by Mary Horlock
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Jack Sayer, ‘The Camouflage Game’, refers to his unpublished, hand-written memoir, courtesy of Gillian Ward.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 Prime Minister Winston Churchill in a letter to the Commanderin-Chief (Home Forces), 10 July 1941, TNA PREM 3/81/4
2 T. Van Oss, York, 3 July 1941, IWM Archive Pavitt Documents. 2790
3 ‘The Strategy of Concealment for Defence Against Tank and Dive Bombing Attack’, TNA PREM 3/81/4
4 Geoffrey Baxter, The Fortnightly D.O., No.10, January 1942, TNA WO199 1630.
is for People moving around, Do so at night and merge with the ground
‘It is incredible to me that Mrs Gray doesn’t know or suspect the truth,’ mused James Meade. ‘Mrs Gray must know, surely.’1 It was May 1941 and the lingering spectre of the mysterious and everabsent Nancy Gray bothered his wife Margaret as well. The war was a test to any marriage, enforcing all kinds of difficult separations. Margaret wondered if their circumstances were really so different. But Joe had made it clear that Nancy Gray could not know the truth, that the very idea of divorce might ‘drive her desperate’. This was rather disturbing. For James and Margaret, so happily married, it seemed terribly wrong and ‘very immoral’ to deceive someone. But Joe stood firm. He said Nancy must be left out of it – not forever, but for now.
Fortunately, every time the issue raised its head, the war got in the way. As 1941 progressed many people were convinced Hitler could not be defeated. All of continental Europe was controlled by Axis powers. The Blitz had pounded London. Having invaded Russia in June, the Germans had reached Moscow, and Rommel was driving across Africa.
On the Home Front, labour shortages were becoming serious and all women up to the age of forty would soon need to register for war work. Nancy chose this as her moment to vanish from London properly. She sent word to her husband, informing him that she had already volunteered her services to the YMCA.2 She promised to let him know of her whereabouts once she was settled. Maureen was newly pregnant and moving to Paisley to stay with John’s parents, so she too would also be out of the capital.
Joe hoped this would take the pressure off. He was praying that his problems might somehow solve themselves, and in the meantime he sought solace in the fact that he wasn’t the only soldier being pulled in different directions. It was easy to blame the war – this damnable, interminable war. All around him people were coming together impulsively, getting divorced and having affairs, and why should anyone pass judgement? He saw it everywhere. At the Civil Defence Camouflage Establishment things were becoming terribly bohemian, with the most ‘extraordinary rearrangements of . . . married couples: i.e. A + B became A – B but + D, and E + F became E – F but + G, etcetera.’3
It was no longer a matter of right or wrong, black or white – the world was altered and people acted accordingly. Even Johnny Churchill and Little Mary, who loved each other deeply, fought like cat and dog. Johnny still went out all night, which caused tremendous rows. Johnny blamed his star sign, which was Gemini. (‘You have a dual nature,’ announced his fortune teller. ‘It is as if the twins Castor and Pollux were struggling against each other. You have tremendous vitality and yet you are lazy. You are faithful yet you can be unfaithful.’4) Joe shared the same star sign but never used it to explain away his behaviour.
Perhaps it was because he was an artist – artists were surely the worst.
‘By an extraordinary coincidence I met Coldstream’s friend Sonia tonight. He is to be in London he hopes Saturday and Sunday – so I will try to let him have the weekend (originally he was to fly with me). I don’t feel I can put up with this much longer – not seeing you – and then not seeing you under proper circumstances. It is awful, dear, darling Mary.’
William Coldstream had become Johnny’s staff captain at Stanmore. A well-known realist painter before the war, he was himself caught between the demands of camouflage and his own emotional entanglements. Like Joe, he was separated from the woman he loved, and like Joe, the woman he loved was not his wife. Sonia Brownwell was a gorgeous blonde many years younger, dubbed the ‘Euston Road Venus’ by the men who’d painted her before the war. Coldstream was quite besotted with her, though weighed down by guilt from his children and failed marriage. Sonia herself wasn’t sure how much to commit.
Sonia and William, Johnny and Mary – sometimes people came together and fitted perfectly, other times it felt accidental, temporary, and terribly uneven. James Meade couldn’t understand these ever-shifting states. Why wilfully make drama when there was so much about already? Then came devastating news that rocked them all. On 1 July, John Packham, the husband of James and Mary’s younger sister Diana, was killed when his ship, the HMS Malvernian, was bombed in the Bay of Biscay. Diana was pregnant with their first child and had only just made the happy announcement. The Meades gathered in Bath to process their grief and support one another. Joe repressed his first instinct to rush to Mary’s side. ‘We must upset people as little as possible,’ he wrote. ‘Anything might happen in these days.’
