Beaulieu

by Cyril Cunningham

  In April, 1940, the FS Wing moved to Sheerness on the Isle of Sheppey at the mouth of the River Thames opposite Southend. Heavy enemy bombing of the area soon forced it to move to Winchester where the King Alfred Teacher Training College was requisitioned to accommodate 200 or so trainees who were entering their basic pre-Intelligence training at regular intervals. It was while the depot was located at Winchester, in December, 1940, that the FS Wing of the Corps of Military Police became part of the newly re-formed Intelligence Corps.

  The demand for Intelligence personnel grew at such a rapid rate that by October, 1942, the premises had become inadequate and the recruit depot moved to an enormous country house at Wentworth, near Rotherham in Yorkshire. The Winchester depot and later the Wentworth depot were basic training establishments for Other Ranks entering the Corps; officer recruits were sent for their basic training to either Pembroke or Oriel Colleges at Oxford, which had been requisitioned for the purpose.

  The first Intelligence Training Centre, later renamed the School of Military Intelligence, was set up in Minley Manor near Camberley in 1939. In May, 1940, it moved into two hotels in Swanage and three months later, in August, it moved again, to Smedley’s Hydro in Matlock, Derbyshire, and remained there until the end of the war. It was here that officers and men underwent their training for a variety of Intelligence duties.

  Woolrych was recruited into SOE as the Chief Instructor for the proposed school at Beaulieu in January or February, 1941. He was a man of exquisite manners, a practising Christian, an accomplished linguist and a meticulous administrator. He was sufficiently tough-minded to have no qualms about training people, men and women, to be spies, and after he became Commandant had little hesitation in sacking any member of his staff whom he considered to be inadequate for the job. He got rid of several members of the team he had inherited from Munn.

  During his time at Beaulieu he had to cope with a stream of visiting top brass from SOE, also foreign dignitaries and politicians, and many of our own politicians, including Hugh Dalton and Ernest Bevin. He disliked Dalton who had a habit of draping his arm over the shoulder of the person to whom he was speaking. But he enjoyed entertaining Bevin as a dinner guest. On one occasion he teased Bevin about the Labour Party’s avowed intention of abolishing public schools. Bevin replied, ‘Do you think we are crazy? Where else do you think we will get educated Ministers!’

  After the war, at the age of fifty-five, he joined the Foreign Office to start its Information Department, a job which brought him into contact with many Ministers, including Denis Healey, who befriended him. The job took him to Strasbourg, to the Council of Europe, where he had many happy reunions with his former foreign friends and acquaintances in SOE. He retired in 1950 and died in 1983 at the age of ninety-two.

  It was at Smedley’s Hydro that he began looking for people to take with him to Beaulieu to instruct secret agents.

  Chapter VI

  THE ‘PRETTY ODD FISH’

  There were about sixteen officers on the teaching staff of the Beaulieu Finishing School. This figure does not include the School’s administrative staff or the six residential adjutant ‘housemasters’ who also undertook some of the supervision of field exercises. Nor does it include visiting speakers, or the Conducting Officers seconded from the Country Sections to act as interpreters and confidants to each batch of trainee agents. It also excludes the trained agents seconded to the School after completing a tour of secret service, to pass on their up-to-date knowledge of the life and the hazards of working in enemy-occupied territories.

  It was this motley collection of instructors, administrators and resting agents, all of them fluent in at least one foreign language and some in two or three, that led Philby to describe them as ‘pretty odd fish’.

  Very few of the staff of whatever rank remained at Beaulieu throughout the war. Almost all of them moved on to other jobs within SOE or returned to the regiments from which they had been borrowed and were replaced by others. However, it has been possible to identify over thirty officers who served on the instructor staff at various stages of the war. After the war at least eleven of them had distinguished careers in a very wide variety of occupations ranging from business and the film and theatre industries, commerce, stockbroking, the manufacture of pottery, academia, the diplomatic service, the law and one became a distinguished couturier.

