Daddy, We Hardly Knew You

by Germaine Greer

  Cambridge, September 1987

  Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté,

  Luxe, calme et volupté.

  CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, ‘L’INVITATION AU VOYAGE’

  For the wine circle after dinner at St John’s, the Master, Professor F.H. Hinsley, kindly invited me to sit on his left and grill him to my heart’s content. On his right sat the famous American endocrinologist, Professor Rosenberg, who had that day given his lecture on ‘Endocrinology and maternal behaviour’. The candlelight vied with the firelight to make the glasses sparkle, and the port, the malmsey and the burgundy glowed in their decanters. ‘The port is only twelve years old,’ said the Master. So I chose the burgundy, which was five years old, and the Master took it too. It was as smooth as cream. The fellows on my left were eagerly discussing hemlock, in particular its hollow stem with purple spots, and the curious fact that in America hemlock is a tree.

  The college servants brought in the coffee. Snuff and cigars were handed. The long gallery filled with the delicious aromas of empire. The Master filled his pipe from a silver pot and held a taper to a candle. When he had sucked the flames into the bowl and laid the taper by, he turned to me.

  ‘This young woman,’ he said, ‘has read my book.’ He seemed surprised, not because a woman had read British Intelligence in the Second World War: Its Influence on Strategy and Operations, but that anyone had ploughed through the three volumes.

  Professor Rosenberg expressed interest. ‘So you wrote the official history of British intelligence in the Second World War. Is there an American equivalent?’

  The question was more complex than it appeared, for the Americans made better use of British intelligence than the British did. The Master had avoided a mildly vexed problem by confining himself to the European theatre, so we sidestepped the question of Magic. It was plain that he loved his subject and was delighted to find anyone else who was interested in it. So I asked my first question.

  ‘What do the initials MECCS mean to you?’

  The Master was puzzled, ‘Middle East…?’

  ‘Codes and Cypher School?’

  Well he might look puzzled. None of the histories of intelligence including his mentions such a thing. And yet there it is on one version of Reg Greer’s service record as plain as a pikestaff, and there it isn’t on the résumé provided by the Australian defence department. Curious.

  I wrote to Fred Winterbotham, who ‘invented the Special Liaison Unit, recruited the men, trained them and distributed them to the various commands and visited them all from time to time to ensure absolute security’. He thought Reg Greer probably was part of an SLU or perhaps connected with MI6. The other intelligence bods I wrote to cautioned me against relying on Winterbotham, and thought that Reg Greer had nothing to do with Enigma. Winterbotham’s mention of MI6 flashed a warning that we were on the threshhold of Boys’ Own fantasy-land. Intelligence, more perhaps than any other branch of the services, relies upon the old school network, upon known backgrounds, family relationships, proven loyalty.

  Ralph Bennett, who was involved in Cairo Ultra from October 1942 to March 1943, replied to my letter: ‘if neither Harry Hinsley nor I have heard of MECCS (and I certainly have not) then I think it must have been either (1) a transient cover-name for something quite different—there were lots of cases like that, (2) a branch of Communications Bureau Middle East, or (3) a cover-name for part of SOE. The second is the more likely. CBME was the intercept station for Enigma and other enemy transmissions, and was located at Heliopolis.’

  If MECCS was a branch of CBME what did it do? What did Reg Greer do in it? Certainly I thought it no more likely that he had been involved in the Special Operations Executive than that he was part of MI6. He was more hush-hush than cloak-and-dagger.

  Sir Edgar Williams pointed out to me that the Special Liaison Units did only one job, that of conveying Ultra information to commanders in the field; there were many times more people involved in interception and retransmission of Enigma traffic, and in reception and decryption of Bletchley traffic, than in this one specialised part of the operation.

  The Right Honourable J. Enoch Powell chose an oddly imprecise form of words in order to dismiss my enquiry: ‘I am sorry to have to say that my duties in Middle East Command 1941–43 and in North Africa Command 1943 afford no means of giving you any information that would be of interest to you in your quest.’

