The Hero Maker

by Stephen Dando-Collins

  The immediate success of The Great Escape gave him the confidence to use his now-accustomed descriptive licence in the new book. Of Air Marshal Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, chief of Bomber Command, for example, he wrote: ‘Harris, it was freely acknowledged, could crush a seaside landlady with a look.’ And, as he had with The Great Escape, he leavened the story of death and destruction with amusing anecdotes, such as the tale of how, after the dams raid, Micky Martin was approached by Australian authorities seeking items for the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. Martin had written back: ‘I am very interested in your museum and am sending you, enclosed, the Moehne Dam.’ He had an Australian colleague on the squadron, Toby Foxlee, write underneath: ‘Opened by the censors and contents confiscated by the Metropolitan Water Board.’188

  It was no wonder, as Brickhill was to tell Brisbane journalist Roy Connolly, that once he was able to deliver the draft Dam Busters manuscript to John Pudney at Evans Brothers at the end of 1950, it ‘was eagerly seized by Evans’. The advance, he told Connolly, was handsomely into the five figures.189 John Nerney would convince Lord Tedder, Marshal of the Royal Air Force, to write a foreword, and even though the book read like a gripping novel, as this was an official unit history endorsed by the Air Ministry, Pudney commissioned an index.

  The first screen version of The Great Escape went to air in the US on 28 January 1951. Produced by Fred Coe, it was directed by Gordon Duff, who’d been directing anthology television drama since 1949. Brickhill was credited as author of the book, but no screenwriter was named. The screenplay had been the work of Coe and Duff, who failed to give themselves a writing credit because they weren’t members of the writers’ union.

  The Coe-Duff script called for sixteen speaking parts. American actor John C. Beecher played Roger Bushell. Another American, the older Horace Braham, played SBO Massey. Polish-born, fifty-four-year-old Kurt Katch, who’d made a career in American movies playing character roles of mostly sinister types, was cast as the German commandant. Among the supporting players were a young Rod Steiger, E. G. Marshall and Everett Sloane. To spice things up, Coe and Duff had also written in a part and a storyline deviation for a woman. The production, shot entirely in the studio, was broadcast live. It wasn’t recorded for posterity. Once aired, it was lost to the ether. As Brickhill learned, the drama’s tunnel set won praise from American critics for its realism. But he himself never saw it.

  Six months later, a year after doing the deal with Coe, Brickhill’s American agent would receive another approach for the screen rights to The Great Escape. This would come from a forty-one-year-old American who’d been directing B-grade movies, mostly westerns, for the past four years. John Sturges read The Great Escape when it appeared in abridged form in Reader’s Digest in the US in 1951. A member of the United States Army Air Force during the war, he found the story resonated with him, even though he himself hadn’t been a POW. Sturges became besotted with the book, and its cinematic possibilities. Told the rights weren’t available, and unaware of Coe’s option, he glumly went away. But that wouldn’t prove the end of the matter. Over the next decade, Sturges would prove a persistent suitor.

  David Higham had meantime negotiated a deal which allowed the BBC to put a Great Escape radio special to air in 1951. BBC Radio’s producer for the special, David Porter, had been a Stalag Luft 3 kriegie, and he convinced several other former camp inmates to participate in the special, which would air in May. The book’s author would at least hear this adaptation of his work, before, on 26 June, setting off for the south of France to find a rented villa. Brickhill’s plan was for Margot to join him there once she completed her psychiatric treatment. He himself was exhausted after knocking out three books in two years, and was looking forward to a rest.

  In a valley below St-Paul-de-Vence, a picture-postcard hill village in Provence between Cannes and Nice with Mediterranean views, Brickhill found his idyllic villa. The locale had been recommended by Eve Norton, who holidayed there, and had a literary connection – D. H. Lawrence had died at the former Roman town of Vence, six kilometres away. Today, St-Paul-de-Vence crawls with tourists, but then it was relatively quiet. The large villa sat on an acreage, had a pond and was blessedly private. With royalty cheques now flooding into Brickhill Publications Limited, Brickhill could comfortably afford to live here. Envisioning a life of writing in the sun free from cares while Margot brought out easel, canvas and paints, and brushing up the French he’d polished in Stalag Luft 3, Brickhill signed a long lease, hired a housekeeper and a maid, and sent for his wife. Moving in and setting his typewriter on a table outdoors, he began correcting The Dam Busters proofs.

