Joseph Gray's Camouflage

by Mary Horlock

  To avoid repetition, the majority of quotes from Joseph’s letters to Mary are not noted. Unless stated otherwise, they form part of the Barclay family archive. Similarly, images reproduced form part of this archive, except where credited otherwise.

  1 The Embroideress, vol. 5, parts 33–40, a collection of articles published in an album by James Pearsall and Co. Ltd, 1931, p. 848

  2 Jane Waller (ed.), A Stitch in Time – Knitting and Crochet Patterns of the 20s, 30s & 40s, Gerald Duckworth and Co. Ltd, London, 1972, p. 10

  is for Hiding, so please keep it dark, And remember to go in the shade when you park

  All the time that he had been writing Camouflage and Air Defence Joe knew something was missing. Camouflage in the First World War meant hand-garnished nets and painted canvas, but neither could work in the long term or on a large scale. Nets had to be generously and carefully garnished with local vegetation, which swiftly wilted in bad weather. Painted canvas, when rolled up, became highly inflammable because the linseed oil (which was used as a primer) fermented.1 Aerial photography also showed that it could be reflective. Joe had spent enough time studying them to recognise the pitfalls.

  As the departments for camouflage expanded and diversified, the materials and ideas didn’t. Disruptive paint patterns and garnished nets were the order of the day, which was precisely what Joe had warned against in his book. To make matters worse, the quality of both was unregulated and often abysmal.

  Joe wanted something better, something standardised. It had to be tougher but still easy to handle, straightforward to maintain and manufacture. A modern, mechanised army needed a modern machine-made camouflage.

  And if he couldn’t find it, he’d invent it.

  Almost every day he was travelling to inspect new sites, recording their every aspect, considering their profiles, their corners and shadows, and then working out how to alter them. For the moment his plans had to be quick and simple. The Committee of Imperial Defence had decreed that the aim of static camouflage was to defeat the bombing airman, not the aerial photographer. This meant that visual concealment by day from a range of four or five miles at a height of 3,000 to 5,000 feet was enough. The aim was to confuse the enemy pilot and put him off his target, thereby giving the anti-aircraft guns more time to respond. Camouflage for this purpose could just be painted, although attention was being given to devising paints with gritty textures to reduce any glare.

  The persistent problem, however, was that the preferred building style in the last decade had been stark and pale, with industrial buildings hastily built out of cheap materials – galvanised iron, concrete, asbestos sheeting – all of them conspicuously light and shiny. Another problem was the easily recognisable ‘soup plate’ shape of oil tanks and gasometers. These were sitting ducks for the Luftwaffe, so it was crucial ‘to secure a measure of concealment as soon as possible, while more elaborate preparations are being made’.2

  But what might the ‘more elaborate preparations’ entail? The year 1938 saw crises on many fronts, and Lieutenant Colonel Wyatt voiced his concerns over the inconsistencies in camouflage policy and procedure. He warned: ‘Numerous instances have come to my notice of paint manufacturers and painting contractors being asked by managers of large factories to camouflage their premises. There is no doubt that industry is becoming camouflage conscious and this fact is being exploited by the paint trade. The evil of this is only too obvious, and unless it is stopped at once, it will get beyond control.’3 Wyatt saw how much money and time could be wasted on schemes that were ultimately futile, and how paint alone couldn’t do the job.

  Joe wanted to find an alternative. A pile of yellowed typewritten notes reveal his work in progress. ‘There are not many materials suitable for constructional camouflage purposes, light enough in weight to be portable, close enough in texture to conceal yet open enough to give ventilation when used in positions which require ventilation.’4

  He had no facilities at RESB to experiment, nor was it in his job description. But it didn’t stop him. Finding ‘the perfect cover’ would make his work so much easier, which meant it was part of his job even if it wasn’t recognised as such. He began experimenting with different natural materials – straw mats, wood fibres, chipboard, sandpaper – anything with a good texture. He laid out samples on the floor of his room in the Sutherland, shining lights down from different angles to consider their effects.

