by Mary Horlock
Johnny’s drawings were indeed published in the Illustrated London News on 8 June 1940. ‘I think the two ink and wash sketches he produced that afternoon were probably the best things he had ever done,’22 declared Sayer.
Joe kept a treasured copy. They are now rather tired and tattered but I can see Johnny’s signature with the accompanying dedication – ‘for Gray, with pleasant memories of the day they were drawn.’
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Jack Sayer, ‘The Camouflage Game’, refers to his unpublished, hand-written memoir, courtesy of Gillian Ward.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 Sayer, Camouflage Game, p. 9
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid., p. 14
4 Ibid., p. 10
5 Ibid., p. 3
6 Ibid., p. 6
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid., p. 3
9 Ibid., p. 28
10 Ibid., p. 22
11 Churchill, Crowded Canvas, p. 153
12 Celia and John Lee, Winston and Jack: The Churchill Brothers, Celia Lee, London, 2007, p. 315
13 Jack Churchill in a letter, 5 April 1940, Churchill Archives Centre, PCHL 4/10
14 Seymour Reit, The Hidden War: The Amazing Camouflage Deception of World War II, Corgi, London, 1980, p. 61
15 Churchill, Crowded Canvas, p. 160
16 Lewis, Such Things Happen, p. 55
17 Geoffrey Barkas, The Camouflage Story: From Aintree to Alamein, Cassell and Co. Ltd, London, 1952, p. 26.
18 Sayer, The Camouflage Game, p. 12
19 Ibid.
20 Barkas, The Camouflage Story, p. 31
21 Sayer, Camouflage Game, p. 14
22 Ibid.
is for Lay-out: the way that you face Is of vital importance so choose the right place
After Dunkirk the invasion of Britain was a real and present threat. Within forty-eight hours of the troops’ evacuation from northern France, the Luftwaffe began sending sorties across the Channel. In the following weeks small daylight raids on coastal towns in the south and east began. The Luftwaffe engaged RAF fighters in aerial combat and from August started to destroy Britain’s defences. There was much to hide and no time to lose.
At Larkhill, Joe’s lectures in static camouflage brought the second course to a close. The men assembled for a group photograph along with officers from the first course who were recovering from their experiences in France. It was a glorious summer’s day, their last all together. They still didn’t look much like soldiers, but that seemed to be the point.
Richard Buckley and Freddie Beddington are seated centre front (Joe marked them out with crowns on the reverse). Buckley, arms crossed, frowns inscrutably, his bristling whiskers hiding most of his face. Beddington, sporting a more reserved moustache, sits beside him, debonair but as unreadable. Tom Van Oss, just back from France, sits cross-legged in front of them – tanned, handsome and grinning like a schoolboy. To his left is Peter Proud, an art director from Warner Brothers. The bespectacled Godfrey Baxter, a theatrical producer for Glyndebourne, is squinting at the back, fourth from the right. He was at least trying to stand to attention, as is Charles McCall, a Scottish painter whom Joe had recommended for work in camouflage. Steven Sykes, a designer of stained glass, stands at the back on the far right; John Lewis, an illustrator, stands beside the film-maker Geoffrey Barkas, who keeps his cap at a jaunty angle.
All were in uniform apart from Jack Sayer, who smiles wryly in his pale suit, holding a lit cigarette.
Joe wasn’t in the picture but he added the names afterwards, sending the photograph to Mary for safekeeping. It was a precious memory of the men he’d count as friends, brothers, some even his ‘babies’. The affection was mostly reciprocated: Tom Van Oss called him a ‘good fatherly angel’ and sketched him as a wise old owl;1 for Jack Sayer he was the ‘father-confessor’2 figure to many a camouflage officer. He was ‘Grayowl’, more often ‘Grumble’. The only person seemingly impervious to Joe’s charms was John Lewis. He dismissed that ‘elderly illustrator’ whose lectures he’d had to sit through. As far as Lewis was concerned, Joe’s only ‘claim to fame’ came later, when he nearly burned down Farnham Castle after it became the Camouflage Development and Training Centre. The story went that after talking to the troops late one night, Joe fell asleep with a lit cigarette. He had to be saved first from potential incineration, and then from a court martial.3
It made a good story – one of so many. Joe would not be the first or last camouflage officer to risk a court martial, and whatever the men now thought of each other, there were more pressing matters demanding their attention.
Dispatched to different corners of Britain, camouflage officers had to teach the gospel of camouflage to regular troops, and apply themselves practically to hiding anything of value. Steven Sykes was posted to Newcastle, Geoffrey Barkas went with Michael Farrar Bell to Northern Ireland. Others, like Tom Van Oss, were sent to Anti-Aircraft (AA) Command in York, and Johnny Churchill to AA Command in Stanmore, Middlesex.