How right he was. Mary tried to console Diana but she herself was burdened by a confusing mixture of emotions. James found the atmosphere unbearable. As far as he was concerned, John’s death had brought everything into focus. ‘I don’t know what is going to happen. I think that Gray should either get a divorce or give up hanging about.’5
James chose to write to Joe. He thought it was the only way, since talking about delicate matters was difficult, and Joe’s deafness made it more so. ‘One cannot tell him anything of this kind by word of mouth without everybody else in the house (and many people outside) probably overhearing!’6
Putting pen to paper, James did not hold back. He told Joe that he was placing too much strain on the whole family by continuing with Mary. He also indicated that they should not have become involved in the first place, considering Joe’s personal circumstances. James blamed Joe for pursuing Mary, even when his married state had become known. The decent thing, James believed, would have been for Joe to break off with Mary and then start afresh once he had arranged his divorce. Now the whole relationship was clouded by its unseemly beginning.
Joe tried to brush it off but felt bitterly misunderstood. What bothered him most was the persistent implication that he’d brought shame on Mary, that he’d deceived her into continuing their relationship. That wasn’t how it had happened. ‘Even if I had not loved you devotedly – which I did from the beginning, how could I possibly have left you?’ he asked. ‘The thing is unthinkable.’
But he accepted that he must now stay away from Bath, and he did so, promising to love Mary from afar in whatever way she’d allow. ‘I will never leave you until I am sure that you want me to go. But I think you do love me as much as I love you – and even if you only love me half as much as I love you then nothing can ever part us.’
Mary accepted she had to make a break. She needed a new job, and she needed to get away from Bath and her family’s scrutiny. Joe eagerly enlisted Sonia to help them, arranging to meet her at the Café Royal on Piccadilly – a place that was fast becoming a favourite haunt, not least because it was still functioning. Together they tried to concoct a plan of action. Sonia felt certain Mary could be useful at the Ministry of Information, where she was now working, but Joe seemed sceptical and the cocktails made him more so.
I’m not sure if you could produce enough camouflage and push – I mean cheek or bluff etc. to cover up lack of knowledge. You ar
e a different type to Sonia – fortunately but no offence meant to S. She said she knew there was a new department to be formed called “anti-lies”. That means reading all German and enemy propaganda and presumably bulletins, spotting the lies and putting in a general report. I am afraid lots of subtle German lies might be believed by the reader!
He suggested Mary come to London and discuss it. ‘I don’t think you need have any fear of spending a week or fortnight actually in London at present. The Germans are much too busy elsewhere to spare bombers for serious raids on London. The G’s are realists whatever they are.’
Mary requested leave so that she could do as Joe suggested. She knew it was time to leave her ‘passive’ life in Bath behind, and the fact that Nancy had volunteered was a further incentive. Mary Churchill had gone to work in a munitions factory in Edgware. Maybe something like that would suit? Joe promised to make enquiries and use every contact he had. Then he wrote with a new idea: ‘Sound City – very hush hush dare not mention – at any rate vital work with lots of women. I’ll drop a line to Norman Loudon and make enquiries.’ Sound City film studios based in Shepperton might have seemed an unlikely place for war work, but unlikely people and unlikely places now complemented each other rather well.
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 J. Meade in a letter to his wife Margaret, 30 May 1941, courtesy Charlotte Lewis
2 YMCA: The Young Men’s Christian Association, founded in 1844, was involved in a wide variety of charity work. During the Second World War it initially provided mobile canteens and tea cars, offering food and drink to those made homeless in the Blitz.
3 An extract from the memoir by Felicity Sutton (née Fisher), a young artist recruited in London, artofdeception.org/more.htm
4 Churchill, Crowded Canvas, p. 12
5 J. Meade in a letter to his wife Margaret, 27 July 1941, courtesy Charlotte Lewis
6 Ibid.
is the Question you cannot decide But the Camouflage officer’s there as a guide
‘The film director today erects dummy structures on an enormous scale and when photographed, their detail is usually so exact that they cannot be distinguished from real solid buildings. If this work can be carried out by a film company, it can be carried out in the more serious business of war.’1
Joe had written these words in 1935, and it wouldn’t be long before film studios and the military were pooling their resources.
In the First World War, fake airfields and flare paths had been used to divert bombing raids and exaggerate the number of aerodromes. To mimic a modern RAF station was going to be a far more complex affair – but it was possible. ‘A Dummy landing ground could be laid down covering an appropriate area of smaller fields with canvas . . . a few dummy planes may be on the ground, but these must be moved regularly to different positions and vary in number.’2
Colonel John Turner was perhaps the third person to read Camouflage and Air Defence. He’d taken up the post of director of Works and Buildings at the Air Ministry in 1931, and had pointed out the need for a national camouflage scheme as early as 1935. But it was only as the Munich Crisis loomed that decoy airfields came into action.
Since he knew enough about real airfields, Turner was well placed to implement their imitations, and he established his very own ‘Department of Dummies’ to this end. Its home? Sound City film studios in Shepperton.
Initially, real aircraft manufacturers had supplied dummy aeroplanes, but this quickly proved too costly and the film studios stepped in. Warner Brothers, British Gaumont and the London Film Company had all been invited to offer tenders for the manufacture of fake aircraft, and the best quote came in from Sound City.
