, the Army was starting a new thing called ‘Intelligence’. Was he interested? When he replied that he was, he was called for a cursory examination of his knowledge of French and German and was subsequently called up in October, 1914, and posted to a motorcycle battalion in Putney. Here he was taught to ride a machine and to map-read and make reconnaissances of the local topography and write reports.

  He was commissioned into the General Service Corps (and later transferred to the I
ntelligence Corps) early in November, 1914, and a month later he was posted, via GHQ St Omer, to the Western Front, to the 7th Division of the 4th Corps. He found himself almost a supernumerary and spent much of his time following up scare reports of alleged spies signalling to each other within the British lines, all of which had reasonable and innocuous explanations. Through these investigations he became known as ‘the Divisional Spy’.

  On Christmas Day, 1914, there was an unofficial armistice and the young Woolrych walked across the battlefield to the enemy trenches to talk to the German troops in their own language.

  In January, 1915, he was ordered to draw panoramas of the whole of the mile-and-a-half Divisional front line and the opposing enemy trenches and terrain. It was one of the routine tasks given to Intelligence officers in the earlier years of the war and kept him occupied for some time. It took him into elevated positions already in use as observation posts by the Forward Observation Officers of the artillery, usually located in derelict buildings close to the firing line, the regular targets of enemy snipers and heavier guns. Many of his panoramas are currently held in the Intelligence Corps museum and indicate an exceptional eye for detail.

  During a trip back to France by ferry after a spell of leave, a Belgian passenger sitting next to him told him that German troop trains were passing the foot of his garden. Were the British interested? On reporting the incident to his superiors he was sent to repeat his story to Divisional headquarters and so started the idea of train-watching as a source of military Intelligence on the enemy’s order of battle.

  On his return to the battle area he recognized a need to do something more than draw panoramas of the terrain to produce useful information on which to base tactical offensives. He began to work among the local population, especially those recently displaced from areas now occupied by the Germans, collecting from them topographical information and pre-war postcards of the areas. He also began interrogating enemy prisoners of war for the same sort of information and was able to use all this data to elaborate on the information in his panoramas. It was to earn him a mention in dispatches.

  At the end of 1915 he was transferred from what the army called Intelligence (a) work to Intelligence (b) work, from collecting tactical Intelligence to secret service and counter-espionage work. He was posted to Folkestone to work with Major B.A.Wallinger who occupied an office in the Marine Parade overlooking the harbour. All the cross-channel ferries from Holland docked at Folkestone. Holland was a neutral country and a happy hunting ground for spies working for all the belligerent nations, and the ferries were carrying both agents and couriers. Wallinger and his staff of about five other officers, including Woolrych, recruited people from among the continental passengers and trained them to gather military intelligence, especially Order of Battle intelligence on the disposition of German units. The agents had to be trained to recognize German army uniforms and badges, as well as military formations, and learn how to transmit this information to their British controllers by a variety of means, including the use of secret inks to send messages by post and by carrier pigeons.

  The total number of agents of this type operated by the British army in Europe during the First World War was astonishingly large, about 6,000, of whom nearly 700 were caught by the Germans. One hundred of them were shot and the rest imprisoned.

  It was in the Folkestone office that Woolrych said he learned the rudiments of the spy trade, which was to stand him in good stead for his job in SOE some twenty-five years later.

  In 1916 he was posted to Paris to set up a recruiting office and a school to teach Belgian refugees from German-occupied territories to spy on German troop movements. There were communities of re-settled Belgians scattered all over France and Woolrych, in civilian clothes and working under an assumed name, went from one to the other looking for recruits. They were sent to the school in Paris where they were taught to recognize German units and German trains carrying the units to the Western Front. They were also taught the badges and insignia of various German units; Woolrych introduced three wooden tailor’s dummies dressed in German uniforms (an idea he was later to introduce at Beaulieu). The next part of their training was to teach them train-watching, to note the time that the train passed the watching post and to identify the composition of the train, noting the type and number of the different types of carriages. On the walls of the school were diagrams of German trains of different lengths and various types of carriages. Some of these diagrams are among the papers left by Colonel Woolrych to the Intelligence Corps museum.

