Beaulieu

by Cyril Cunningham

  In short the Manual of Military Intelligence provided Brooker and Skilbeck only with the bare bones of a syllabus for training and they had to rack their brains and imaginations for days and maybe for weeks to flesh it out. They were no doubt assisted by John Wedgwood and held frequent discussions with Woolrych. They gave the job of developing lectures and demonstrations on disguises and falsification of appearances to Peter Folliss.

  Peter Folliss is something of an enigma. He was 26 years of age when the war broke out and he had followed the usual route into the Intelligence Corps Centre. He had received much of his Intelligence training from Brooker and Skilbeck while they were acting as instructors at Sheerness or Winchester earlier in the war. He is said to have been something of a misfit, cognitively, with the other original instructors, who tended to regard him as a callow youth. There is a rumour that Folliss came into SOE as a trained agent, via the Secret Intelligence Service, but this is unlikely in view of his known history of training at the Intelligence Training Centre. He may, however, have been an SIS contact with the school. He certainly moved from Beaulieu in 1946, by which time he was Chief Instructor, transferred to the SIS to set up a Special Training School for them near Gosport in Hampshire. When he died in 1970, at the age of 57, in New York, he had become the chairman of the board of an international company of high financiers.

  Folliss was a Lieutenant in the Intelligence Corps when he arrived at Beaulieu in the spring of 1941 and he was one of the very few instructors to spend the entire war there. He rose from being a very junior member of the staff to the post of Chief Instructor which he took over in June, 1944, with the rank of Major. He was careful with his appearance and was slightly effete and languid, which people who knew him thought to be a pose, and gave rise to the rumour that he had been an actor, albeit a little-known one. He certainly encouraged people to draw this conclusion. He is said to have received some training in make-up from the Max Factor organization, whether before joining the forces or in preparation for his role at Beaulieu is not known.

  Another member of the original Beaulieu staff who played a major role in developing agent training was Paul Dehn who, as well as being an outstanding and unforgettable lecturer on propaganda warfare, is credited with having masterminded and developed many of the ingenious practical exercises of the Beaulieu courses, the so-called Schemes.

  Dehn’s post-war reputation as a writer, scriptwriter, poet, film critic, opera librettist and song writer has vastly overshadow his wartime achievements, to the extent that when he died at the end of September 1976, at the early age of 63, no mention was made in his obituaries of the very significant part that he had played during the war years in SOE in this country and in Canada and America.

  Dehn’s work as a screenplay writer, but not his name, is well known to millions of people all over the world. He wrote the screenplays of a long list of well-known and award-winning films such as Goldfinger, Murder on the Orient Express, Orders to Kill, Seven Days to Noon, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and many others. He was a sparkling performer who amused and entertained wherever he went both during the war and afterwards.

  He was born in 1912, the son of a prosperous Manchester cotton merchant of Jewish descent. He was educated at Shrewsbury and Oxford and his godfather, the well-known drama critic James Agate, inspired him to take up writing. He became a film critic for a Sunday newspaper and also worked for a time as a journalist. He had a talent for foreign languages and was recruited into SOE at the age of 28 via the Intelligence Corps. He is said to have served for a time as Gubbins’ personal assistant before joining the staff of Beaulieu some time before September, 1941. He was assigned to the task of teaching propaganda warfare and ‘black’ propaganda, along with Kim Philby who claims to have produced the draft curriculum of this module. Dehn specialized in this subject for the rest of his wartime career. He made an enormous impression on everybody with whom he came into contact both as an entertainer, ‘A bloody good night club act’, and as a serious thinker with a warm and romantic nature. The official history of SOE describes him as having ‘a vivid imagination and a rollicking sense of humour’. The official American history of the OSS described him thus: ‘one of the finest lecturers to grace a classroom . . . Listening to him was better than reading the most exciting spy novel.’ Another of his acquaintances commented, ‘There was far more to Dehn than a quick wit, a piano and a packet of cigarettes. He was a first rate instructor, outstandingly good.’ He had a powerful imagination, great sensitivity and strongly developed linguistic gifts. There is a famous story of how he sat in his bath learning by rote a Polish translation of his lecture. He eventually delivered it in perfect Polish to a group of Polish student agents who, afterwards, could not understand why he needed an interpreter to translate into English the questions they put to him!

  Indeed he sparkled throughout his war career, in this country and in North America when, in the winter of 1942, he was posted as Chief Instructor, at Skilbeck’s request, to Camp X at Oshawa in Canada. In the summer of 1943 he spent most of his time in America teaching propaganda warfare to members of the Office of Strategic Services. He was even well-known by proxy to the German counter-espionage agencies, because of the unforgettable impression he made on all the agents with whom he came into contact while they were undergoing training. After the German surrender he was sent to Norway on an interrogation mission and finished his service in SOE by compiling an agent handbook. When he died in 1976, a bachelor, he was deservedly described as one of the most versatile writers of his generation.

  Another of the Beaulieu instructors who followed Brooker, Skilbeck and Dehn to Camp X in Canada was Captain Howard Burgess. He went there in May, 1942, and in the middle of a lecture he was delivering on security he broke off to ask the class if they had noticed a flash of lightning and then collapsed to the floor. He died from a stroke. He was twenty-six years of age.

