Some lecturers attempt to avoid these hazards by writing out their lecture in full and reading it to their unfortunate students. Such a delivery does nothing to engender confidence in the lecturer’s mastery of his subject and compels the serious student to spend more time scribbling than listening, thereby destroying any intelligent understanding of what is being said.
Unhappily, the tradition of education, especially higher education, in this country places far too much reliance on chalk and talk to increase the teacher-student ratio and make it look more productive. The norm is stuffing students with knowledge, often to the total exclusion of practice, or if practice is allowed it is usually insufficiently monitored or too brief to produce real skill.
When the Finishing School opened the instructor staff fell into the trap of loading the syllabuses with too much chalk and talk and not nearly enough practice and they misjudged the reactions of many of their students who were quite unlike ordinary teenage students. They varied in age between twenty and middle age, came from all walks of life and were of numerous nationalities and very varied educational backgrounds. Some, like Nancy Fiocca, already possessed years of experience operating as secret agents in enemy occupied territories. Others had suffered defeat after bitter fighting in their native countries and had experienced hair-raising adventures and hardships in order to escape to Britain. They were not hotheads by nature, nor were they criminally inclined. But their commando training at Arisaig and other SOE schools, especially their training in unarmed combat, ‘silent killing’ and the use of close combat weapons had imbued them with supreme self-confidence. They had become doers rather than patient listeners and were not renowned for sheepish acceptance of cautionary admonitions. They were not likely to be impressed by that favourite vice of dons, the intellectualization of the trivial, nor were they likely to be overawed into acceptance of instruction by demonstrations of profundity.
It must, therefore, have been something of a shock to them to discover on their arrival at Beaulieu that they were going to have to spend much of the next two or three weeks sitting in classrooms, bending their minds to difficult subjects like codes and ciphers, the chemistry of secret inks, the complex organization of German counter-intelligence, counter-espionage agencies and military and civil police; and above all they were impelled to absorb the cautionary practices of security, a subject that would be critical for their survival in the field but which went directly counter to their commando training.
The trainees often arrived singly or in pairs by rail at Brockenhurst or Beaulieu Road stations where they would be met by a pick-up driven by one of the soldiers from the house in which they were to be billeted. Sometimes they arrived in small groups accompanied by their Conducting Officer, a male or female official from one of the Country Sections who often also acted as their mentor and, if necessary, their interpreter and who often participated in the course as a student.
On arrival at the School some of the students had already been given a ‘nom de guerre’ and a suitable new ‘identity’ and ‘cover story’ to go with it, (known to the Cold War generation as a legend) and they had to live with their new identities throughout the course. The Commandant probably knew their real names, but these were never disclosed to the instructors or to the ‘housemasters’ and it is said that their real names were also unknown to their fellow students. The Poles did not consider it necessary to provide all their students with a legend and neither was it necessary to provide one for the large number of students of many nationalities who were going to work with partisans or who were not going to be sent on operations behind enemy lines.
The assembling students would be greeted at their house by its ‘housemaster’ who might or might not have a fluent command of their language, and if not the Conducting Officer would translate for him. Once they had settled into their house they received an early visit from either the Commandant or the Chief Instructor who greeted them officially and gave them a fairly lengthy description of the course content and its aims.
Complaints about the sedentary nature of the course, its theoretical emphasis and lack of realism soon filtered back to the Country Sections and the training division of SOE’s headquarters in London and led some of the students who were already experienced operatives to condemn the courses as a waste of time.
A post-war report on the situation noted: ‘It was found that theoretical instruction was of little value unless it could be applied in practice . . . and, furthermore, it was unsatisfactory to impose an entirely sedentary life on students who had for the past two months been living an active physical existence.’ In another section of the report it mentioned that early in the School’s existence it was found that ‘training a man or woman to lead a clandestine life was more a question of inculcating a habit of mind than of teaching facts’. It concluded that except for students of outstanding abilities ‘it was virtually impossible to teach the students all that they needed to know and also change their thinking habits in a matter of three weeks.’ It does not mention the ambivalence and incompatibilities of the SOE agent’s roles, the clash between the need for secrecy and the objective of creating mayhem. It was left to the Beaulieu staff to undertake the impossible task of trying to weld the two aspects together into a coherent whole.
Many of the first Beaulieu instructors were well aware of the inadequacy and amateurism of their efforts and their failure to capture the interests of the students in some of the subjects. Hardy Amies stated that before he arrived at Beaulieu he had no knowledge of enemy organizations and had to mug it up rapidly and then teach it to the students. Philby was one of the first instructors to note the indifference of most of his pupils to his sessions on political warfare. In retrospect this subject does seem to have been out of place in a programme designed for spies, saboteurs and hell-raisers. Another instructor, ‘Nobby’ Clark, is said to have commented on the uselessness of teaching living off the land to people who were going to become urban guerrillas or would be spending their time in the arctic wastes of Scandinavia.