  They were, as Philby remarked, a pretty odd lot and included a burglar. And they were teaching some pretty rum subjects, the like of which would have been more suited to the criminal sub-culture of Wormwood Scrubs, where, behind the backs of the warders, hardened criminals would probably have passed such knowledge by word of mouth to first-time offenders! The curriculum included such subjects as murder, arson, train-wrecking and other forms of sabotage, robbery, safe-breaking and key-making, burglary and housebreaking, forgery and ‘black’ propaganda, blackmail, false pretences and ‘casing’ premises, all of which were unlikely topics for army officers to be teaching as part of a curriculum of an authorized training course. Indeed, the German counter-espionage agencies called Beaulieu ‘the Gangster School’.

  The majority of the instructors were recruited from the Intelligence Corps and came into SOE on the ‘old boy network’, mainly via the School of Military Intelligence, although some visiting speakers were on loan from Scotland Yard’s burglary squad and from MI 5.

  The recruitment of staff for Beaulieu had been started at the end of 1940 by Gubbins and Munn. Major S.H.C. Woolrych had been earmarked for the job of Chief Instructor early in 1941, and he, in turn, approached four members of his teaching staff at the Intelligence Training Centre at Matlock saying, ‘I’ve got something important to tell you chaps.’ He disclosed that he had been recruited into SOE and was looking for people to take with him to Beaulieu.

  The four members of the staff, all captains, were Leslie Charley, about whom very little more is known except that he became a Lieutenant-Colonel in SOE, ‘Bill’ Brooker, Cuthbert Skilbeck and John (later Sir John) Wedgwood, of the famous pottery family. Skilbeck, who died in June, 1996, related that Woolrych picked on Brooker because he knew Brooker’s parents, and that he, Skilbeck, and John Wedgwood were Brooker’s close friends. All three of them were of a similar age. Brooker and Skilbeck were 32, Wedgwood a couple of years older. Woolrych had known Leslie Charley during the First World War.

  During the course of the war Brooker, Skilbeck and Wedgwood were to succeed Woolrych in the role of Chief Instructor at Beaulieu but it was John Wedgwood who, according to official records, held the post for the longest period, two years, before handing over in June, 1944, to the last Chief Instructor, Peter Folliss.

  R.M. Brooker (always known as Bill) was by far the most colourful of the four, a rumbustious extrovert who had a meteoric rise to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel within SOE until he fell out with Gubbins over the direction SOE was taking in the selection and training of secret agents. Brooker, who had no operational experience, but was probably basing his ideas on the experience of the Free French and the Poles, favoured the recruitment of Europeans already in place in enemy occupied territories. SOE initially had no trained secret agents and therefore had been forced to use commandos until it had trained inexperienced civilians who in the early 1940s had been readily caught by the Nazis. As the war progressed it showed a distinct preference for seasoned service personnel wearing their uniforms and acting in a para-military capacity. There was a head-on clash of egos which ultimately resulted in Brooker being demoted and shunted to one side where he could do no harm, to the job of a Conducting Officer to Americans training in SOE’s schools, including Beaulieu. But not before he had distinguished himself in Canada and in the United States as an authority on agent training, even though he had spent only nine months on the Beaulieu instructor staff and had only eighteen months of war service altogether. This may seem little to qualify him as an expert, but in wartime, in his field, expertise was counted in months rather than in years.

  After the war
he built himself a successful career in the travel business, at one time becoming the controlling shareholder and Managing Director of the Henry Lunn travel firm. He launched several other enterprises which were bought out. In 1954 he retired briefly to Montreux where he started up another enterprise. He retired again in New York but was enticed out of retirement to work in the hotel industry for two very well known organizations, a job which took him around the world. By the time he finally retired in 1977, at the age of 68, he was the co-founder of the Association of British Travel Agents and had served on ABTA’s first council. He died in January, 1995, at the age of eighty-six.

  Brooker was a large man; some said he had the stature of King Henry VIII. He was a born salesman and a brilliant and convincing lecturer with an immense fund of stories that he could tell in his first language, which was French. Philby described him as ‘the cleverest man I have ever met in my life’.

