by Giles Milton
As the dreadful year of 1940 drew to a close, Gubbins encouraged everyone to attend what was to become his annual New Year’s Eve party. It was an all-ranks dance for both sexes – a time to party, drink too much and snatch a moment of romance.
Gubbins wore his kilt ‘and led the Scottish dancing until the small hours of the morning’. The frisky young Annabels and Georginas were presided over by the imperious Mrs Phyllis Bingham, who behaved like a Victorian chaperone-cum-governess. Under her chill gaze, the girls remained on their best behaviour. ‘It was,’ said Joan Bright, ‘as decorous as an end of term party at a girls’ school.’ But Joan also knew that end-of-term parties do not necessarily come to an end when the headmistress retires to bed.
Gubbins enjoyed himself to the full, leading the party-goers through late-night jigs and Highland reels, caring little for the conventions that ‘senior officers were not expected to enjoy all-rank dances’. He was ‘an exception’, said Joan, adding that ‘in staff relations, as in much else, he was ahead of his time.’42
Gubbins had started his new job with very little: two gloomy rooms and a handful of staff. Within weeks he had hired so many people that he ‘annexed another flat’.43 Within months, he had moved his team into Norgeby House on Baker Street, a grand modern office block. ‘Every time we visited the place,’ said one, ‘partitions seemed to be going up or coming down.’44
A makeshift Operations Room was established on the first floor, ‘absolutely sealed off from everybody’. As the first major missions entered the final planning stage, the tight security was made tighter still. Even Margaret found that she was ‘only ever told what you needed to know’. She was under strict instructions not to chatter with her female friends, an instruction she took with a weak smile. ‘It was unthinkable to visit people in offices. There wasn’t time.’45
Gubbins knew that he needed to strike – and strike soon – if he was to stifle the criticism being levelled at him by many in Whitehall. ‘Constant pressure was put upon us to show results,’ said one of those working alongside him.46 But Gubbins also felt that events were at long last being propelled forward. As he cast his eye over his staff, he saw ‘tremendous enthusiasm, everyone working day and night, feeling that here was a start to enable us to get back at the enemy again quickly and show that the Allies could still hit back’.47
Now, all he needed to do was attack. And for the particular mission he had in mind, he needed the help of Cecil Clarke.
7
The First Big Bang
CECIL CLARKE HAD been putting the finishing touches to his monstrous hydraulic digger when Hitler’s army swept through France and the Low Countries. The Nazi victory meant that there was no longer any need for such a machine, at least not for the foreseeable future, as the Siegfried Line had become an irrelevance. But there was most definitely a need for Clarke himself. He was immediately poached by the Intelligence Corps and sent to work at Aston House, a Hertfordshire research station.
Cecil always managed to cause a stir and his arrival at Aston was no exception. The station’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Langley, was a stickler for security and had surrounded the place with barbed wire, sentry boxes and armed guards. All visitors had to report to the gatehouse, where they were interrogated and frisked for weapons. ‘It really was most impressive,’ said Stuart Macrae after visiting the establishment.
Most visitors accepted the security as a necessity. Clarke saw it as a challenge. He ‘contrived to avoid all security measures’, inching his substantial frame through the coils of barbed wire, dodging the guards and then pushing through the phalanxes of rhododendrons. In just a few minutes, he was knocking on Lieutenant Colonel Langley’s door.
Langley was incandescent at such a breach of security and immediately blamed Macrae, ‘deploring this conduct on the part of an officer for whom I was responsible’. Macrae pointed out that Clarke alone was responsible for his conduct, leading to yet more fuming on the part of Langley. He said that while he was unable to evict Clarke from the property, ‘in no circumstance would he be allowed inside the house and he could not be served meals.’1 It was a punishment more appropriate to a boarding school than a government research station.
Clarke cut a strange figure at Aston: jovial to the staff, yet solitary and absorbed. His idiosyncratic habits rarely passed without comment. He was constantly muttering ‘what-what-what’2 and spent his rare moments of leisure writing doggerel verse. The rag that he clutched, oil-smeared and in tatters, was used for everything from cleaning spark plugs to blowing his nose.
