by Mary Horlock
The war was just beginning but one small battle had been won.
Notes
CAB = Cabinet Papers
CD, TC, CDTC = Camouglage Development and Training Centre
HO= Home Office
IWM = Imperial War Museum
PREM = Prime Minister’s Office Records
TNA = The National Archives
WO = War Office
Jack Sayer, ‘The Camouflage Game’, refers to his unpublished, hand-written memoir, courtesy of Gillian Ward.
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 TNA WO 227/48
2 Eugene Mollo statement, Barclay Archive
3 ‘E’ Committee memo from J. Gray, 20 November 1939 to the President, Royal Engineers and Signals Board, IWM Archive Gray Documents.4273
4 Memo from Brig. A. P. Sayer, RESB, 28 November 1939, IWM Archive Gray Documents.4273
5 IWM Archive Pavitt Documents.2790
6 Sayer, Camouflage Game, p. 7
7 Capt. Tom Van Oss in a letter home, 26 September 1940, courtesy Richard Van Oss
8 Buckley was a brilliant instructor and inspired great loyalty, but his temper tantrums became the stuff of legend. (‘We all grew very fond of this intelligent, unstable Commandant.’) See J. Lewis, Such Things Happen: Life of a Typographer, Unicorn Publishing Group, Stowmarket, 2002, p. 57
9 ‘Notes on Concealment and Camouflage’, Military Training Pamphlet No. 26, Ocotober 1939, prepared by J. Gray, IWM Archive Gray Documents.4273
10 E. Mollo in an undated letter, IWM Archive Gray Documents.4273
11 C. S. Schofield in an undated letter, IWM Archive Gray Documents.4273
12 C. S. Schofield in an undated letter to Ministry of Supply, Barclay Archive
13 E. Mollo, ‘Notes on S.A. Camouflage Material’, Barclay Archive
14 C. S. Schofield in an undated letter to Ministry of Supply, Barclay Archive
15 E. Mollo in a letter, 25 September 1947, IWM Archive Gray Documents.4273
16 Lt. Col. F. Beddington in a letter, 12 September 1947, Barclay Archive
is the Knowledge of how to combine Doing the job with leaving no sign
Good cover was the first rule of camouflage. With steel wool approved and Maureen married, Joe was now able to focus on what else needed to be hidden.
Nancy Gray moved in to a flat in Wimbledon with Maureen and John. Joe rarely mentioned her to Mary. If he did, he only ever referred to her as ‘A.G.’ He was very glad to quit the Sutherland and leave one life behind. But it was the beginning of a strangely itinerant existence. He rented a small room near Marlborough Gate, but used it rarely. He had keys to Mary’s flat, but he hated to be there without her. In the end, the place he preferred was the office.
It didn’t matter that he wasn’t meant to sleep there, since Major Gray was getting used to breaking rules. Joe either pretended he didn’t hear the orders telling him what not to do, or he was deaf to the reprisals. After taking over Buckley’s camouflage course in Netheravon he had been ‘given a tremendous dressing down, for exceeding his orders, absenting himself, doing another man’s work and so on.’1 Did it bother him? Not at all.
‘I say, I’ve had the most fearful rocket from your cousin,’ he grinned to Jack Sayer. ‘It must have been for staying on to help old Buckles . . . What a good thing I’m deaf! I never heard half of what he said but I knew he was wild by the way he kept hitting his desk!’2
And so Joe made his weakness a strength, insulating himself against army protocol and all its notions of order. He was determined to do things in his own way, and when Francis Wyatt came out of retirement to head the department he was ‘rather fascinated’ to find himself in command of ‘a sort of crazy gang’.3 Fortunately ‘he was an easy-going chief with a strong sense of humour. He at once recognised that his Major Gray was a wayward genius, who would never be methodical or punctual, but who was nevertheless dedicated to his job.’4
Joe got away with it because he was so good. He was, in fact, uncannily good. Jack Sayer considered Joe the backbone of RE8, a man with a shrewd eye and ‘uncanny resource and ingenuity’.5 But Sayer never understood how someone so outwardly haphazard in his habits could be so thoroughly effective.