  Bill Brooker was born in Paris in 1909, the son of the Manager of Thomas Cook’s Paris Office. He had worked for a while for a merchant in Mincing Lane in the City of London before joining Nestlé’s at their headquarters in Vevey in Switzerland. Throughout the 1930s he had travelled extensively across Europe selling Nestlé’s products and was in Barcelona at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in the late summer of 1936. He had to leave in a hurry and at the age of 27 he was notably successful in smuggling the Company’s blocked pesetas out of Spain over the Pyrenees, using couriers and clandestine routes and, to quote his words, ‘volumes of false papers and plenty of imagination’. This was his only experience of clandestine operations, although at Beaulieu and in North America he always gave the deliberate impression of having had extensive operational experience as a secret agent.

  He and Cuthbert Skilbeck formed a highly successful partnership which was to last until March, 1943. Between them they can fairly claim to have been the midwifes not only of the courses run at Beaulieu, but they also played a significant role in setting up and running courses at SOE’s Canadian school known as Camp X in Oshawa, just outside Toronto on the shores of Lake Ontario. Together they were the architects of several courses that were eventually to be run by the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, the American equivalent of SOE. Indeed, Brooker played a very significant role in bringing OSS into being and had enormous influence with the American General William (Wild Bill) Donovan, the founder of the modern American Secret Service, the Central Intelligence Agency. Brooker played a dominant role in shaping the OSS training programme during the latter half of 1942. He and Skilbeck also designed courses run by the American Central Intelligence Agency. One of these was for training agents for clandestine security operations all over South America.

  Cuthbert Skilbeck had lived in Paris and Dresden during his teens and had afterwards returned to this country and joined the 500-year-old family firm of drysalters (merchants for raw chemicals, dyes and gums) which he rejoined after the war. He was fluent in French and German and in his younger days could speak a smattering of Norwegian, which he had acquired while staying at a little house his father had owned in Norway.

  John Wedgwood had been educated at Winchester and Oxford and had spent three years on the continent before joining the family pottery business and becoming one of its directors four years before the outbreak of the war. He is frequently described as being notoriously ‘absent-minded’, or vague, dreamy and eccentric, characteristics which concealed a penetrating intellect. One of the Beaulieu secretaries described him as ‘delightful but vague’ and relates that on one occasion he was preparing his lecture notes in the garden of The Rings but failed to notice that his finished sheets were being blown away. Some of the office staff ran out into the garden to rescue them. Philby described him as ‘pale and wide-eyed and would break long silences by unexpected and devastating sallies’. One of his colleagues described him as ‘a very engaging, whimsical character’. His eccentricity was an example of what Philby meant when he described the staff at Beaulieu as ‘pretty odd fish’.

  It is most unlikely that Wedgwood was in fact clinically ‘absent-minded’; it is far more likely that, like many so-called absent-minded professors, he was notoriously inattentive when confronted with matters that he found trivial or uninteresting and was apt to drift into profound mental pre-occupation with matters that he considered to be more challenging. He left Beaulieu in June, 1944, to take up the post of Military Intelligence Staff Officer with the Fifth North Staffordshire Regiment and subsequently served in the Arctic and in Italy. After the war he returned to the family pottery organization and became its deputy chairman and roving ambassador. At one period he tried, unsuccessfully, to enter politics. He was a noted mountaineer and caver and a keen walker. He died in 1989 at the age of 82.

  All three of them had answered appeals in the newspapers for foreign-language speakers and had been called up and posted as privates into the Field Security Police at the Corps of Military Police depot at Mychett. One of their instructors was Captain S.H.C. Woolrych.

  On completion of their initial training they were promoted to the rank of Lance Corporal. Brooker and Skilbeck were sent on a Sergeant Instructor’s course at Mychett and after serving as sergeant-instructors for a few months they were commissioned as second lieutenants in the General List in February, 1940, and were put in charge of Field Security Sections. Wedgwood was also soon commissioned.

  Brooker was posted to a Section working in the docks at Tyneside and Skilbeck was sent to take charge of a half-Section in the docks at Marseilles. Their jobs, in both cases, were to screen the crews of ships entering the docks, to try and ensure that none of the seamen were working in clandestine capacities for the Germans or the Italians. In this job they learned to interrogate in a foreign language and learned the art and difficulties of interrogating without any sophisticated aids save their own wiliness.