He had left Mrs Clarke in the driving seat at LoLode, where the luxury caravans, parked out front in Tavistock Street, seemed like symbols of a happier era. Now, LoLode’s small roster of staff was preoccupied with producing limpet mines and army trailers. Clarke occasionally cycled home for an evening with the family, but it was a tiring and costly journey. He jokingly told Dorothy that he cycled eight miles to the pint, which meant that the round trip involved at least four stops in local pubs. By the time he arrived back at Aston, he was decidedly merry.
The purchasing officer at Aston, Cecily Hales, had got used to buying all manner of strange supplies for the researchers working at Aston, including ‘molybdenum, stainless steel, mild steel and piano wire’. Yet Clarke himself required even stranger materials. One day she peeked into his drawer and found it contained ‘masses of condoms’, probably on account of a new limpet mine he was developing. She began to suspect that he was obsessed with contraception, a suspicion confirmed when Max Hill, the head of supplies, confessed that Clarke had asked him to go to ‘the condom manufacturers, Durex’, and purchase ‘various sizes and thicknesses’. Cecily felt sorry that Mr Hill had had to undertake such an embarrassing task. ‘They must have imagined that he was a dirty old man.’3
Clarke found time to write a practical guide to sabotage during those autumn months at Aston. His Blue Book offered advice on everything from disguise to explosives and bore many of his literary hallmarks: explosives were ‘sweets’ and detonators were ‘toys’. But as always with Clarke, the clownish tone was a veneer. The advice he offered was rooted in a deep understanding of sabotage. ‘A job is a good one,’ he said, ‘if it looks like an accident, act of God or has no explanation.’4 Leaving no traces allowed the saboteur to flee from the scene undetected, as well as reducing the chance of reprisals.
Colin Gubbins had been keeping a keen eye on Clarke’s work and was most impressed by what he saw. His approach was so strikingly original that it seemed the perfect counterfoil to the Nazis. Gubbins was intent on poaching him from the Intelligence Corps and approached him shortly before Christmas 1940 with the offer of a new job. He was to be promoted to acting major, given the codename D/DP and made the commanding officer of Brickendonbury Manor, a country mansion that Gubbins was intending to transform into his principal training centre for all would-be saboteurs. It was to be modelled on Coleshill House, only he wanted it to be far more professional. Clarke was to be responsible for teaching new recruits the fine art of sabotage.
He signed up immediately, an acceptance that came as no surprise to Stuart Macrae. ‘It was just Nobby’s cup of tea,’ he said, ‘and enabled him to become a bigger menace than ever.’5 It also lifted him into Gubbins’s elite inner circle, one whose single-minded pursuit was ungentlemanly warfare.
* * *
Brickendonbury Manor was a Jacobean mansion of imposing grandeur, one that had been extended and enlarged by so many generations that its echoing chambers had become a burden rather than a pleasure. Its most recent owners had been the Pearson dynasty, whose titular head, Sir Edward, had rebuilt the south front, added yet more rooms and contrived a Jacobean-style banqueting hall. But Sir Edward had died more than a decade earlier and his widow, Lady Susannah, found the place too large for comfort. In the summer of 1939 she sold the estate to a wealthy businessman named Ernest Gocher, who had just taken possession of the keys when he was informed that it had been requisitioned
by the government.
For the first few months of the war, Brickendonbury had been used by Lawrence Grand’s Section D. When Grand’s section was disbanded, the future of the house looked uncertain. Gubbins was aware of this and visited the place soon after his appointment to Baker Street. According to Kim Philby, who was living there at the time, he arrived ‘with a posse of fresh-faced officers, who barked at each other and at us’.6 Gubbins liked what he saw and had Brickendonbury Manor swiftly transferred into his fiefdom, renaming it Station 17.
In common with the Firs, it was to become one of the country’s most secret addresses, a house that even its owner, Mr Gocher, would not be able to enter until the war was over. In the intervening time, neither he – nor any of the local villagers – was to have any idea what was taking place behind its dense screen of foliage.