  Even though Margot didn’t have a driver’s licence and they didn’t own a car, she insisted on driving to Provence. Taking a driving course and quickly gaining her licence, she purchased a gleaming new Alfa Romeo roadster, getting Brickhill to arrange payment from France. He paid for it through his company, but ground his teeth with annoyance when Margot registered the car, not in the company’s name, but in her own. With a friend who was an experienced driver beside her, Margot drove down to St-Paul-de-Vence. The problem was, the friend stayed, and every casual acquaintance in London that Margot had invited to come to visit did just that over the next few months. Brickhill’s dream of a peaceful idyll became a nightmare.

  ‘I need you to protect and insulate me from the world!’ he complained bitterly to Margot. ‘So that I can work.’190

  18.

  Bader, the Man with Tin Legs

  CONTENTEDLY, BRICKHILL SAT back and puffed a cigar. He’d just enjoyed a fine dinner in a posh London restaurant, at someone else’s expense. Across the table sat Douglas Bader (pronounced ‘Bahder’), and his wife, Thelma. Bader, a handsome, round-faced forty-one-year-old with a cheeky grin and a mischievous twinkle in his eye, was also sucking on a cigar. His demure wife looked the image of Princess Elizabeth, the future Queen Elizabeth II. All evening, the couple had been quizzing the Australian.

  ‘Look here, Brickhill,’ said Bader now, ‘we have a lot in common, you and I. We both flew Spitfires and Hurricanes in the war, and both bailed out, to spend years in German prison camps. We both use rude language, and dislike pompous officials. You might not make too abominable a mess of my story.’191

  It was October 1951. The Dam Busters had been published in September, and it had immediately become clear that Brickhill had another runaway bestseller on his hands. Among the first of millions who would read the book was Bader, a man who’d made a name for himself as a Battle of Britain fighter pilot with twenty kills, despite having lost his legs in a flying accident before the war. Bader and his wife had both been enthralled by The Dam Busters, with Bader later saying he’d been impressed by Brickhill’s gift for bringing people and events to life, for creating a sense of immediacy and actuality, despite having never known any of the men of 617 Squadron before embarking on the book.192

  Thelma would remember her husband slapping the cover of The Dam Busters after they’d finished reading it. ‘If anyone writes our story,’ he’d said to her, ‘it must be Paul Brickhill.’193

  So Bader had written a letter to Brickhill, proposing dinner in London to discuss a potential literary collaboration. After Brickhill received the letter at St-Paul-de-Vence, the invitation had intrigued him enough to agree to meet. Leaving Margot in Provence, he’d returned to England and come to dinner. On Belgrave Square in exclusive Belgravia, the airy Belfry restaurant was housed in a former Presbyterian church. Today, as Mosimann’s, it’s just as posh as it was back then. In May 1945, within days of being released from German imprisonment and returning to London, Bader had been taken to dinner here by Spitfire pilot chums including Johnnie Johnson and Adolph ‘Sailor’ Malan. It had been his regular haunt ever since, when he could afford it on his salary as a mid-level executive with Shell.

  Brickhill already knew a lot about Bader, a former RAF group captain, although he had never met him before. He’d written several hundred words about the
man in Escape to Danger, referring to his escape attempts when a POW. Some of his information had come from Wings Day, who had flown with Bader in the 1930s and shared prison camp with him in the 1940s. Like Brickhill, Bader had been an inmate of Stalag Luft 3, although he’d been transferred elsewhere by the time Brickhill arrived there, ending up at the Colditz Castle maximum security camp, Oflag IV-C.