  Sir David Hunt could remember only a few names from RAFHQWD of which my father’s was not one, but thought that my deduction that F/O Greer was part of the Malta SLU was ‘very sound’. The Middle East SLU had been set up by A.E. Dilkes; the Middle East was the first place that Ultra was exploited effectively. The Bletchley story had been told a dozen times, the Cairo story never. Winterbotham had blabbed, but not Dilkes.

  ‘You know,’ said the Master, ‘there is a history of the SLU, a book. I know because I’ve seen it, but I don’t know if it’s got to the PRO yet.’

  ‘So it’s still in the Office of the Cabinet.’

  ‘It may be,’ said the Master, with a grin. If the primal elder has anything to do with it, I thought, it will be lost on the way to the Public Records Office.

  ‘There are personnel files, in the Directorate of Signals. Your father should be mentioned there.’

  ‘What does the description Secret and Confidential Publications Officer mean to you?’ I asked him.

  ‘I think it means your chap was responsible for the security of British cyphers,’ he said.

  ‘What would these things that while published were also secret and confidential be? One-time pads?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ The Master was mildly bemused. This sort of nut-and-boltery was not what his book was about, but it was obvious that the Ultra operation had been designed as a whole down to the precise methodology of interception and distribution in the field. There was nothing to indicate that Reg Greer had ever been involved in Top Secret U, nothing but my tendency to aggrandising fantasy, that I had inherited from him and have tried all my life to inhibit and control.

  ‘Who would know?’ I asked. ‘Would Lewin know?’

  ‘Lewin is dead,’ said the Master. He could have added many more names to the list of those who died with their story untold.

  ‘What I hate to think is that Daddy beavered away in that underground dungeon for eight months, painfully decoding and encoding without any idea of the importance or the relevance of what he was doing. I don’t want to think that he was entrusted with only a meaningless fraction, just used as a secure conduit, unable to betray because he knew too little. I would hate to think the British used him that way.’

  ‘No, no,’ said the Master. ‘He would have known what Ultra was; even if he was not himself in an SLU he would have had access to the Malta SLU.’ He put his hand, sadly distorted by arthritis, on my wrist, knocking off the little pile of scented snuff that I was gradually working into my nostrils.

  ‘What was the oath you took when you entered the Ultra programme?’ I asked. ‘Can you remember the exact words?’

  ‘Something like I am engaged upon important secret operations for the government and I promise never to reveal their nature until released from this bond by my government.’

  (Well, I thought, they can’t have used that one with Reg Greer. It wasn’t his government. Maybe they said, ‘I am engaged on important secret operations for my king.’ A bit of pomp goes a long way in the circumstances. Maybe the king sent a personal note, ‘Reg Greer, we are relying on you. G.R.’ Certainly the indoctrination was effective; you would think the oath would have required something more than a handshake, but Ralph Bennett couldn’t remember taking any oath at all when he was recruited for Bletchley in 1941. ‘No one thought of betraying secrets in those days,’ he said.)

  ‘Weren’t you surprised,’ I asked, ‘when Winterbotham spilled the beans? He hadn’t been released from his oath, had he?’

  ‘No, he hadn’t,’ said the Master, ‘and yes, we were. We weren’t fo
rmally absolved from the duty of secrecy until 1976.’ Reg Greer had only seven years to live; the Australian papers made nothing of it. Perhaps he never knew that the secret was no longer secret.

  ‘Did it do any harm after all? We won’t use the system again, will we?’

  ‘No,’ said the Master with glee. ‘Nowadays we all have unbreakable cyphers. Computers, you see; each message we send can have its own completely arbitrary cypher. That’s why spies have become so important. If you can read the other fellow’s traffic you don’t need spies.’ He smiled hugely, as if Ultra had been a most satisfactory jape, the boffins’ finest hour.

  As I walked back through the cobbled courtyards, between old brick walls that glowed rose in the light reflected by the leaded panes of the pointed windows, I wondered what Reg Greer would have made of the sight of his daughter in her doctoral gown drinking deep of the burgundy in such distinguished company. I loved it; I loved the limed oak panelling, and the stylised stucco grape vines that rioted symmetrically above my head. I loved the scent of good coffee and fine tobacco and the bouquet of my burgundy so carefully decanted by the college servants. I liked the playfulness of perpetual students.