Within days of taking control of Brickendonbury, Gubbins handed Cecil Clarke the keys to his new domain. He immediately stamped his idiosyncratic personality on the establishment. No sooner had his first sabotage students arrived from London than they realized that theirs was to be a training unlike any other. One of them, Peter Kemp, couldn’t work out if Clarke was mad or brilliant or both. ‘He had a disquieting habit, during lectures, of exhibiting to us one of his pets [he means an explosive device] with a large charge attached, placing it on the desk in front of him, cocking it, and announcing: “This will go off in five minutes.”’
He would then proceed with his lecture, unconcerned by the ticking bomb, while his students nervously counted the minutes. ‘During the last half of the last minute the sound of his voice was almost drowned by the shuffling and scraping of chairs, especially from the front rows. When only five seconds remained, and every head in the class was down, he would suddenly remember, pick up the infernal machine, look at it for a moment, thoughtfully, and toss it nonchalantly through the window to explode on the lawn with barely a second to spare.’7
Kim Philby described Clarke as having a ‘rumbustious sense of humour’.8 This quickly became apparent to all who visited Brickendonbury. ‘He had no guards on the gates to his magnificent estate. One just drove in and then found the vehicle being battered by rounds fired from spigot mortars set off by trip wires.’ Happily for the occupants of the cars in question, these rounds were blanks. ‘Nobby [Clarke] would emerge smiling and point out that if they had been live rounds, the occupants of the vehicle would no longer be in this world.’ This was all very well, ‘but it was of little consolation to the driver, who had to explain how the bodywork of his vehicle had been badly bashed.’9
Clarke’s tree spigot was his latest invention, one specially designed for use by saboteurs. It was a clever adaptation of the mortar that Millis Jefferis had first demonstrated at Chequers. Clarke had equipped it with a special silencing rod that held gases, flames and smoke inside the tail of the bomb, making the point of firing almost impossible to locate. The Americans later bought large quantities of the weapon and produced an army training film to show how it worked. ‘The initial acceleration arms the special fuse, so that when the bomb hits its target, the impact drives the fuse firing pin into a detonating cap which ignites the booster charge.’10 Its three-pound explosive charge was powerful enough to destroy any vehicle.
There were times when Clarke used live mortars in his demonstrations, especially when he wanted to impress visiting dignitaries. He would have an old car ‘towed down the drive with a suitable length of rope, giving the driver some protection’. Then, without warning, one of his spigots would be fired by a tripwire. In a blinding flash of light, it would strike the vehicle side-on. ‘It was a nice avenue of trees down the approach to Brickendonbury and these were prettily heavily decorated with bits of old car as a result of these demonstrations of the spigot mortar.’11
In happier times, the flower gardens of Brickendonbury had been featured in horticultural magazines, with lavish photographs of the Dutch gardens, climbing roses and the spectacular weeping ash tree that overhung the moat. Now, the trees and flowering bushes served as targets for Clarke’s various mortars.
His favourite trick was to lead visitors to the chalk pitt, which he used for testing the most powerful explosives. Here, he would demonstrate ‘what could be accomplished with a fertile imagination, a range of devices and a bit of plastic’. He particularly excelled himself on the occasion of a visit from Hugh Dalton and a select group of Whitehall officials. ‘Various booby traps had been laid for them, with bangs going off and grenades rolling out at their feet, so that they arrived at their bomb-proof observation redoubt walking stiff-leggedly like cats on miry ground. The guests, who had had a day off in the country and had met the Jolly Roger boys, expressed themselves as highly impressed.’12
* * *
The head of Baker Street, Frank Nelson, may have been a workaholic, but those long hours in the office had not translated into action. Bickham Sweet-Escott had regular mid-week meetings with all the county section heads and then drafted the seven-day progress reports. ‘The meetings were grim,’ he confessed, ‘and we always looked forward to Wednesdays with a sinking feeling.’ As the new year dawned, he was able to record a few acts of sabotage in the Balkans and several more in Norway. ‘But elsewhere the work was slow,’ he admitted, ‘and my reports were gloomy documents.’