The instructors learned by experience and by trial and error to adjust the ratio of theory to practice. Some subjects such as recognition of enemy units, uniforms and badges and learning a code, then encoding and decoding it, were clearly best taught in the classroom, and some, like living off the land, were clearly of a practical nature. But in between there were many topics like learning to resist interrogation, contacting strangers, identifying contacts from descriptions and the criminal skills where the balance between theory and practice was difficult to achieve and where practice presented very real problems of supervision and control and a high risk of betraying the whole secret enterprise to the public. Burglary and housebreaking, making reconnaissances of premises and breaking into potential sabotage targets such as military establishments, docks and harbours, railway sidings and other vital installations to lay specimen explosive charges exposed the students to the vigilant public alerted by constant official exhortations to watch for enemy agents and careless talk. There was not only the risk of arrest, but a very real risk of being beaten up as suspected spies by off-duty servicemen or zealous civilian vigilantes. In addition, such practical sessions introduced serious problems of monitoring and supervision and made excessive demands on the limited number of tutors trying to cope with the lecture loads and the running of courses in the other houses of the School. As it was, the practical sessions in living off the land were exposing the students and instructors to the wrath of local landowners for trespassing, poaching and damage to crops, copses, thickets and woodland in the processes of acquiring material for making hides. And small-arms fire and minor explosions were not going unnoticed in the rural community.
Indoor exercises were easy to arrange but there was a temptation to indulge in role-playing, which is patently unrealistic unless performed by people with considerable acting skill. There was only one such on the staff and that was Peter Folliss. One of the exercises was approaching a stranger and making contact wi
thout arousing the suspicions of onlookers; another was picking out an individual at an identity parade from a written or verbal description. Others were an observation exercise and interrogating trainees to try and break their ‘cover’ and alibis, where the interrogator was a role-playing tutor.
Initially, practical outdoor and indoor exercises were of a very modest nature. Cuthbert Skilbeck described how the Beaulieu tutors introduced one on the first course for the first batch of women trainees who were housed in Boarmans in May, 1941. The five women on this course had been driven in the dead of night a short distance from Boarmans to Hilltop and the adjacent Beaulieu Heath, several square miles of bracken, gorse, hidden ponds and bogs and generous animal and insect life. The trainees were dropped separately dressed in jump suits and parachute harnesses. Hiding in the undergrowth, they had to wriggle out of their suits and harnesses, bury them without trace, get their bearings and then crawl away from the ‘dropping zone’ and warily find and make contact with their ‘reception committee’ representative. The bogs and ponds on the heath are dangerous and the women are said to have been petrified of the darkness, the desolation and the strange noises of the night life!
An early indoor exercise in observation and reporting comprised a member of the staff walking into a room for five minutes and after he had left the students were required to write a description of him. They usually made a complete mess of it until they had been taught a method of systematically assessing physical and behavioural characteristics according to a schedule.
Bearing in mind that several batches of students of different nationalities might be undergoing training simultaneously on different types of courses of different lengths, the problem of resourcing and timetabling the course for each house must, as already mentioned, have been a nightmare. Cuthbert Skilbeck said that he and Bill Brooker used to reserve Sunday mornings for this onerous task, using an enormous blackboard which covered one wall of their office in The Rings. They had to arrange their complex training schedules by trial and error. It was an extremely difficult task that sometimes spilt over into the afternoon. They had sixteen instructors, many of them specialists in particular subjects, nine student houses, six or seven different subject modules and about eight teaching periods during the day, as well as one or more at night, and they had to allow sufficient time for the tutors to move by road from one house to another varying in distance between two and ten miles. Shuffling all these variables without the aid of a computer to produce a workable timetable must have been a challenge to the sharpest of intellects.
One of the outcomes was that the specialists did not remain as specialists for very long and in order to meet the demands had to turn their hands to teaching some of the more general matters like German organizations and resistance to interrogation. Ralph Vibert, the original coding expert, also participated in field exercises and acted as an interrogator (he had been a barrister) in training the students to rehearse their cover stories and resist interrogation. Paul Dehn, the propaganda expert, is also known to have taught codes, ciphers and secret inks. As the practical exercises grew in length and complexity the ‘housemasters’, the other ranks who worked in the houses, the Field Security staff attached to the School and even the three secretaries were drawn into the training programme in a variety of instructional, observational and participant roles.
Because of the different types of work for which the students were being trained, the number of modules that they took, the extent to which the subjects were covered and the sequence in which they were taught varied greatly. In some cases, for example, those destined to work with partisan groups to train them in the use of weapons and explosives would not need to take the module on propaganda warfare.