  ‘Have you heard this one?’ said a senior fellow. ‘God made an application to the Science and Engineering Grants Committee. It was refused on three grounds. The work was done too long ago; the literature has no apparatus; and the experiment has never been successfully repeated.’ We roared, but the senior fellow went on: ‘Then there was a wrinkle in reality; the Science and Engineering Grants Committee did not simply cease to exist, it had never existed at all.’ And he smiled so widely that his eyes closed up tight.

  I loved that way the junior fellows rose to refill our glasses and get closer to conversations they suspected of being interesting. I loved the way the fellows used Latin to explain things to visitors whose English was halting, and how simply they expressed their ignorance of fields that were not theirs. Better still I loved the way that the fellows warmed to the exposition of their specialities, if given a chance. From hemlock we went on to water hemlock. And how a Scots family died when they used monkshood instead of horseradish as sauce to their beef. And how effective leopard’s bane is, for never a leopard has been seen within miles of it.

  Daddy would not have liked any of it. He would have found it high-falutin’. He would have wanted a beer and a cork-tip rather than wine and cigars. I don’t know if he would have been proud of me for holding my own or even if he would have known whether I was holding my own or not. As far as I know he never read a word I wrote or saw or heard any programme I made.

  When I got my Ph.D. I sent him a telegram—or did I just plan to send it? You have a doctor in the family. When my brother was expected my father tried out names, ‘Dr Gideon Greer’, ‘Dr John Greer’. He never tried out ‘Dr Germaine Greer’. When I went home to Melbourne to tell my family that I had won a Commonwealth Scholarship and was on my way to Cambridge, my father called me to him and pressed something into my hand. ‘Don’t tell your mother,’ he said, making signs to be secret. I put whatever it was into my sleeve. When I was in the street walking to the train station, I pulled it out. It was a five-pound note.

  When I came up to Cambridge my fellow-students were showing their parents around their rooms, the lecture theatres, the Backs, posing for pictures in the family album. The families beamed with pride and pleasure, shouted and ran about, gathering images of their successful children against the background of Erasmus’ bridge and the Wren Library and the stone nougat of King’s College. Nobody photographed me, not then, not when I knelt resplendent in medieval red and black with my hands joined in prayer within those of the Vice Chancellor, Germaine Greer Philosophiae Doctoris Cantabrigiensis. I collected my degree by myself. There was no victory supper, no champagne. I had worked all my life for love, done my best to please everybody, kept on going till I reached the top, looked about and found I was all alone. My parents were too ignorant even to appreciate what I had achieved. I thanked my lucky stars it was English poetry I studied, so that I had the charms and incantations to lay upon the wound in my soul. If I had chosen to study dentistry or computer science, I might never have won through to happiness.

  Malta

  ‘Malta is not only a fortress, but the home of the Maltese.’

  LIEUTENANT-GENERAL SIR WILLIAM DOBBIE, JUNE 1942

  On the twenty-first of August, 1942, Pilot-Officer Greer, having successfully weathered his six months’ probation, got his promotion to the rank of Flying Officer. If he was, as I think, part of the ‘Y’ service, he could expect no further promotion. With the good news of the promotion came the bad news. He had been posted to Malta.

  Since the first raid by the Regia Aeronautica, seven hours after Italy entered the war on 11 June, 1940, Malta had been taking punishment. The island, no bigger than the Isle of Wight, had a population of a third of a million. The Maltese had been told to prepare for attack by gas, rather than bombing. Despite the daily Italian broadcasts that promised that the Regia Aeronautica would reduce Valletta to rubble in a day, no underground shelters had been prepared. The island had been left, moreover, without air defence of any kind. Four squadrons of Hurricanes had been promised, but did not arrive. The harbour lacked the most elementary protection against air attack, having not so much as a single smudge pot to provide a smokescreen.