  He knew what he was looking for. Aerial photographs had shown it was all about texture – a soft mid-tone with some depth, a good bit of ‘contained shadow’ was ideal.

  It was all about trial and error, and Norfolk Square was soon his laboratory. Just as Solomon J. Solomon had experimented in his back garden, so Joe grappled with the finer points of camouflage in a public square at night. It was far from glamorous, it was verging on the ridiculous. His straw mats might have worked had it not been for their fragility – they couldn’t withstand a wintry night outdoors – Joe was quite revolted by the sodden mess that awaited him the next morning. Straw and sandpaper combinations were ruled out for the same reason, though a thicker coir fibre fared better. It was relatively waterproof and sturdy, but it had a tendency to absorb water and then became too heavy for its purpose. There was no point creating a good lightweight cover that sagged after a downfall. It was all so frustrating. He knew exactly what he wanted his material to do; he just couldn’t think how to make it. He consulted his colleagues and tried to combine different materials together; he went back to read and reread his old notes. He tried, he tested, he failed, and he tried again. Nothing was quite right.

  Although now a camoufleur, Joe still thought like an artist. This was part of the problem, especially since he was an artist whose speciality had been precise observation. In the spare moments between his camouflage inspections he sketched different kinds of vegetation from the train or car – he looked at wheat, woodland, hedges and moss – trying to think up ways to lift them off the page and into three dimensions. He went back to RESB, wandering between departments, picking the brain of any interested engineer.

  Of course he was being too literal. Ever the realist, slavishly trying to recreate reality was going to be his hurdle. He stared long and hard at the landscape, but he couldn’t see the wood for the trees.

  ‘Utilizing techniques of film producers, sculptors and modellers, workers in metal, and even the technique of artificial flower manufacture, complete realism might be achieved in the duplication of natural features, but not as a practical proposition on a scale demanded and not without enormous expenditure.’5

  ‘How to get away from representation?’ Joe scribbled angrily over one typescript. ‘How?’

  But he didn’t have to get away from representation; he just had to think of it differently. The answer came to him late at night when he was leafing through one of his art books. ‘One conveys the idea of the true by means of the false.’ It was a quote lifted from Degas, an artist whose paintings had the look of spontaneity but were actually the opposite. Joe typed it out. ‘One conveys the idea of the true by means of the false.’ His mistrust of modern art was unchanged – Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism – he couldn’t marry the form with the content. However, Impressionism was different. The Impressionists responded to natural light and built up texture, daubing and dashing their paint. It was easy to recognise the features in an Impressionist landscape and yet it looked almost abstract up close.

  ‘It is not possible except at close range to note individual blades of grass or individual leaves of trees. In painting a field or trees the brush is swept broadly across the canvas – no attempt is made to express detail in a literal photographic manner.’

  Joe picked up his oil paints for the first time in over a year and layered some thickly on his palette. ‘Heavy ridged paint applied with a coarse, stiff brush, the fibres of which “plough” the oil paint, so it is furrowed. Each small ridge of paint casts its own shadow, while its upper surfaces reflect the light in varying degrees . . .’ Pul
ling away from the surface, with the paint still glistening and fresh, something was becoming clear. ‘Natural effects are freely translated into paint without literal description of natural facts.’ That was it. With the loosening of each brushstroke there began a rich play of light and shadow. ‘IMPASTO. The whole idea of imitating nature in a literal manner was impracticable. An abstract scheme must be evolved . . . in other words, nature’s texturing quality and principles must be interpreted in a purely formal manner.’

  He didn’t find the answer, though – not through painting. It was all in his etching plates. Etchers scrape lines in their plates to create not just images but actual effects. Deeper lines quickly fill with ink, creating richer, velvety textures. Etchers can ‘use a medley of lines to express vibration of tonal values’, and through a dense cross-hatching of lines they create ‘intensely realistic effects’. They can thus summon ‘all kinds of natural textures – trees, grass, moorland etc. and even broken water’6 by simply the curve and crossing of lines.

