Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

by Giles Milton

  The names on the list meant little to Gubbins and so he asked Joan Bright for help, since she knew this world far better than him. ‘I was sent over to the War Office to make a preliminary sorting,’ she later recalled, ‘and then to pick out those whose qualifications seemed most suited to training in irregular warfare.’16 There were some first-class candidates on Beaumont-Nesbitt’s list. Peter Fleming (Eton and Oxford), Douglas Dodds-Parker (Winchester and Oxford) and Geoffrey Household (Clifton College and Oxford) were three of the six that Joan selected for her initial shortlist. They were soon followed by many more. All shared one thing in common: they had been given an education that, while expensive, had toughened them up and made them immune to hardship.

  Once Joan had made her pick, she handed the list to Gubbins. He then embarked on a tour of London’s various gentlemen’s clubs, having learned that many of these men were members of either Boodle’s, Brooks’s or White’s. One of his earliest potential recruits was Peter Wilkinson (Rugby and Cambridge), a young gentleman officer who had only recently joined the Royal Fusiliers. Wilkinson was lunching in the Army and Navy Club one day in the late spring of 1939 when he found himself engaged in conversation by an immaculately dressed, middle-aged stranger with a clipped moustache and a Scottish brogue.

  Wilkinson found Gubbins most diverting company. The two of them chatted for a while about the Nazi occupation of the Sudetenland and then Gubbins spoke of his desire to learn German. Wilkinson recommended a newly published primer, The Basis and Essentials of German, which he had used to obtain proficiency in the language. Gubbins thanked him, drained his coffee and went on his way.

  Wilkinson thought nothing more about the encounter until two days later, when he received an invitation to lunch at a private address in a mews off Marylebone Road. It came from the same Gubbins fellow and it piqued his curiosity. The invitation led him to the back entrance of a vast Regency mansion that faced on to Regent’s Park.

  Matters only got stranger when he was invited inside by a servant and led up the back stairs. He found himself ‘faced with what looked like, and proved to be, Epstein’s head of Paul Robeson’. Hanging above it was ‘a magnificent explosion de couleur which on closer examination, proved to be a painting by Kokoschka’. Only later would he discover that the mansion belonged to the wealthy, art-collecting family of Edward Beddington Behrens.

  There was no time to admire the art. Wilkinson was led into a vast drawing room where he found Gubbins chatting with two men, a subaltern in the Hussars and a captain in the Inniskilling Dragoon Guards, neither of whom he recognized. He still had no idea as to why he had been invited and Gubbins did nothing to enlighten him. The four of them ate a delicious cold luncheon washed down with Chevalier Montrachet, and then finished the meal with wild strawberries. It was not until the coffee arrived, and cognac was being sluiced into crystal balloons, that Gubbins finally explained why the three men had been invited. He told them that if war broke out, as seemed likely, ‘large areas of Europe would be overrun by the Germans and that, in that event, there would be scope for guerrilla activity behind German lines’.

  He confessed that ‘he was a member of the secret branch of the War Office’ and that he was looking to build an elite team ‘for training in guerrilla warfare’. They would not have to plan their missions: that would be done by Gubbins and his inner circle. Nor would they have to concern themselves with weaponry. Such things would be dealt with by Millis Jefferis. Their training, too, would be undertaken by a special instructor who would teach them the dark arts of guerrilla warfare. Their task was to be at the sharp end: they were to be dropped behind enemy lines.

  Peter Wilkinson listened to what Gubbins had to say, drained his cognac and signed up immediately, though not because he had any particular desire to be a guerrilla. ‘It seemed to me that any job which involved cold luncheons washed down with Chevalier Montrachet and finishing up with fraises des bois merited careful consideration.’17

  The other two men were also seduced by the lunch. They allowed themselves to be whisked back to the offices in Caxton Street in order to meet the fledgling team that was slowly being assembled. It marked the beginning of a whole new life, one that promised excitement, comradeship and danger. And it was to begin right away.