  The Air Officer Commanding, F.H.M. Maynard, commandeered six Gloster Sea Gladiator bi-planes that had been left still crated on the wharf by HMS Glorious when she left hurriedly to join the Norwegian campaign, and took seven officers, none of whom had had combat experience, off desk duties to fly the three planes that were operational. This was the truth behind the legend of the defence of Malta by ‘Faith’, ‘Hope’ and ‘Charity’, as the three planes became known long after their serviceability was at an end.

  More significant than ‘Faith’, ‘Hope’ and ‘Charity’ in the defence of Malta were the anti-aircraft batteries, manned by the three Coastal Regiments, two Maltese and one British, but at the beginning of the Italian bombardment they had only thirty-four anti-aircraft guns and eight Bofors, besides an odd assortment of old guns salvaged from the dockyard. There were no fighters to provide cover for their exposed positions. In the very first raid five members of an anti-Parachute Squadron and a boy working as duty telephonist at the Harbour Fire Command Post were killed; by the end of the day eleven civilians were added to the number of the dead, all Maltese.

  At that stage British thinking held that if France fell Malta was indefensible. However, though they had no plans to defend the island, the British had drawn up no contingency plan for surrender. The island’s rulers, the Governor, and the naval and air commanders, were left to defy the enemy with the few men and totally inadequate equipment that they had. The Royal Navy decided Grand Harbour was too hot to hold them and moved out to Alexandria. If the Italians had invaded at any time in 1940 there would have been a short sharp massacre and Malta would have become an Italian island. Doubtless the Maltese would have learned to tolerate the Italians as they had tolerated most of the foreigners who had ruled the fortress. To this day Italian analysts do not know why Italian high command failed to prevent the garrisoning of Malta, why the island was then neutralised at maximum cost to the Regia Aeronautica, or why when Malta was quite incapable of mounting any resistance the island was not occupied, but allowed to re-garrison. The failure to take Malta cost the Axis Africa.

  The island was a rock fortress and could shelter its own, but it could not feed them. The Maltese population had increased exponentially under British rule, and as a result the island’s dependence on imported food and fuel and manufactured goods had also increased. The Italian bombardment eased off, and the Axis concentrated instead on starving the Maltese into hoisting the white flag. From June to September 1940, no supplies at all reached the island. From September 1940 to September 1941, convoys reached the island at intervals of not more than two months but between October 1941 and Octob
er 1942 the blockade of Malta was penetrated by only eleven merchant ships, of which two were sunk in the harbour before the bulk of their supplies could be unloaded.

  Not having been told to capitulate, the islanders dug in and resisted, with all their native toughness and stoicism. The British press reported with astonishment and gross insensitivity, ‘Malta can take it.’ It made no sense that an island sixty miles from Sicily was remaining British against all the odds, but the fifty or so influential Maltese who might have said so had been interned.

  In January 1941, Malta’s war took on a new and terrible complexion. A convoy mounted to relieve Malta and Greece, escorted by the new British aircraft carrier Illustrious, was attacked by the Luftwaffe from bases in Sicily. The carrier was hit six times; 126 members of her crew were killed and 91 injured. People on Malta heard the furious sea battle and watched in awe as the crippled vessel dragged herself into Grand Harbour. For four days all was quiet. On the 16th all hell broke loose, as Malta took the first of many raids by the Luftwaffe. For the first time the people heard the ear-shattering roar of the box barrage put up to protect the dockyard, and the screaming sirens of the dive-bombing Stukas. In January there were 57 alerts, in February 107, in March 105, a total of 963 alerts for the year.

  In January 1942, Fliegerkorps X in support of Rommel stepped up the aerial attack on Malta. In the first three weeks of January, there were 950 raiders sent against Malta, 150 sorties a week. In January there were 263 alerts, in February 236, in March 275. Bad weather often kept Malta’s fighters grounded; there was nothing for it but to take the merciless bombardment, hour after hour, day after day, week after week. Men worked day and night to repair vessels and aircraft only to emerge from their slit trenches after yet another raid to discover that they had been ‘spitchered’ again. There was no way of protecting aircraft on the exposed airfields until the army was called in to build stone pens to protect them from all but a direct hit and to repair the runways.