  Now this was something. Joe bought some steel wire, the kind used for fencing. Wire had had a supporting role in the camouflage covers of the last war, but what if it could be knitted or bound into a mesh on its own? He used the thinnest kind in a criss-cross pattern, folded and ‘knitted’, then added clustered rosettes or ‘cabbages’ on top. It wasn’t quite dense enough, but here was a seed. ‘I considered a number of schemes comprising springs and metal strips’, which is how he summarised the hours of frustration, the nights of lost sleep, and the cuts to all his fingers.

  In the end he didn’t find the answer – it found him. When browsing the stock of a local hardware store looking for thinner wire he came across the strangest twinkling bundle, tucked away unobtrusively near the cloths and dusters.

  ‘I picked up a pad of domestic steel wool, examined it, and realised it was made of metal fibres inexpensively produced . . .’7

  With pounding heart Joe grabbed seven more. His excitement seemed wildly out of proportion to the objects in question but then, he was not a man familiar with household chores. Steel wool, traditionally used for the scouring of pots and pans, was the closest thing yet to his new camouflage cover. Of course it was too dense and the wrong colour, but Joe sensed how it could be altered. Dashing back to the Sutherland, he set to work dissecting the skeins, a task far more complex than unwinding a normal ball of wool. It completely absorbed him until Maureen arrived.

  As he held up a tangled abstract bundle to show her, he tugged at it hard.

  ‘Skeins found to be composed of closely intermingled and, in places, matted very fine fibres. Strands . . . fragile, but assembled in such great quantity and so closely tangled, that skein as such is strong and difficult to break.’8

  Joe gave some to Maureen to handle. She turned the fibres over, frowning hard, trying to imagine how this could be important. Undeterred, Joe hurried out to purchase more, clearing out the stocks of several local retailers.

  ‘I can knit them together and make a sort of mat,’ he explained. And that is what he did for several nights. The finished product was then painted with a deep forest green. Joe was so certain that this was it, he rushed to share his invention with Le Breton-Simmons and Brigadier Sayer.

  He first held it up, peering at them through it.

  ‘You can see and fire a gun through it,’ he explained. ‘And it’s fireproof.’

  Then he laid it on the floor. It bristled and buckled like something alive.

  Simmons shook his head. ‘It is the oddest thing I have ever seen.’

  Joe smiled. ‘Not from a distance.’

  Brigadier Sayer stood with arms folded, saying nothing. Joe knew it was his opinion that mattered. Their president had a sharp, appraising eye and was quick to see the faults in things. But he nodded slowly.

  ‘Yes, this could be something.’

  Sayer later called it ‘a new material that approached the ideal for Camouflage’.9 He told Joe to make contact with the British Steel Wool Company, then based in Kent, and ask them to either manufacture or locate some larger, coarser samples to be tested out in the open.

  Joe set to work making enquiries and soon learned that in order to create a coarser variety of his steel wool, a ‘Band’ machine was needed, something that originated in Germany. Fortunately, there were some operating at several factories in England. They were in business.

  The brigadier was already in the process of organising trials of different camouflage materials on a group of oil tanks near Bristol. He decided steel wool should be put to the test as soon as possible. Joe jumped at the opportunity and had more samples made, then he drove to Bristol to inspect the site. There was neither the time nor the money to cover the tanks entirely so he devised rectangular frames upon which the steel wool was fixed. The plan was to spread the material across the round top of the tanks, fixed with rabbit wire and bituminous tape, and then use these small frames between them to break up their telltale shape and reduce shadows. Hitching a lift in RAF reconnaissance aircraft, they flew over the area and recorded the results. It was flawless, a revelation in what it didn’t show.

  Joe was convinced his new material was essential. As the threat of war grew, so did the need for camouflage, more sophisticated and comprehensive schemes. Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement had completely failed. In March 1939 Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia. The government pledged 8 per cent of its £25 million Civil Defence budget to ‘obscuration of glare, and camouflage’, and the Civil Defence Bill gave the government the power to insist that factories and public utilities be camouflaged. To support this initiative the Camouflage Sub-Committee produced the Air Raid Precautions Handbook No. 11, which aimed to ‘place the art of camouflage on a common sense basis and so prevent waste of labour and materials on ignorantly conceived or unnecessary schemes’.10 It was a desperate attempt to regulate and consolidate camouflage knowledge, but it was also (still) all about paint. There was a selection of fourteen ‘Standard Camouflage Colours’ and basic guidelines on how to apply it.