‘I am afraid I cannot tell you what it is [I am doing],’ wrote Van Oss to his family, ‘but it is proving exceedingly interesting, full of variety, and sustaining, because the importance of the subject is not universally accepted.’4
Persuading everyone else in the Army that camouflage was neither ‘a fashionable nuisance’ nor ‘a magic cloak’5 took up a huge amount of time, but camouflage officers were endlessly inventive. They designed pamphlets, poems and cartoons to both amuse and indoctrinate. Similarly, the best lectures on camouflage were as diverting. Van Oss filled cinemas with audiences of up to a thousand at a time, and always found that a bit of blaring music put ‘the mass of pink-faced, smoking, khaki-clad men in a good mood’.6 Props and tricks were encouraged: jokes, anecdotes, and even naked ladies. Roland Penrose became camouflage instructor to the Home Guard and fired their interest in concealment by using slides of his lover, Lee Miller, covered in nothing more than camouflage cream, netting and strategically placed vegetation. Julian Trevelyan followed his friend’s example, finding that a few X-rated slides slipped into his presentation always kept the troops alert. Godfrey Baxter, meanwhile, spent most of his time in the Mess sinking gin and delivering famously racy lectures: ‘At every dance you have probably noticed the girl with the black velvet dress with a great hand-mark on her bottom where her partner has held her too tight. All he has done is to destroy the contained shadow on the velvet, as you are busy doing when you walk about in the grass around your gun-site.’7
But camouflage officers also had to practise what they preached, and now devoted hours to disguising the gun sites, bomb stores and hutted camps that were fast appearing. Every village had its ‘strong post’ to defend. Pillboxes, those ‘awkward little pentagonal objects’8 used for anti-aircraft guns, were a constant challenge. Joe had advised such features were best merged with existing structures – for example, barns, hedges or haystacks – but in the early days camoufleurs couldn’t resist being more inventive. These depressing concrete blocks underwent ingenious transformations and were disguised as ruined forts, summer houses, fairground stalls, chicken coops and garages complete with petrol pumps. Of course, that in itself created issues, since too elaborate a design would attract attention and public comment. ‘Our concealment must be so complete that even the fact that we are hiding something shall not be apparent,’ reminded Penrose.9
Still, artists couldn’t help themselves. Julian Trevelyan writing to Edward Seago, another well-known artist recruited into camouflage, det
ailed his painting of two anti-aircraft guns – one following a ‘pointillist’ design and another using a disruptive pattern of countershading. He explained that in order to paint the other guns of the battery along precisely the same lines, Seago had to authorise the purchase of six different camouflage shades, recommending a specific local paint manufacturer so that Trevelyan could be present and ‘could supervise the mixing of the correct shades’ personally.10 While such attention to detail was laudable, it’s vaguely reminiscent of a soldier’s remarks on Solomon J. Solomon in the last war: ‘I can see him now standing away from the tank with one eye closed and holding his brush at arm’s length between the delicate touches that he painted on to her.’11
Many camoufleurs held tight to their pre-war artistic sensibilities. Major Seago was often irritated by the question ‘You were an artist, weren’t you, before the war?’ ‘I am an artist,’ he would haughtily protest.12 But Joe chose a different tack. Rather than talking up his art background, he referred back to his experience as an observer in the trenches. He told men to see like an artist but think like a soldier, and whatever his rumbustiousness, his schemes were as efficient as they were economic. He constantly warned the men of RE8 against any flights of fancy. Because of the constraints of time and money and the sheer scale of the task at hand, schemes had to be kept simple.
Joe was also responsible for a variety of different sites, from very large Royal Ordinance factories to smaller gun sites, and War Department depots. Each structure or structures presented new challenges depending on their shape or surroundings, and so needed care and attention, but the procedure itself followed similar lines. Joe always recommended a ground reconnaissance in the first instance, where it was important to meet the manager or person responsible for the site (the maintenance of camouflage was often as challenging as making it). After a ground inspection, there would ideally be an opportunity to fly over the buildings, taking photographs from different angles. Most officers were taught aerial photography and so multitasked, although Joe admitted to Mary he found the camera too cumbersome: ‘a huge affair compared with ordinary cameras and needs both hands to do it’. He preferred to fly with a photographer so that he could observe and then refer back to the images afterwards.
The simplest camouflage schemes involved darkening in a single colour, the basic blending in. Written instructions were enough for that, and Joe found he spent a lot of time providing this kind of advice. Any schemes that involved patterning needed more detailed drawings and sketches, and very occasionally a model might be made.
Everything had to be worked out, from design and fitting through to construction, but whatever the excitement over steel wool, Joe accepted that paint was still the main form of camouflage available. It was the cheapest and easiest method. With prominent features such as chimneys, complete concealment was impossible. The only option was to aim at confusion and so create a broad disruptive pattern, for example, and garnished nets could be used to mask any hard edges and eliminate harsher shadows. Elsewhere, any shiny surfaces such as corrugated iron or glass skylights had to be sanded down or coated with ‘gritty’ substances. Dealing with the surrounding area was as important. Scarred earth showed up light and was therefore always dangerous, as were outbuildings and parked cars and trucks (which were preferably dispersed). Similarly, railways or shiny road surfaces could easily give the game away. Railway stations were most often covered in netting and train tracks could be painted to look like roads. Road surfaces also had to be darkened and given a ‘grittier’ textured effect to blend with vegetation, or covered by screens. On the ground ‘a lasting pattern can be produced by sprayed bitumen raked into a rough textured surface with white, sharp river sand as the contrasting pattern.’13
Joe developed the ideas that had formed the basis of Camouflage and Air Defence, though there was much he still had to consider, not least the impact of blackout. Initially, all camouflage was designed to protect against daylight raids, but this soon changed as German bombers came to favour cover of night. Blackout had been enforced two days before the war’s outbreak – with all windows and doors tightly covered and street lights and headlamps switched off or hooded. Concealment was everybody’s everyday responsibility, but that also drew attention to certain features that almost defied concealment.