Joe tried to show him exactly how it was done, whisking him down to Dover in the early months of 1940. There they were tasked with devising a camouflage treatment for one of the many gun sites now appearing along the coastline. In this instance, it was an old naval gun brought out of retirement from the last war and mounted on a railway chassis.
There was no time for an aerial reconaissance as the job had to be done the next day, so they met with a Mr Ellis, the representative from ICI, who had a team of painters standing by. Ellis was desperate to know what colours to order, what Joe had in mind, but for now he’d have to wait.
They spent a long time inspecting the site and its surrounding area, with Joe pointing out features of interest, surveying the gun from every angle through the changing light. Ellis had found them a small hotel near Deal to stay at overnight and joined them there with a set of scale drawings, expecting them to set to work immediately on the toning down and blending in that would be required.
They did not. Instead Joe set about ordering a large meal. He then made a detailed assessment of the drinks menu. The poorly stocked bar was no deterrent.
‘Let’s not worry about work just yet,’ he said, smiling enigmatically.
Ellis, although anxious to get the job done, gave in rather quickly, and so three men spent a most convivial evening and discussed just about everything except the matter in hand.
It was only as Ellis rose unsteadily to his feet that he remembered.
‘What about hiding this great gun?’
Joe was suddenly and miraculously sober, as if the last few hours of drinking had not happened at all.
‘You have my solemn promise the plans will be ready by morning,’ he said.
Sayer watched as Ellis staggered upstairs and wondered how on earth that would be possible. Then he turned back to find Joe purchasing a small bottle of Drambuie – ‘about the only thing left in the bar’.6
‘Come along,’ Joe smiled to his younger colleague. ‘Let’s get to work.’
They retired to Joe’s room and there laid out the maps and drawings on the floor, and spent the rest of the night working out the best camouflage scheme – an intricate design of contrasting planes and paint colours with carefully netted edges. Sayer wasn’t entirely sure if the alcohol helped or hindered, but the completed plans were gently nudged under Ellis’s door by him once he was finally able to take to his bed.
‘Ellis had vanished with them before we surfaced in the morning and we never saw the results of our efforts. But Ellis must have been much impressed by the success of our methods because whenever he had occasion to call at our office thereafter he always brought some Drambuie for us.’7
Joe’s work on camouflage was itself neatly camouflaged: he’d confound and confuse, create a diversion and then surprise everyone by doing what he was meant to. Words like ‘erratic’ and ‘chaotic’ swirled around him, making their own smokescreen. Even Jack Sayer didn’t know the whole truth. He mistakenly called Joe a Scot, born in Dundee, who between the wars had lived in Chelsea. He never knew of Joe being married or having a daughter, though remarked that his way of life was so ‘casual and disorganised’8 it was always a worry where he slept most nights.
Joe had the ability to be always there and yet never there. He’d work all hours and bed down in the office, then be ready for the next day before it began. Flying was the best way to see what needed to be hidden, but flights for camoufleurs were hard to secure. The No. 1 Camouflage Unit operating from Baginton had only six Stinsons – small and cramped American passenger planes that didn’t fare well on a windy
day – ‘rather like flying in a paper bag’.9 So Joe made friends in the RAF and hitched lifts on any number of unauthorised flights from various locations, improvising his own grand tour of the south coast. He generally resurfaced when he ran out of money and needed rescuing, putting in a call to Captain Ayscough, who was in charge of petty cash.
Here’s a fine fiasco!
Send for Captain Ayscough!
Major Gray has ’phoned to say
He’s lost his pistol – spent his pay –
Dropped his warrant down a drain –
Gone and missed his ruddy train –
Kindly send an aeroplane . . .
Thank you, Captain Ayscough!10
J. P. Sayer
But Joe didn’t just get away with it – he gloried in it. Jack Sayer sketched him taking flight from his desk with Francis Wyatt looking on. ‘What a Will o’ the Wisp you are, Gray!’ ran the caption. Joe declared it quite marvellous and posted it to Mary. Soon he was sending her a cartoon every week, and photographs taken of him, and poems written about him. It was a clever way of making himself present, and what a presence he became. Mary wouldn’t see him for weeks but she had these wonderful images instead: Joe grinning from the cockpit of an aeroplane, lounging on the grass at an aerodrome, peering out from under a camouflage canopy.