  As if already anticipating the problems of how these ideas might be interpreted, the Handbook warned that ‘those entrusted with the preparation of schemes need an appreciation of colour values and drawing, an experience of flying; a scientific or engineering training is a valuable asset’. It further stressed: ‘Schemes should not be lightly undertaken without the advice of those experienced in the art.’11

  Inevitably, however, plenty of unskilled eyes set to work devising schemes. Factory owners acted on their own initiative with disastrous results. Writing in the Observer, Jan Gordon noted the proliferation of ‘camouflage curiosities’, pointing out that ‘Buildings elaborately and expensively camouflaged stand elbow to elbow with even larger buildings of staring white. Some look as if the abstract or jigsaw artist had come into his own with intent to advertise his work rather than conceal it . . . So far, perhaps, the prize for ineptitude should go to a large gasometer on which has been painted a huge tree some three times as large as any possible tree in the district.’12

  Joe and his colleagues often found themselves correcting the mess created by amateurs. When Jack Sayer was dispatched to advise on a hutted camp sited on the cliffs of Dover, he was horrified by what he found. The commandant had received peremptory orders to camouflage every building, and, ‘in the absence of any detailed instructions and perhaps with some hazy memory of the “dazzle painting”’, had created something that ‘was probably visible from Calais with the naked eye’.13

  Such problems only enhanced the appeal of a ‘standardised’ camouflage material. Back at RESB, Brigadier Sayer hurriedly sought to push the testing and production of ‘steel wool camouflage’ up the agenda and brought it to the attention of Colonel John Turner and Norman Wilkinson (now Air Commodore Wilkinson, an adviser to the Air Ministry). Further tests were carried out on oil tanks at Llandarcy in South Wales during the spring and summer of 1939. Steel wool was pitted against other texturing materals, including asbestos wool, cork and
coir screening. Once again, air reconnaissance showed that steel wool was the best.

  On 28 July 1939, a meeting of camouflage officers was held at RESB with representatives from both the Air Ministry and the Admiralty. Mr Moulton, a representative of the British Steel Wool Company, attended and was asked to give estimates for the production of this new form of steel wool camouflage, and also to advise on the situation regarding rust retarding, which would be crucial if the material went into large-scale production.

  Two men who would become key players in the story were also present. Peregrine Churchill was an engineer working as a civilian adviser to the Air Ministry, and Johnny’s younger brother. Peregrine was the polar opposite to Johnny – quiet to the point of withdrawn and, thankfully for Joe, an absolute stickler for detail. Once he heard Sayer’s presentation, Peregrine was excited by the possibilities of this steel wool camouflage. He sketched out a rough design for a gun cover on the spot, and promised to finesse it and forward it to Joe.

  The second person now becoming involved was Cecil Schofield. Schofield was a businessman whose firm M&E Equipment had already done some contract work for the Air Ministry. Schofield had recently joined forces with the designer Eugene Mollo, who had become known for renovating cinema and theatre interiors across the south-east of England.

  The coming war brought about some unlikely partnerships and the alliance of Schofield and Mollo was surely one of them. Schofield, an enthusiastic founder of companies and registerer of patents, was eager to explore any new market. He wore pinstripe suits, rented extravagant offices on Park Lane, and drove a Bentley very fast. By contrast, the reticent Russian-born Mollo had trained at the Royal College of Art, and firmly favoured the creative over the lucrative.

  M&E Equipment had a factory in Kennington which had already begun developing new techniques for camouflage, and had recently acquired its own parkerising plant. Parkerising14 was a process that protected steel from corrosion by the application of an electrochemical phosphate conversion coating, and was now being used in the manufacture of firearms. It quickly became apparent that this same process could easily be used to rust-proof steel wool. Within weeks Schofield had excitedly applied for a patent and declared Joseph Gray a visionary.