‘I find it fascinating to fly over blacked-out expanses of the countryside,’ Joe wrote to Mary. ‘You would be amazed at how much is still visible with a full moon . . . Fascinating and damned frustrating!’
Man-made features were easy to spot in moonlight – not just the reflective surfaces of modern buildings, but the plumes of steam and smoke they emitted, the hard edges of road junctions, the glittering sheen on a reservoir. White smoke at night had to be eliminated, so the fuel source was altered to produce a darker smoke. Concealing water was near impossible, though. Scrap metal, tin sheeting and drums were used to devise screening to at least break up the shape of any lake or river, and gritty substances were floated on the surface – but only with limited success.
And there was a whole other problem with landmarks, which might be used by the enemy bomber to guide him to his target. Most were impossible to hide, although Jack Sayer delighted in the discovery of some paperwork relating to the Cerne Abbas giant, that ‘unashamed phallic figure’ cut into the Dorset downs. What could possibly be done to conceal it? ‘Major X noted that the affair had come up again. Colonel Y agreed it was shockingly conspicuous and recommended camouflage, and so it went on until Brigadier Sayer gave his opinion that cold water should be thrown over the whole thing.’14
Yes, there was still fun to be had, and it wasn’t just the processes of camouflage that caused amusement, but the materials themselves. Reducing shine was a full-time occupation. A lot of time was spent trying to make paint gritty, and when that failed, substances like coke breeze or cork granules were used. But the best secret weapon was sludge. As unattractive as it sounds, sludge oil could be recovered from the bottoms of bunkers and oil-burning merchant vessels and proved extremely effective at reducing both colour and shine on brickwork. It prompted this jolly ditty, presumably by Sayer:
Sludge! Sludge! Glorious Sludge!
Scraped from the bottom of tanks;
Lots you can do with it – have a shampoo with it –
Rub the old back with it – paint the town black with it –
Charm away bunions – fertilize onions –
Massage the cranium – good for the brainium!
If you’re rheumatic, a slave to sciatica,
Wallow away in it – spend the whole day in it –
Order a drum of it – give the cat some of it –
Have a good dig at it – take a nice swig at it –
Paint the Home Guard with it – bomb Hitler hard with it –
Polish the floor with it – win the whole war with it –
Give me a Peerage as thanks!
(The Viscount of Sidcup and Sludge! –
Glorious, glorious SLUDGE!)
Camouflage Game
With the good-humoured Colonel Wyatt now in charge at RE8, he was in need of a staff captain, and Joe happily secured Kenneth Dalgliesh, a peacetime architect who had lost an arm at Arras, and proved to be a connoisseur of both port and beer. Dalgliesh had a low tolerance of civil servants and red tape, but proved extremely capable on the material side of camouflage, becoming deeply involved in experimental work with cork granules, sludge oil ‘and other strange matters’,15 spending days on end at a research facility, testing out various industrial by-products to create a perfect texture.
For the record, Dalgliesh found sludge worked best when it was applied and then ‘blinded’ with dry earth, so that a solid dull surface could be obtained.
But if concealment was so crucial to saving lives and vital resources, what about steel wool? Peregrine Churchill for one grew very extremely frustrated when its supply wasn’t forthcoming. In June 1940 he brought the matter to the prime minister’s attention. He
made it clear that the War Office and the Air Ministry both wanted large quantities but the demand was not being met. Frustrated by the delays, he insisted on an enquiry.
The results of this enquiry remained as a closed file in the National Archives, right up until the time that I requested they be opened. Peregrine, writing to his aunt Clemmie in July, made very serious allegations of ‘fifth column activity’16 against the Ministry of Supply. He felt sure that officials were fixing contracts and the firms now producing steel wool were quite incapable and incompetent.
The problem arose due to the fact that, because of competitive tendering, M&E Equipment could understandably not have a monopoly to produce steel wool. A new supplier, Williams & Williams, had been approached but were apparently producing substandard material, as were another firm, Tinsley Wire Industries. The Air Ministry had declared that the latest batch of steel wool was far ‘too stringy’.
Whereas the quiet and careful Peregrine wanted to follow correct protocol with an ‘official investigation’, Johnny, being Johnny, couldn’t wait. Incensed by the red tape and wasted time, he stormed the Chester factory of Williams & Williams and created merry hell.