The instructors at the Finishing School tried exceedingly hard to keep pace with operational developments in enemy-occupied territories. They regularly received updated information from a variety of other Intelligence sources and also from enemy broadcasts and publications. They spent many hours updating their information on conditions in Nazi-occupied Europe, in Italy, the Balkans, North Africa and the Middle East, and eventually information on the Far East and Japan. The Country Sections regularly sent them information and also sent experienced secret agents down to Beaulieu, on completion of their tours of operations, to pass on their experiences and inject realism into the tuition. Such was the complexity of keeping abreast of local conditions that it was not long before the officers teaching this subject and enemy organizations were forced to specialize in a single occupied country.
Paul Dehn is reputed to have been the first instructor to introduce the idea of the complex one, two and four-day schemes during which the students were sent all over the country to major cities and ports to practise their nefarious skills and learn to cope with being shadowed, genuinely arrested, imprisoned in a police cell and interrogated for real.
The dates on which the schemes were introduced is not known, but the shorter schemes lasting one or two days were usually conducted in the nearby towns, Southampton, Portsmouth and Bournemouth. The centres of Southampton and Portsmouth were destroyed by German bombing early in the war and so most of these exercises took place in Bournemouth which was relatively unscathed. It was in the centre of the town that the trainees practised shaking off somebody shadowing them and shadowing somebody themselves, making contact with an unknown person at a prearranged spot, exchanging identification and passing messages without appearing to do so. The trainees were told never to be late or too early for a contact. One male trainee, briefed to make contact with a woman outside the Post Office, arrived a little early and approached a woman who turned out to be an innocent bystander. He apologized and circled the block again and saw another woman waiting, as he thought, to contact him, but she too was the wrong person. He circled the block again and when he approached the third woman who was his assigned contact an elderly lady beat him over the head with her umbrella and threatened to call the police and have him arrested for molesting and trying to pick up three young ladies! There is no record of what his assailant thought when he succeeded on the third occasion!
The shadowing exercises usually led the trainees into one or other of the well-known Bournemouth departmental stores, Beales, Bealsons or Plummers. There are some very amusing stories about these exercises. On one occasion the trainee proved more expert than his shadow. The trainee was Jack Trott, a married army officer, who was eventually posted to Turkey as an agent. In the spring of 1944 he was being shadowed in Bournemouth by a much younger man, probably a Field Security corporal in civvies. Trott shot into Bealsons and headed for the lingerie department where he took his time examining a selection of ladies’ underwear while his highly embarrassed ‘tail’ hovered at the entrance until his bashfulness compelled him to retreat, allowing Trott to disappear out of another exit.
To this day the management of Beales is unaware that it took an important part in the training of many famous male and female SOE agents of many nationalities, including Odette Hallows, Violette Szabo, Andrée Borrel, Yvonne Rudellat and many others, many of whom were caught by the Gestapo.
The trainees were taught a variety of ways of shaking off a tail besides using premises like departmental stores and cinemas. They learned how to make use of reflections in shop windows to check if they were being tailed and to double back on their tracks, make last-minute boardings of public transport and taxis, alter their appearance in a doorway by donning a cap and spectacles and many other tricks.
The complex ninety-six hour schemes were introduced in the early part of 1942. The schemes involved sending groups of students to areas remote from the School to make a reconnaissance of a target area, such as a port or military establishment or railway network to determine the most vulnerable point for attack. The students were allocated individually to lodgings in widely spaced parts of the same town or in different towns, and were required to organize themselves clandestinely and carry out the orders of their group leader who had the responsibility of
allocating duties and planning the attack. Whether or not the team made an actual attack using dummy explosives is not recorded.
It was discovered that too much time was wasted by the trainees keeping in contact with each other and the only person really tested was the group leader who was compelled to shoulder too much responsibility. There were also very considerable problems of supervision. A new scheme was therefore evolved in which the students were sent out individually to contact and recruit an unknown individual and perform a limited reconnaissance task. This type of scheme took a lot of planning and organizing and involved the co-operation and intervention of MI 5 agents, civilian residents, Field Security personnel and the civil police. The trainees were kept under constant surveillance and when they were caught they were arrested, imprisoned and subjected to real interrogation. There are recorded instances in which those trainees who managed to achieve their objectives and escape from the area were sent back to be arrested and interrogated, since these experiences were regarded as essential parts of their training.
Organizing these schemes became a full-time job for several members of the Beaulieu instructor staff.
Considerable opposition to this new type of scheme was encountered from some of the Country Sections who argued that exposure to arrest and interrogation was lowering the confidences of their trainees at a time when they were in a highly strung condition. But SOE’s Training Division believed that it was better to discover the weaknesses of potential agents before they were sent on operations in the field where they would probably jeopardize the safety of the organization as well as the lives of their compatriots. On the whole the students reacted favourably to their ordeal and found it valuable when they were sent on real operations. This type of scheme was later adopted by the Secret Intelligence Service.
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