  As Brickhill was aware, Bader’s reputation was mixed. Gordon Sinclair, a pilot who’d flown with him, would remark, ‘Bader was not everyone’s cup of tea.’194 In fact, Bader had an abrasive personality and a ‘take the piss’ sense of humour which rubbed many people the wrong way. Harry Broadhurst, who became an RAF Air Chief Marshal, would recall that, after he’d been wounded in the backside during the Battle of Britain, Bader had greeted him with a slap on the painful rear end, saying, ‘Hello, hello. Run away from the Hun again?’195

  When a prisoner of the Germans, Bader had made himself very unpopular with some fellow POWs. Said one of them, Victor Gammon: ‘His imperious manner, unreasoned and frequently unreasonable efforts at escape, without thought for the consequences for others, did not endear him to those who had spent a couple of years in careful planning, or even to those who believed that attempting escape was a game for idiots.’196 It hadn’t helped that the Luftwaffe had treated Bader as a VIP prisoner, providing him with a chair at Appell and allowing him to ride in vehicles with his guards while other POWs were made to walk.

  Leaving aside what he’d heard about Bader, Brickhill came to the Belfry dinner both flattered and fearful. Flattered by Bader’s approach, and fearful of tackling a full-on biography for the first time. He would also admit to being uncertain about how to act towards a man with no legs. Would Bader be sensitive about his prosthetics? ‘Did one refer to them casually, or not at all?’ Brickhill pondered.

  That question was answered by Bader as they sat down to dinner. ‘Just a minute while I fiddle these ruddy legs under the table.’

  As they chatted over the meal, Brickhill realised that Bader was no shrinking violet. There would be no gradual reveal of the man’s personality. ‘It hits you like a bolting steamroller,’ Brickhill would say three years later. ‘A glowing, dominating charm that can change to disconcerting brusqueness.’197

  If he were to take this book on, Brickhill told Bader as they puffed their Havanas, Bader must appreciate that he would be the Australian’s guinea pig as he experimented with the biographic form. Bader seemed unfazed. And Brickhill’s interest was piqued, especially when Bader offered to give him his flying logs, combat reports, press clippings, original photographs, more than 2000 letters, and other bits and pieces. Most interesting of all, Bader revealed that he had already attempted to write his story himself, bringing in another unnamed author to help. That author had taken their manuscript to the Rank Organisation, hoping to interest them in a feature film based on Bader’s story. When Rank rejected the idea, the previous author had walked away. Bader also offered to give Brickhill the 100,000-word manuscript that he and that unnamed writer had produced.

  Brickhill went away to think on it. No longer desperate for money, he had no pressing need to rush into a new book. The various incarnations of The Great Escape were by now lining his pockets, and Associated British Picture Corporation, which was forty per cent owned by Warner Brothers of Hollywood, was very interested in taking an option on the screen rights to The Dam Busters.

  There was just one hurdle to that film deal. While Associated British’s managing director Robert Clark was enamoured with the book, and with its huge sales and subsequent ready-made film audience, filming the book in its entirety, with its numerous raids and personnel, was just not feasible. To work, a Dam Busters film would need to be very focused. Before Clark committed to the picture he needed to be convinced that it could be successfully adapted to the screen.

  In a meeting with Clark in early October, Brickhill agreed to drop everything and write a film ‘treatment’ of fifty or sixty pages which spelled out his vision for how The Dam Busters could be realised on film. He would do it without payment, knowing that, if Clark liked what he saw, the producer would commit to a film. To help Brickhill with his first-ever film treatment, Clark teamed him up with Walter Mycroft, sixty-one-year-old Director of Productions with Associated British. Mycroft had a hunched back and was just five feet four inches tall, but he had a wealth of experience in every aspect of filmmaking.

  Basing himself in a Chelsea flat, and with Mycroft’s help, Brickhill dashed off a Dam Busters film treatment, a cinematic overview in which he deliberately concentrated on the dams raid, to the exclusion of later 617 Squadron operations. And, as he had in the book, he focused on Barnes Wallis and Guy Gibson. By October’s end, after delivering the treatment, he turned his full attention to the Bader proposal.