  * * *

  Joan Bright never ceased to be amazed by Colin Gubbins’s energy and enthusiasm. He was driven by his work and would often remain in the office until long after midnight. But the day’s work was merely the prelude to long hours of after-dark partying, for there was one rule to which Gubbins always adhered: if you worked hard, then you had earned the right to play hard. He put one of his staff, H.B. ‘Perks’ Perkins, in charge of after-hours entertainment. It was a job that Perks took very seriously.

  One Caxton Street newcomer was surprised at how Gubbins ‘would come and totally let his hair down’.18 ‘Great party-goer, great womanizer,’ recalled another.19 He would party long and hard, consuming impressive quantities of alcohol before ‘going to bed at three or four in the morning’.20 Then, somewhat sore of head, it was back to the office again at the crack of dawn.

  Joan couldn’t help but wonder if poor Mrs Gubbins had ever seen her husband at play. She doubted it, especially after being introduced to the shy, introverted Nonie. ‘She was above all a home-maker,’ she wrote, adding that homemaking ‘was a quality which was stretched to its limit when she met Colin’.21

  International tensions were on the rise throughout the long summer of 1939, leading to a frenzy of activity in Caxton Street. Gubbins made two hastily arranged trips to Warsaw, in order to build contacts with Polish intelligence. There were strong fears that Poland would be Hitler’s first target if and when war broke out.

  While Gubbins was away, Joan did her best to make space for all the new recruits. She found it a giddying experience to be surrounded by so many well-groomed young men. ‘Our offices near St James’s Underground became crammed with men and ideas.’ She helped to set up basic courses in guerrilla warfare, with informal lectures by Joe Holland on subversion, wireless communication and local resistance. The venue for these talks was Caxton Hall, a building that was no stranger to subversion, having once been used by the suffragette movement for its ‘Women’s Parliament’. Joan had good reason for choosing it, aware that ‘the constant comings and goings gave good cover to the small and highly secret groups of young men in plain clothes.’22 She kept an eye on the new recruits as they were put through their classes and felt certain that, given time, they would prove a highly effective force.

  But time was not on their side. On Saturday, 19 August, Gubbins received alarming news from the War Office. British intelligence had been tipped off about Hitler’s intention to invade Poland before the end of the month. Three days later, the entire world was stunned to learn that Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov had signed a German–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. The fate of Poland now seemed sealed. It was surely only a matter of time before Hitler would send his troops over the frontier.

  Gubbins knew that he had to act – and fast. He needed to get his ‘left wing’ into Poland in order that they might help to organize resistance to any invading German Army. He also wanted to renew the links he had made with senior Polish intelligence officials. It was unfortunate that his fledgling guerrillas had only undergone the most rudimentary training and had precious little idea about how to fight an underground war, let alone coach others in such warfare. But another trip to Poland would, at the very least, give them a better sense of the Polish will to resist.

  Speed was essential. Gubbins had just three days to assemble his team and head for Warsaw. The men were to travel incognito and in the greatest possible secrecy. It was imperative that the Germans knew nothing of what was taking place.

  Among those chosen to join the mission was Peter Wilkinson, who realized that his days of quaffing chilled Chevalier Montrachet were probably at an end. Not entirely sure as to what he should pack for guerrilla warfare against the N
azis, he sought the counsel of his ageing stepfather, a veteran of the First World War.

  The old man had ready advice. Hunting wire-cutters and a liquid prismatic compass, those were the two essentials. He told Peter to take himself off to the Army and Navy Stores on Victoria Street and buy the best he could get. Peter did as instructed, somewhat puzzled as to how a liquid prismatic compass would help him defeat the Nazis.

  The day for departure came soon enough. Joan made her way to Victoria Station to wave them off. ‘Twenty men in civilian clothes, their passports identifying them as insurance agents, commercial travellers, entertainers, agricultural experts.’ She was swept up by the excitement of it all: ‘A deadly secret cell in a big body of naval ratings, soldiers and airmen.’