Sound City was based at Littleton Park House, a stately mansion dating back to the seventeenth century, in a picturesque part of still rural Middlesex, some fifteen miles outside of London. Turner was impressed by the skill of its studio technicians (he would only ever speak of Sound City’s craftsmen as ‘engineers’) and struck up a good understanding with the man in charge, Norman Loudon. By 1939 Loudon was a businessman of substance, having built his fortune managing Camerascopes, a company that manufactured flicker books for children. He had founded Sound City with the intention of creating the first British film studios purpose-built for talkies. Some in the trade dismissed Loudon’s venture as a ‘gaggle of dilettantes with a bit of money to waste’,3 but it was soon producing a film a fortnight, and the fact that five ex-naval commanders were on its staff possibly eased its assimilation into the war effort. ‘It was not that different from what they had been doing since 1932. Now the audience for their fantasy world was to be the German armed forces.’4
Loudon worked and played hard, freely mixing business and pleasure. He had an appetite for glamour and high living, and a love of fishing that Joe shared. ‘Loudon really is the supreme host and Sound City has the most expensive and best trout fishing in England.’ When he wasn’t trying to find Mary a job in one of the workshops, Joe begged her to join him there for the weekend instead. He imagined them squirrelled away at ‘some fishy hotel’.
The work of RE8 was still primarily concealment, but by 1941 the trend towards deception was set. Joe sent Mary two photographs taken one after the other: the first shows him approaching a large anti-aircraft gun, in the second the barrel of the gun has slipped down and banged him on the head. He turns back to the camera, laughing. He is more embarrassed than hurt – of course the gun wasn’t real. ‘Sound City is a dangerous place. They all carry film cameras in their pockets!!’
The large sound stages were being used to manufacture bomber parts, whilst thousands of dummy aircraft, buildings, barges, tanks, people and guns were built in the scenery construction workshops. These were constructed as kits and sent far and wide to populate decoy airfields, factories or dock areas. (‘The ideal dummy building would be collapsible and easily portable. So that it may be concealed until the last moment for erection.’5)
The aim was simple: to confuse the pilots of enemy aircraft. Whilst real airfields were disguised as farms with their aircraft dispersed to satellite sites or wooded areas, two types of dummy site were evolved: day dummies (‘K’ sites) and night dummies (‘Q’ sites). ‘K’ sites were built a few miles from the genuine airfield and needed a lot more work: ten dummy aircraft, worn tracks, disturbed areas made to look like bomb and petrol dumps, an air sock and machine gun post. These were manned by up to twenty men, part of whose job was to move the dummy aircraft to imitate activity. ‘Q’ sites were more successful, and simply used lighting effects devised by the studio technicians. This included red lamps to indicate high buildings and other obstructions, and a car headlamp that could mimic a taxiing aircraft.
The success of the dummies was difficult to quantify but they became the stuff of legend. There were stories of ‘Q’ sites being so effective that RAF pilots actually tried to land on them, or ground staff erupted in panic when enemy bombers loomed.
‘Sir, we are being attacked!’ radioed one flight sergeant as the Luftwaffe strafed his site.
‘Splendid, Sergeant, good show.’
‘But Sir! We need fighter cover! They’re wrecking my best decoys!’6
It sounds too good to be true, but that didn’t matter. Dummies and decoys were an exercise in artistic licence.
‘It is not necessary in creating a dummy town to er
ect a whole town,’ Joe advised. ‘The carefully considered use of smoke screen over a fairly large area with dummy houses and a few prominent buildings, showing deliberately in places, would give an excellent impression of a town in process of being camouflaged.’7 Similarly, the lighting of a city or industrial centre could be recreated through simple techniques. Strobe lights could give the impression of welding (at a foundry) or recreate sparks coming off the tracks (as in areas where trams were used). A pool of water with a standard lamp hanging over it might be used to look like a reflection coming off a nearby river or lake.
RE8 had taken on a Captain Berry, who now made fakery his speciality: ‘He would plan and set up various frameworks and lighting systems which would simulate faulty black-out, doors opening and shutting, the dim, hooded lights of a railway siding and other evidences of the situation of a large or important factory,’ recalled Sayer. ‘In actual fact, of course the real factory was three or four miles away and Berry’s little contraptions were set up in the open country with, so I suppose, a couple of heroes sitting in a small, lonely hut ready to press the button that put the circuits in action if a raid was imminent, with the object of attracting all the bombs intended for the real target.’8
But decoys were no use once bombing had begun, and decoy fires were set to mislead bombers further. These were called ‘Q’ fires or ‘SF’ sites (‘Special Fire’). ‘Normally a “Q” fire should be about one mile from the installation and must be about 800 yards from any habitation . . . The decoy fire is lit after bombs have been dropped in or near the parent, whether or not fires are started, with the intention of drawing off further attack.’9 The hope was that subsequent waves of bombers would be misled and drop their bombs on fires ignited several miles away. By 1941 the country was dotted with decoy sites. Cities, factories, oil terminals, ports and airfields all had their decoys.