He made it look so easy – that didn’t mean it was.
‘The work is never-ending – I’m simply snowed under. Please come up, even for a day. I miss you terribly and have had an awful week of depression – never had anything like it before. I can’t describe what I have gone through but I will tell you when I see you. I realise I must walk about in the open more, visit our old places and keep some perspective.’
One day of flying was exhausting, and the organising and reporting afterwards took longer. The reality was Joe worked too hard, drank too much, and fell asleep in his clothes. He loved the challenge and the camaraderie – finding himself in amongst ‘an exceptionally first rate lot of chaps’ – but his worries about the future shrouded everything. He was in the skies or looking up at them, expecting enemy aeroplanes. He wasn’t sure the British could win this war, and he feared for his recruits and their young families. He was having a second chance at life when they had barely had a first. It didn’t seem right.
He came to rely on alcohol, he couldn’t help it – it felt necessary and it swiftly became part of the job. Before Johnny Churchill went to France with the British Expeditionary Force, Joe took him to one side and dispensed two bits of advice. The first was: ‘Be natural, especially with generals, because we will be dealing with high-ranking officers.’ The second was: ‘Be able to hold your drink.’
He wasn’t being frivolous.
‘Our work will meet with opposition and indifference, and often the most difficult issues – the fixing of permission to do this and that – will be settled in the Mess.’11
Joe knew how to make an impression. If people wouldn’t take camouflage seriously then why not make it funny: buy drinks and tell outrageous stories, put on a bit of a show. Camouflage was as much about standing out as blending in, and those first impressions mattered. Joe saw something of himself in Johnny – the black sheep of the family, the bon viveur, the occasional clown. Johnny’s father had had a dim view of his son’s artistic tendencies (‘playing the ass in the gutter’12), but once he went off to France, he changed his tune completely. (‘My Johnny is now a Captain and in France! He is doing Camouflage work and having a splendid time.’13)
Camouflage made rebels and renegades acceptable. It turned opinions and expectations upside down. ‘Camouflage violated a principle dear to the pipe-clay heart of every staff officer: it went against the military obsession with neatness, spit-and-polish, drill field regularity. Camouflage was considered careless and “undisciplined”. It made a virtue of dispersion, irregularity, and improvisation.’14 For men like Joe and Johnny, that left everything to play for.
But Johnny was soon in trouble not of his own making. The situation in France was crumbling, and he found himself under constant fire from German bombers along the Belgian border. ‘A mood of alarm and hysteria was developing among the troops of the BEF.’15 Freddie Beddington had not had the chance to test out Joe’s steel wool. Instead, he’d found himself burning all his maps and schemes in a brewer’s vat outside Boulogne. He returned to England to work with Richard Buckley in establishing the camouflage training courses, the second of which began in early May.
Jack Sayer was dispatched with two dozen other new recruits by train from Charing Cross. He was one of the few who wore a respectable suit; the rest had donned various interpretations of military attire and and resembled ‘the chorus line of a First World War musical comedy’.16 When Buckley met them on the platform at Shorncliffe he was understandably concerned. ‘I cannot say, gentlemen, what effect you will produce on the enemy. But, by God, you terrify me!’17
In response they offered him every variant of salute, apart from the correct one. But what did Buckley expect? They were painters and illustrators, sculptors and set designers, art directors and filmmakers. They were not soldiers. Not yet.
What awaited them was a mixture of the practical and the theoretical. ‘Our days were filled with much strenuous outdoor work as well as lectures and a certain amount of flying.’18 ‘Buckles’ would deliver what he called his ‘set-pieces’, lecturing on light and shade and texture, and the relative importance of colour and tone to the air camera. He taught the men about nets and how to garnish them, and he would make them dig pits and try to conceal them. He could also, quite suddenly, explode in anger, but he succeeded in infecting everyone with a passion for their subject. And it wasn’t only hard work. Each evening they lounged in the Mess, smoking and drinking the finest Madeira. ‘I have rarely enjoyed such excellent and lavish food as I did those four weeks,’ recalled Sayer.19
Back at the Board, Joe was scheduled to travel up to Larkhill for three days’ solid lecturing, but he was caught between too many commitments. He was finalising the production of steel wool and instructions on how to use it, answering endless requests for camouflage from up and down the country, worrying about the new camouflage officers coming out of training and the old ones still abroad. The surrender of France felt imminent and it filled him with despair.