  Yet as she handed the men their passports, she was shocked to learn that Caxton Street had made its first fundamental blunder. ‘It was a sign of our immaturity in such matters that the numbers on the brand-new passports were consecutive.’23 It was as if a school group were heading to the battlefront. In wartime, such a slip could cost them their lives.

  If the mission began as farce, it rapidly turned into comedy. Peter Wilkinson had been warned of the importance of travelling inconspicuously. He was therefore a little dismayed when he met his fellow guerrillas at Victoria Station. Far from looking inconspicuous, they could have been heading to a fancy dress party.

  Gubbins himself was wearing a bright green pork pie hat and clutching a diplomatic bag; Hugh Curteis was in tartan trews; ‘Boy’ Lloyd-Jones had chosen to disguise himself in a grey pin-stripe suit and seedy bowler hat. Wilkinson took one glance at him and decided that ‘he looked like an absconding banker’.24 Another member of the party, Tommy Davis, had made the effort to come in civilian clothes, but somewhat spoiled the effect by wearing a Brigade of Guards tie.

  It was too late to change clothes: the train was ready to depart for Dover. As Joan wished them good luck, she happened to glance at the sky and noticed the first barrage balloons being installed, ‘mute white forerunners of London’s ordeal by raid’.25 She felt suddenly depressed. Although she had spent the last four months helping to prepare for war, only now did the reality strike home. The barrage balloons reminded her of her frightening childhood during the First World War.

  Gubbins and his team took an extraordinarily circuitous route to Poland so as not to arouse German suspicions. They travelled by train to Marseille, by boat to Alexandria and then by plane to Warsaw. By the time they arrived in Poland, it was all too late. German troops had stormed across the Polish frontier on the first day of September and the first bombs were already raining down on the suburbs of Warsaw.

  Gubbins managed to renew contact with the brilliant Polish intelligence agent Stanislav Gano, head of Poland’s Deuxième Bureau. He also snatched meetings with members of the fledgling Polish resistance. ‘This tragic fortnight has been an unceasing rush, tearing round night and day in fast cars over primitive roads, trying to find out what is happening and why; rushing back to send wires to London and then dashing off to some new area of activity.’26

  There was no time for guerrilla warfare: as the Germans pushed deeper into Poland, Gubbins realized that the game was up. He told his team to scatter and flee from the country in whatever way they could. Gubbins himself headed southwards in the company of Peter Wilkinson, who was somewhat disappointed by his first guerrilla mission. He had not even used his wire-cutters.

  The two of them made it safely to Bucharest, where they got royally drunk at the infamous Colorado Club and flirted with a dancing bar-girl-cum-spy called Mickey Mouse. Wilkinson recognized her from a nightclub that he had once frequented in Prague. When he reintroduced himself, she seemed delighted to meet him again and reminded him of his ‘nightly rendering of “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby”’.

  He and Gubbins finished their drinks and staggered off to the Nippon Club, where they got completely ‘bottled’. They ended the evening ‘with two very amusing girls and two bottles of fizz’ – and all for less than a pound. It was a strange sort of guerrilla warfare.

  Wilkinson kept a diary for his mother, who was longing to know if being a guerrilla was as romantic as it sounded. But he omitted the drinking, the womanizing and even the secret meetings with Polish intelligence officers. His mother was most disappointed and complained that his diary ‘might have been written by a curate accompanying a party of Victorian spinsters’.27 The truth was very different. Gubbins and Wilkinson had used their trip to create vital links with Polish intelligence.

  Gubbins returned to London in October and found he had acquired a new nickname. Everyone in the office was now calling him Gubbski, on account of the friendships he had forged. Joan quizzed him about his Polish jaunt – not just the most recent one, but his previous two trips as well – but Gubbins proved reluctant to give anything away.

  In the absence of hard news, wild rumours began to circulate throughout the office. There were stories that Gubbins had led secret discussions between Polish and British agents; that there had been a clandestine meeting in Poland’s Pyry Forest; and most bizarre of all, that a heavily disguised British man (with the moniker of Professor Sandwich) had brought together a team of British and Polish cryptanalysts.