  The agents were taught to recruit the services of their families to maintain a 24-hour watch on German troop movements and to write their reports on the thinnest and toughest tissue paper they could find, using a magnifying glass, mapping pens and Indian ink. The message could then be rolled into a tiny package and secreted about the human body or attached to a carrier pigeon. Some of these reports are also among the papers left by Woolrych to the Intelligence Corps museum.

  Woolrych was later to write in his memoirs of the First World War:-

  ‘The crux of all agent training is how the reports are to be transmitted. In the First World War we had to depend on written reports and ways of getting them out [to their controllers]. There had always been whole families of ‘passeurs’, that is, smugglers, living on the Dutch/Belgian frontier, who had immemorial methods of crossing the frontiers. For a time we pressed them into service but gradually the Germans closed all the loopholes and wired the frontier with electric fencing. Every kind of method was employed to circumvent the electrified wire.’

  The agents were given rubber gloves, but some of them were electrocuted to death. Some used barrels with no tops or bottoms which were thrust through the wire to provide a tunnel to crawl through. Others crawled into beetfields, concealed their message in a beet and threw it over the wire to an accomplice on the Dutch side. A number of agents relied on carrier pigeons.

  He continued his recruiting and training of spies for the better part of a year before he fell ill and was taken to hospital with appendicitis. He never returned to agent-running and was transferred to security duties with an inter-allied mission. Early in 1918, now a captain, he was posted back to the Western Front as chief Intelligence (b) officer to the Second Army under Stewart Menzies, who became chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service in 1939.

  Woolrych was made responsible for Field Security (counter-espionage) work for the Second Army front. It was in this job that he used his knowledge of spies and spying to set up a counter-espionage organization comprising several subalterns and fifty ‘Intelligence Police’, called ‘green-caps’ because they wore green capcovers to distinguish them from the ordinary Military Police who wore red capcovers. The system he devised for policing a huge area became a model for Field Security operations during the Second World War. He divided his area of responsibility into sections of approximately 50 square miles and settled his policemen, who were linguists, in pairs and in plain clothes in each of these sectors and instructed them to get to know their areas intimately and make friends with the local population. He issued his men with questionnaires to make sure that they carried out their work diligently. He was thus able to monitor all movements and events, especially unusual events in the back areas of the Second Army front.

  After the armistice, Woolrych, now a Major, moved with the army of occupation into Germany, where he set up the same system for monitoring events in the area for which he was responsible. He was demobilized in December, 1919, and placed on the Army’s Special List.

  He had married during the war and had a family. Between the wars he struggled to make a living as an import-export agent. He started his business with one of his brothers, who lived in Copenhagen, importing hosiery, but the business failed. He found another partner and began importing fashioned silk stockings, something that had not previously been available in this country. Woolrych acted as an agent between the manufacturers on the continent and the wholesale houses in th
is country. It provided him with a reasonable living until a tax was imposed upon silk, which ruined his business. He turned to importing Swiss woollen goods. In running his businesses he had learned a smattering of Danish and Norwegian. In his spare time he had a passionate interest in luxury liners and would take his sons down to the London docks for a treat to look at them. He was a keen amateur photographer and developed his own films. He was also an accomplished classical pianist and endeavoured to get an hour’s practice at the piano every day. He even managed to do this during the Second World War when circumstances permitted, especially at Beaulieu where there was a grand piano in the officers’ mess at The House in the Wood.

  He was recalled to the colours on 2 September, 1939, only one day before war was declared. He was not one of the very small band of former Intelligence officers on the regular army officers reserve. He was given the rank of Captain on the General List (which was dubbed ‘Cross and Blackwell’s Own’), and made second-in-command of the Field Security Wing of the Military Police depot at Mychett in Surrey. With a staff of three captains, three sergeants, two corporals and five ATS girls, he set about re-forming the Field Security service. Since the Intelligence Corps had not yet been re-formed, the Army had reverted to the 1914 practice which regarded Field Security personnel as a branch of the Military Police.

  The FS Wing at Mychett had the task of training volunteers with foreign language skills in a variety of FS duties, including rudimentary interrogation techniques, general security, how to keep security records and how to collect information on the enemy Order of Battle. They were then formed into standard Field Security units, teams comprising one officer, one senior NCO and thirteen sergeants and junior NCOs.