  After the fall of France the Germans quickly occupied the northern part of the country but were slow to exert a controlling influence over the Vichy administration of the south of France. Skilbeck and very many other British service personnel were able to get away from the continent weeks after the defeat of the British Expeditionary Force and its evacuation from the beaches of Dunkirk at the end of May, 1940. Skilbeck left France at the end of June and by a circuitous sea route returned to England, to the depot at Sheerness, on 10 July, 1940, and was reunited with Brooker and many other friends. When he arrived at his home his wife grumbled about him taking so long to get home after the fall of France, and he had retorted that he was ‘bloody lucky to have got home at all considering the situation in France, after running the gauntlet of German submarines in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, and sailing half way to America in a shipping convoy to avoid them!’

  When the Intelligence Corps recruit centre was created at Winchester, Brooker and Skilbeck moved there for a brief period before transferring to the Intelligence Training Centre at Smedley’s Hydro at Matlock to teach on the officers’ and OR’s Field Security courses. Here they met up with John Wedgwood and with Stanley Woolrych, now a major and the chief instructor of Field Security training. Also on Woolrych’s staff was Lieutenant Malcolm Muggeridge.

  Brooker, Skilbeck, Wedgwood and, possibly, Leslie Charley arrived together at Beaulieu in March or April, 1941, and only then were they confronted with the task of designing syllabuses.

  The general outline of the content of agent training had already been the subject of discussions between Colin Gubbins, ‘Jimmy’ Munn and Stanley Woolrych, and by the time Brooker, Skilbeck and Wedgwood arrived at Beaulieu several courses had already been run by Hill, Philby and a number of other unknown tutors. Munn and Woolrych had, according to Cuthbert Skilbeck, ‘already laid on people to teach specialist subjects like codes and secret inks’. This suggests that Gubbins and the senior training staff had already decided upon a modular format for the Beaulieu courses, that is, had decided to prepare a number of self-contained packages or modules, each of variable length and complexity, to provide sufficie
nt flexibility to enable them to tailor courses of a mixed bag of topics to meet whatever demands would be made by the Country Sections for superficial or in-depth training of agents of various sorts. There were at least seven modules, Agent Management, Enemy Organizations and their functions, Communications and Codes, Security and Resistance to Interrogation, Criminal Skills including railway sabotage, Propaganda Warfare and Black Propaganda, and Fieldcraft and Living Off the Land, i.e. survival training.

  The content of some of these modules had been left to Woolrych to decide, and he delegated the detailed work to various members of the instructor staff. He left Brooker and Skilbeck to work out the details of the Security module. They shared a room at The Rings and spent very many hours discussing, often long into the night, which topics should be included. According to Skilbeck, ‘We took the old Manual of Military Intelligence and, so to speak, stood it on its head, that is, we reversed what it said in the Field Security section about security against spying. The Beaulieu course was based upon our original two-week FS course.’

  This is a gross simplification. The old Manual of Military Intelligence is nothing more than a series of pamphlets of pocket-book size held together at their bindings by Treasury Tags, two pairs of metal tags at the ends of two pieces of string, rather like very short bootlaces. Each pamphlet is described as a Section. The first three Sections concern the collection of military Intelligence by using the resources of the army, navy and air force, e.g. by skirmishing and patrolling, naval interception and air reconnaissance. The next two sections, Sections 4 and 5, the ones used by Brooker and Skilbeck, concern Counter Intelligence and Military Security, and Civil Security and Counter Espionage. Each Section is divided into chapters which lay down the general principles of Counter-Intelligence (e.g. physical measures to stop leakages of information, such as guarding premises, movement control, vetting etc) and Counter-Espionage (covert investigation and shadowing suspected persons, working with MI 5, etc). MI 5 obviously possessed valuable knowledge, based on its own operations, of what countermeasures the German security services would be likely to take and this could be reversed to teach potential agents how to avoid them. A fourth chapter concerns the organization of sources of information and records. This was of direct practical use for training agents on how to recognize unknown contacts and how to disguise their appearances by reversing, that is to say falsifying, many of the thirty visible characteristics of suspected persons which FS personnel were advised to observe and record.