‘I am having the most frightful time,’ he wrote to Mary. ‘The work is never-ending and the news just gets worse. Some of our chaps unaccounted for. Still waiting. In London, things are definitely getting hotter and I would be very glad to feel you were in Bath during the coming period.’
Mary was safe in Bath, but what about everyone else? On 25 May the War Office made the decision to evacuate British forces. Even up at Larkhill, Barkas and Sayer saw evidence of the chaos of defeat.
‘We got back to camp in time to meet a long, slow, straggling procession of men climbing with difficulty the gentle slope towards the mess. Ragged, grimy men, unshaven, caked with mud and dust . . . I saw none who spoke or smiled. They stumbled on like zombies – dead but walking. They were men from Dunkirk.’20
Sayer caught a train down to London that weekend, eager to see his young family. On the Sunday he stopped in at Melbourne House knowing that Joe would be at his desk, ploughing through paperwork with his usual flair.
They were sharing a sandwich, discussing the latest recruits, when the door of the office was suddenly flung open. There stood Johnny Churchill, clean-shaven but sodden.
‘I say! What a war!’21
It was the wonderful bit of theatre – it would soon become a catchphrase.
‘Good God,’ Joe croaked. ‘Where have you come from?’
Johnny flung himself down in a chair.
‘Dunkirk, my dear man. Fantastic.’
Johnny hadn’t come directly to the office, however. After reaching Dover he’d boarded the first train to London, stopping briefly at the Grosvenor Hotel to shave, before taking a taxi to the Admiralty and reporting to his uncle Winston, who had been p
rime minister for a matter of weeks.
‘I have had the most dreadful time. They need more boats – smaller ones. I offered to go back. You have no idea. The scene on the beaches was amazing.’
Johnny then pulled some crumpled papers from his tunic pocket, scattering them loosely across the desk.
‘Here, I made some sketches.’
Joe took up Johnny’s sketches, scanning them quickly. Then it came like a reflex reaction – he abruptly cleared his desk and spread out two sheets of paper.
‘Draw it, while it’s still fresh.’
Johnny had sunk deeper into the chair, eyes already closing.
‘Sorry, I don’t think I can, old chap.’
Joe pretended not to hear, or perhaps he really didn’t. He was reaching into one of his desk drawers, from which he produced a bottle of Kummel.
Kummel was a sweet, colourless liqueur flavoured with caraway seed, cumin and fennel. It was very popular before the war, and never recommended as a substitute for breakfast.
Johnny barely stirred.
‘Perhaps a sandwich?’ Sayer offered.
‘Let me sleep for a couple of hours and I’ll be all right.’
‘Rot!’ Joe took a roll of paper and, leaning over, whacked Johnny on the head. ‘You will use your sketch notes and draw at once what you have seen before it goes from your mind.’
Johnny sighed but didn’t move.
Bang went the roll of paper again.
‘All right, all right.’ Johnny pulled himself up.
‘Your drawings will be a direct record. Think on that.’
Joe handed Johnny a glass of Kummel and then stood over him for the next two hours, regularly whacking him with a roll of paper to keep him awake.
June 1940
Dearest P.F.
I had been going to write a long letter this weekend but have to go off to Larkhill tomorrow for 3 days. I hope you are getting on fine. I have missed you more than somewhat! What a catastrophe in France but what a masterpiece getting so many away – Johnny arrived after having had a very stiff time. On Sunday while I was working he did two amazing drawings of the beach at Dunkirk, which he is going to try in the London Illustrated News. The beach was like Southend on a Bank Holiday. Thousands and thousands of men. Troops firing away and the German bombers cracking away at them with bombs and machine guns. Then all kinds of boats from fishing smacks up to large steamers. Tug boats as well, in fact anything that would float and scores of row boats all filling up with men or being sunk by the German dive bombers. They are exceptionally good drawings and realise the scene wonderfully.