  As he read Douglas Bader’s manuscript, his logs, press clippings and letters, Brickhill became convinced there was drama aplenty here; another story of a man overcoming great odds. But Bader was also keen for Brickhill to make the book as much Thelma’s story as his own. ‘Make no mistake,’ he had said, ‘it was our story, not only mine. Without Thelma I could not have survived.’198

  The more that Brickhill delved into the couple’s life together, the more he agreed with Bader. Although Thelma had been working as a waitress at a country tearoom when Bader first met her, she came from a well-to-do family, was educated, refined, and very loving and loyal. She had married Bader despite the fact he was by then walking on tin legs following his ‘accident’. He’d actually lost his legs after showing off, doing a prohibited low-level stunt. Thelma had been his strong supporter ever since.

  Brickhill’s mother was a strong woman. He was attracted to strong women; to women generally. He wouldn’t have noticed that, when penning his feature articles from Germany and Hungary in 1945–46, he’d rarely named the men he mentioned. Always more interested in the women, he’d named them all. Even when talking about Frau Gades’ starving children in Berlin, he’d given the names of her daughters, Brigide and Lise, but not her sons. Now, Mrs Bader interested him. To Brickhill’s mind, the calm, cool and collected Thelma could make an interesting literary foil to the hell-raising Doug.

  David Higham, immediately seeing the potential of a Bader book, encouraged his author to do it. With the ongoing success of The Great Escape and The Dam Busters, Higham was confident a fat publishing deal could be brokered. One autumn evening, Brickhill went around to Bader’s Kensington flat, and they agreed to collaborate. Brickhill would write the book, and he offered to share the royalties fifty-fifty.

  More than the potential ego-enhancing glory, Bader was interested in the money that would come out of this arrangement. He and Thelma had never owned their own home, and he wanted his biography to buy them a London house. For his part, Brickhill stipulated that Bader must make himself available for repeated interview, for as long as Brickhill needed. He would only commence writing when he felt he had everything at his fingertips. Bader agreed. There was no written contract. Theirs was a gentleman’s agreement, sealed with a handshake.

  Higham was soon able to attract the interest of William ‘Billy’ Collins, the future Sir William, colourful chairman of venerable multinational publishing house William Collins and Sons. Billy Collins assured Higham his company could make Brickhill’s Bader book a worldwide publishing success, the equal of their last World War Two bestseller, Eric Williams’ The Wooden Horse.

  Another Collins author at this time, Winston Graham, best known for his Poldark novels, described Billy as ‘cheerful, jolly, enthusiastic’, as well as ‘very likable but slightly unknowable’. Collins loved sport, and was an ardent cricketer and tennis player well into old age.199 He had a very paternal and possessive attitude to his authors. Another writer, George Greenfield, would recall that, after one well-known Collins author died unexpectedly, the chairman exclaimed, ‘Dead? After all I’ve done for him!’200

  Brickhill agreed to sign with Collins. But, as he later told John
Pudney, he felt extremely guilty about deserting both him and Evans Brothers, who had been so influential in his success to date. In part compensation, Brickhill had Higham negotiate an agreement with Pudney that would see Brickhill putting together a new book for Evans Brothers while he was researching the Bader biography. It would be an escape anthology.

  Rejoining Margot at St-Paul-de-Vence after the productive six-week break in London, Brickhill began sending out Bader research letters and started work on the escape anthology. John Pudney would call this book Escape Or Die, and set down publication for the autumn of 1952.

  To gain access to the sort of stories needed for Escape Or Die, Brickhill approached Air Chief Marshal Sir Basil Embry, chairman of the Royal Air Force Escaping Society (RAFES), formed to organise escaper reunions, to help escapers’ widows, and to aid the families of Europeans who had given their lives to help RAF escapees and downed aircrew evade capture by the Germans. Brickhill offered the society fifty per cent of the book’s royalties, and also convinced RAFES to follow his lead and incorporate to minimise tax. ‘I am grateful to him,’ Embry would say.201

  Once Embry put Brickhill in contact with men who told him a raft of hair-raising stories of escape set in Europe and the Pacific, the author would churn out eight gripping true tales. Yet even though Brickhill was becoming a household name in Britain via The Great Escape and The Dam Busters, his self-confidence was only skin deep. Feeling the book needed the credibility a major literary name would lend, he suggested to Pudney that they seek a ‘name’ author with military writing credentials to write a preface, and Pudney put on his thinking cap.