  Joan would never get to the bottom of Gubbins’s work in Poland; it was just one more mystery in an office whose raison d’être was subterfuge and deception. But others who scratched at the surface of the story began to suspect that the curious Professor Sandwich – facilitator of everything – had been Gubbins in disguise.

  There are few certainties about Gubbins’s three trips to Poland and the Professor Sandwich files – if they still exist – remain behind lock and key to this day. But one thing is clear: the rumoured meeting in Pyry Forest did indeed take place, and it ended with a British agent named Wilfred ‘Biffy’ Dunderdale being handed a bulky leather holdall. He was instructed to deliver it to London as a matter of urgency.

  When Biffy peered inside the bag, he found that it contained a strange-looking machine built of rotors, cogs and an illuminated keyboard. Resembling some sort of futuristic typewriter, it was so valuable that the head of MI6, Stewart Menzies, turned up in person at Victoria Station to collect it.

  Menzies had been making his way to a formal dinner when he was brought news of the machine’s imminent arrival. He caused something of a stir on the station concourse by pitching up in full dress uniform, ‘with the rosette of the Legion d’honneur in his button hole’.28

  It was a suitably flamboyant welcome for a parcel that was to prove of supreme value to the British war effort. For the machine – filched from the Nazis and transferred to Britain with the aid of Gubbins’s Polish contacts – was called Enigma.

  Its destination was Bletchley Park.

  3

  Making Bangs for Churchill

  COLIN GUBBINS HAD been right to stress to his staff the urgency of the work being undertaken by Caxton Street. At 11.15 a.m. on 3 September 1939, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain informed the nation that Britain’s ultimatum to Germany had met with no response. Hitler had refused to withdraw his troops from Poland, which meant that Britain was now at war. Later that day, King George VI made an emotional radio broadcast from Buckingham Palace. ‘There may be dark days ahead,’ he said, ‘and war can no longer be confined to the battlefield. But we can only do the right as we see the right, and reverently commit our cause to God.’1

  Everyone had their own reaction to the declaration of war. In Tavistock Road, Bedford, Cecil Clarke stood to attention in his living room as the National Anthem played on the wireless. His eldest son, John, was excited to hear the first air-raid siren of the war, set off (he presumed), ‘in case German planes came over’.2 He was disappointed when it proved to be a false alarm.

  Sixty miles away in London, Joan Bright spent the afternoon answering the office telephone in a whisper, because everyone kept telling her that ‘the enemy had ears’. Later that evening she almost became the firs
t British casualty of the Second World War. She foolishly accepted a lift through the blackout with an Irish brigadier who was determined to display his machismo behind the wheel, driving his Rolls-Royce at reckless speed. As they hurtled down Tottenham Court Road in pitch darkness, the car slammed ‘fair and square into a pedestrian island’ and Joan was jolted violently forward.3 She was lucky to escape with a cut lip.

  The declaration of war had an immediate effect on life in Caxton Street. ‘The work did not double,’ wrote one of those in the office, ‘it was at once multiplied by about four.’4 Colin Gubbins suddenly found his team taken seriously by the few Whitehall officials who knew of its existence. On the same day that Chamberlain made his historic address to the nation, Gubbins was asked to move from Caxton Street to the War Office, so as to be closer to the heart of strategic decision-making. It was the first sign that ungentlemanly warfare might yet serve a purpose.

  No removal men could be spared to shift the furniture, so Joan Bright had to arrange everything herself. She asked her close friend Lesley Wauchope to help with the move, packing up books, paperwork and the office desks. As the two of them ‘staggered up Whitehall carrying files and typewriters’, they were disappointed to see the men following behind them empty-handed. Joan amused herself with the thought that she was ‘the vanguard of a revolution’,5 one that would be spearheaded by strong-willed women like herself. Working for MI(R) in the fraught summer of 1939, anything seemed possible.