  One of the first instructors in codes, ciphers and secret inks was Ralph Vibert, a 29-year-old Jersey barrister, who, after the war, became a very prominent Jerseyman and a Commissioner of the Royal Court of Jersey. At the outbreak of hostilities he had been living in England with his family and as a civilian he had been recruited by an unspecified organization, probably an offshoot of GCHQ, to train as a cryptographer. After struggling for six months to learn this very difficult subject, one of a group of sixty trainees, fifty-seven of them, including Vibert, were rejected; only three of them made the grade and were probably sent to Bletchley Park, the main Government cryptography centre. However, because he could speak French and had mastered the art of coding, he was passed on to SOE. He was given a commission in the General List and sent to Beaulieu to teach coding and secret inks. He also used his barrister’s interrogatory skills to exercise students’ resistance to interrogation. He was soon joined by another expert in coding, thought to have been Captain D.C.Benn, and later by Captain P.B.(Pip) Whittaker, who, like Peter Folliss, also moved on to the Secret Intelligence Service. Ralph Vibert was another of the Beaulieu staff who eventually became a Chief Instructor at a similar school in the Far East, in the autumn of 1943. After the war he returned to Jersey as an advocate, became the Solicitor-General and a prominent Jersey politician.

  The Beaulieu team seem to have turned to Scotland Yard for assistance in designing the module on criminal skills. Two sources of evidence indicate that they produced a professional burglar and safebreaker to teach the Beaulieu students how to blow the locks off safes and doors. During the war Woolrych mentioned to one of his sons, a regular naval officer, that he had a professional burglar on his staff but did not reveal his name. In May, 1941, lockpicking, keymaking, housebreaking and safe-blowing were being taught by Captain D.E.F. Green, always known as ‘Killer’ Green, of the Intelligence Corps. Everybody, including many of his colleagues, were convinced that Green had been ‘inside’, because of his adroitness at breaking into houses, picking locks and breaking into safes. It is most unlikely that he would have been awarded the
King’s Commission had he been a convicted criminal. He was by profession a Chartered Accountant who is said to have learned his nefarious skills from an incorrigible Scottish burglar and safebreaker, Johnny Ramenski, who was of Polish extraction and was destined to spend thirty-eight years of his life in gaol.

  Ramenski is said to have been the first Beaulieu instructor in criminal skills. He had been released from Barlinnie gaol in Glasgow for war service, probably in exchange for a reduction in his sentence. He was not recruited into the army but remained a civilian instructor, though when teaching he wore army overalls, thus giving rise to the rumour that he had been conscripted. He was about twenty-seven years of age, five feet ten inches in height, heavily built, had a swarthy, unwashed and severely pock-marked complexion and spoke with a thick Glagwegian accent. His services were employed by the army in several establishments to teach troops safe-blowing and he is reputed to have been used by the Foreign Office to blow open a Foreign Embassy safe on at least one occasion. Early in February, 1942, he is known to have been instructing commandos at the Combined Operations Depot at Achnacarry, fourteen miles to the north-east of Fort William, and moved from there to teach the use of explosives to the Royal Engineers at their depot at Ripon.

  He was a dab hand with explosives and detonators but was very difficult to understand, so thick was his accent, and if interrupted during a demonstration would growl ‘hush yer greetin’. He had an extraordinary knack of knowing just how much explosive to use on a job and he was also a fine judge of how to make the force of the blast go into the lock leaving a neat hole and not exploding outwards to wreck the room. He had various tricks for containing the blast to the lock, like packing mud round the explosive or using a long piece of timber as a brace between the explosive and the wall of a room. He also taught his students how to deaden the noise of the explosion.

  Ramenski is said to have spent some time teaching at Beaulieu, before his subject was taken over by ‘Killer’ Green and later by Scotland Yard professionals of the Burglary Squad. Since he was a civilian he could not be housed in army barracks and where he lived, whether in lodgings under police supervision or in a local prison, is not known. What is known is that his ‘war service’ was interspersed with stretches in prison for further offences. He was a compulsive burglar and safe-breaker.

  Almost every book written by former agents about their time at Beaulieu mentions Captain William Clark, always known as ‘Nobby’, who, throughout the war, taught living off the land and fieldcraft, how to move stealthily through woodland and open country. He had been a regular soldier, a veteran of the First World War, with twenty-two years service in the army and had risen through the ranks. He was a big, burly man with hands like hams and had a shock of black hair and a complexion ‘like a glass of claret’. Usually he had a pair of labradors at his heels. He had been a gamekeeper on the Royal Estate at Sandringham and was probably the only member of the Beaulieu instructor staff who was not fluent in a foreign language, although he could speak a little soldier’s French. At Beaulieu he was both a ‘housemaster’, the adjutant of STS 35, The Vineyards, and the best known instructor on the Survival module which included lessons in poaching. During the threatening days of a German invasion he also instructed staff and students in the use of firearms and explosives in isolated quarries and clay-pits in the vicinity of the Beaulieu estate. He had been a key member of the party designated to stay behind at Beaulieu and in the New Forest in the event of invasion.