The gloom had been lifted by the arrival of Gubbins, who injected life and purpose into the machinery of Baker Street. At last, there was a feeling that someone had switched on the power. Within days of Gubbins taking his place at Berkeley Court, the veteran saboteur Tom Masterman was smuggled into Belgrade in order to establish an underground network of saboteurs. Another agent, ‘a likeable and busy barrister’ named George Pollock, was dispatched to Cairo in order to build a team that could strike throughout the Middle East. Pollock delighted in underhand work – it was not so different from being a lawyer – and exceeded his brief by planning a series of spectacular assassinations of pro-Nazi Middle Eastern politicians. He was disappointed to learn that Whitehall refused to sanction them. ‘We had to infer that cold-blooded murder was not part of our code,’ wrote Sweet-Escott.13 Not yet, perhaps, but Gubbins was already eyeing the possibilities of assassinating leading Nazis.
Agents were dispatched to Gibraltar, Malta, Lisbon and even Cape Town. A large group of Balliol graduates were sent to join Pollock in Cairo. Gubbins even established a mission in French West Africa, under the auspices of a man named Louis Franck. He was recommended as ‘a good athlete and excellent linguist’.14 More importantly, he was a personal acquaintance of General de Gaulle. His orders were to keep an eye on Vichy collaborators.
Lastly there was the ‘brilliant and ruthless’ George Taylor, who was smuggled into the Balkans. He was said to have ‘a mind of limpid clarity’.15 He also had a job on his hands. His task was to arrange groups of saboteurs who could hide out in the mountains.
Gubbins had been working as hard as his agents, planning his first sabotage mission within weeks of joining Baker Street. Intelligence had revealed that German pilots of Kampfgeschwader 100, a bomber squadron in France, were driven to Vannes aerodrome each evening in two coaches. Gubbins’s idea was to parachute a small team of guerrillas into Brittany, ambush the coaches and shoot all the pilots inside.
The planned operation soon hit a snag. Charles Portal, Chief of the Air Staff, was vehemently opposed to such ungentlemanly conduct and refused the use of RAF planes. ‘I think that the dropping of men dressed in civilian clothes for the purpose of attempting to kill members of the opposing forces is not an operation with which the Royal Air Force should be associated.’ He said that there was a big ethical difference between smuggling a spy into a country ‘and this entirely new scheme for dropping what one can only call assassins’.
Gubbins pressed ahead regardless and managed to parachute a small group of French saboteurs into France. But the mission came too late: the German pilots were no longer travelling to the aerodrome by coach and Operation Savanna, as it was known, had to be aband
oned. But it had not been entirely in vain: the returning saboteurs brought back to England ‘a mass of intelligence about living conditions – curfew rules, bicycle regulations, cigarette prices, identity papers, ration cards’.16 Such details were to prove of vital importance in the months ahead.
A larger and more enticing target on Gubbins’s list of targets was the huge electrical transformer station at Pessac, close to Bordeaux. This stretch of coastline, along with the rest of the Atlantic littoral, fell inside the German occupied zone of France, for it was deemed too strategically valuable to entrust to the Vichy government. Pessac had been an early goal for the German invaders, whose commanders were quick to see the importance of the power station. Its eight transformers supplied power to the principal factories in the coastal area between St Nazaire and Bayonne. They also provided energy for the chemical manufacturers in the Bordeaux area, now in the hands of the Nazis. But for Gubbins, these factors were completely overshadowed by the fact that Pessac was supplying all the power for the massive German submarine base outside Bordeaux. If his men could knock out the transformer station, they would strike a crippling blow to German U-boat operations in the North Atlantic.
An air attack on Pessac was initially considered, but quickly ruled out on the grounds that aerial bombardment was highly inaccurate. If the pilot missed the target, his bombs stood a high chance of landing on a civilian area. The only other option was to parachute a small team of saboteurs into Pessac. They would have to find their way to the transformer station, scale the perimeter fence, dodge or kill the sentries and then force an entry into the main building. If they managed to get inside without being caught, they would need to locate the key components of the plant machinery and wire them with explosives.