  He was also the source of continuous irritation to the Montagu Land Agent, Captain Widnell, who thought that there was nothing so deadly as a gamekeeper turned poacher. Clark was frequently accused of overstepping his authority in the liberal use he made, without Widnell’s permission, of the facilities, the woodland and the game on the Montagu estate. He tried Widnell’s patience to the limit and caused the latter to write repeatedly to the School’s commandant, complaining of Clark’s misdemeanours, like devasting a copse of saplings to provide wood for a hide.

  There is no doubt at all of ‘Nobby’ Clark’s remarkable skills as a stalker, trapper, poacher of game and fish and his ability to conceal his movements and himself, despite his bulk, in any type of country. He was an expert at laying traps, primitive but very effective alarms and security devices to protect property and ensnare trespassers and undesirables. After all, it had been one of his duties at Sandringham to protect royal personages.

  He was not the only member of the staff to teach living off the land. Several other officers including Captain Maurice Bruce were engaged in the same task at various stages of the war but one unexpected instructor, at STS 34, The Drokes, in its early days, was another former gamekeeper, Private Len Hatfield, whose talents were also used to teach many student agents poaching and trapping and how to live rough, before he was posted to active service.

  Although many of the Beaulieu staff were originally specialists in particular subjects they do not appear to have remained so for very long. For example, it is known that Paul Dehn also taught codes and secret inks, and all the Intelligence Corps instructors were required to do a spell of teaching students to identify German uniforms and units, especially the military and political police and counter-espionage units and organizations such as the Gestapo, the SD, the Abwehr and similar civil and para-military organizations in all the Nazi-occupied territories. One of the earliest instructors to be given this task for a brief period was Hardy Amies, the famous couturier, who is remembered by his contemporaries for his immaculately tailored uniforms.

  He had joined up at the age of 30 at the outbreak of the war and as a linguist had been posted into Field Security and later commissioned in the Intelligence Corps and posted as an Intelligence Officer to the Canadian Corps Headquarters in England. He had been interviewed and recruited into SOE in April, 1941. He was sent down to Brockenhurst station where he was met by an army driver and taken to The House in the Woods. There, he was greeted by ‘a pleasant hunchback in civilian clothes, an expert in secret inks and codes’, who was ‘the only inhabitant of the house at that hour’. The only civilian other than Philby known to be at Beaulieu at this period was the elusive Professor Patterson, seconded from the Secret Intelligence Service.

  In November, 1941, Hardy Amies was posted back to London into the Belgian Section of SOE. He eventually did the parachute course at Ringway and at the end of 1943 he became the head of the Belgium Section.

  Within one year of the School’s inception no fewer than eleven of the original staff had moved on and had been replaced by other instructors and ‘housemasters’. Of the original instructors only five, John Wedgwood, Peter Folliss, Marryat Dobie, Bobby Angelo and Ralph Vibert, remained at Beaulieu for more than two years. Of these, Marryat Dobie was by far the oldest, indeed he was the oldest of all the instructors. He was fifty-three years of age and was a veteran of the First World War in which he had served in the original Intelligence Corps. Between the wars he was a prominent librarian and scholar and had been the Keeper of Manuscripts in the National Library of Edinburgh.

  One of the original team was Henry Threlfall, an imperturbable individual who was particularly adept at getting senior staff officers to meet the needs of SOE. He came to Beaulieu after operational experience in Sweden where he had been working with the German Section. He left Beaulieu during 1942 and was posted into the operations section of the Polish Section and moved with them to their advanced headquarters at Monopoli near Bari in Italy in the autumn of 1942. It was from here in the summer of 1944 that the Poles sent their agents, many of them trained at Beaulieu, to support the Warsaw uprising. He became the head of Force 139, which was conducting operations with the Polish and Czech Sections. After the war he became the head of the Siemens organization in London.

  Of the original ‘housemasters’ there were two who appear to have remained at Beaulieu for the entire period of the School’s existence, ‘Nobby’ Clark and Captain R. Carr. Carr was for a long period the adjutant of The Drokes (STS 34).

/>   Chapter VII

  THE STUDENTS

  The popular idea of a spy is somebody similar to Kim Philby, a civilian who may or may not be a native of the country in which he resides, posing as a respectable citizen while collecting and transmitting classified information to a foreign power. This classic notion is in fact far more descriptive of the type of people operated by our Secret Intelligence Service than the men and women who worked for SOE, whose primary purpose was subversion and disruption. Inevitably, in order to do this SOE needed a great deal of information for targeting and sabotaging installations and key industrial plants working for the Germans in the occupied countries. Some of this came from their own resources but much of it came from other Intelligence sources including air reconnaissance and the Secret Intelligence Service. Nevertheless, the Country Sections needed huge amounts of information about local regulations, documentation and living conditions in the occupied countries in order to operate at all. In practice, therefore, the SOE agents were compelled to collect intelligence for operational reasons, but it was not their primary function.