by Philip Eade
When Evelyn sent his mischievous friend Ann Fleming a copy, she telegraphed back: ‘Presume Ivor Claire based Laycock dedication ironical Ann.’ Evelyn’s response was: ‘Your telegram horrifies me. Of course there is no possible connexion between Bob and Claire. If you suggest such a thing anywhere it will be the end of our beautiful friendship … For Christ’s sake lay off the idea of Bob = Claire … Just shut up about Laycock, Fuck You, E Waugh.’76
The violence of Evelyn’s reaction indicated to many people that he had been rumbled, and as Beevor reasonably remarked, his subsequent diary entry hardly dispelled the suspicion: ‘I replied that if she breathes a suspicion of this cruel fact it will be the end of our friendship.’77 However since then a substantial body of contrary evidence has been excavated from scattered military archives by the Waugh scholar Professor Donat Gallagher and now several other key documents – including a previously unseen memoir by Bob Laycock – have come to light that go a long way towards refuting the accusations against Evelyn and his military mentor. So it is worth re-examining what happened after Evelyn and Laycock reached the Creforce cave on the afternoon of 31 May.
* * *
When they got there they found General Weston in charge, Freyberg having left the island by flying boat the previous evening. As Laycock recalled in his memoir, Weston seemed to be in extremely low spirits and warned them that both ammunition and food were in very short supply. Laycock reassured the general that his commandos had been trained to forage and that, having picked up countless rounds abandoned during the retreat, they also had more ammunition than they could possibly shoot off. They left the cave with orders which Evelyn later recorded in the Layforce war diary: ‘Final orders from CREFORCE for evacuation (a) LAYFORCE positions not to be held to the last man and last round but only as long as was necessary to cover withdrawal of other fighting forces. (b) No withdrawal before order from H.Q. (c) LAYFORCE to embark after other fighting forces but before stragglers.’78
That evening Laycock was again summoned to Weston’s cave and ‘found him looking more utterly dejected than I can describe’. Weston was due to leave in a few hours by aeroplane and, as Laycock recalled:
He looked at me without appearing to see me for a moment or two and then said very slowly and very quietly: ‘I am now going to say something which, even in my most ghastly nightmare, I never dreamed that I could say to a British officer on the field of battle. Take down this order.’ I turned to Freddy [Graham] who produced a notebook and pencil. Again in a voice so subdued that we could hardly hear him General Weston started to dictate. ‘From GOC Crete to Remnants Creforce. You will provide yourself with a white flag. Tomorrow morning at first light you will seek out the Commander of the German forces and surrender to him.’
When he had finished, Freddy handed the message to me. I gazed at it for some time before asking Weston whether he would consider it very insubordinate if I flatly refused to obey it.
Laycock pointed out that his commandos had plenty of fight left in them and suggested to Weston that either he could stay and organise guerrilla warfare in the hills, which some of his commandos eventually undertook on their own initiative, or he could evacuate as many of his brigade staff and men as could get down to the beach in time. After some thought Weston told Laycock that the second alternative seemed more likely to pay dividends for the future war effort. The general also took account of the fact that the Germans appeared to be ‘making no attempt to give us the coup de grace’, as Laycock wrote, and therefore as far as he was concerned ‘the responsibility of Layforce to provide a rearguard to a force which was due to surrender in a few hours time had lapsed’.79 By his own account, Laycock was thus authorised to delegate the responsibility for surrendering, a task which he initially assigned to Lieutenant-Colonel Colvin but which was eventually undertaken by a more senior New Zealander.
Beevor later accused Laycock of lying about his authorisation to evacuate, apparently overlooking the fact that General Weston recorded in his dispatches that he had sent for Colvin to make the surrender, thus effectively corroborating Laycock’s testimony that he had been given permission to go. Freddy Graham recalled the circumstances of the crucial last meeting with Weston rather differently, however the conclusion was essentially the same – that Laycock was at liberty to evacuate his brigade headquarters along with as many of his men as he could muster. It is unclear whether Evelyn was at the same meeting, however in his private diary he later recalled that Weston ‘had at first charged Bob with the task but later realised that it was foolish to sacrifice a first-class man for this and chose instead Colvin … Weston said that we were to cover the withdrawal and that a message would be sent us by the embarkation officer on Sphakia beach when we could retire.’80
In the event no message arrived and sometime after midnight Laycock grew concerned that time was running out for his commandos to make it from their various rearguard positions to the beach in time. He thus took Evelyn and Graham and hurried to Sphakia to try and find the beach officer, but the officer had already left by flying boat along with Weston and the rest of the Creforce staff at 11.50 p.m. Laycock now took matters into his own hands and sent Evelyn’s batman, Tanner, as a runner with orders to his troops protecting the perimeter to withdraw.
By his own account, Evelyn meanwhile ‘rescued a party of Greek boatmen whom the Australians wished to shoot as spies’ and, deciding that there was nothing more they could do, he and Laycock and the rest of Layforce brigade HQ embarked in a small motor boat and boarded the destroyer Kimberley, which would be the last ship to leave at around three o’clock in the morning.
Evelyn later wrote in the Layforce diary: ‘On finding that the entire staff of Creforce had embarked, in view of the fact that all fighting forces were now in position for embarkation and that there was no enemy contact, Col. Laycock on own authority, issued orders to Lt-Col. Young to lead troops to Sphakion by route avoiding the crowded main approach to town and to use his own personality to obtain priority laid down by Div. orders.’81 In his Spectator piece Beevor wrote: ‘It would be hard to compress more distortions of the truth into a single sentence.’82 Yet everything that Evelyn recorded seems to have been perfectly correct. There was no enemy contact because the Germans chose to fight during the day and rest at night and so fighting had stopped at 8.45 p.m. Beevor contends that Evelyn’s most serious fabrication was the assertion that ‘all fighting forces were in position for embarkation’, given that by Beevor’s reckoning neither the Australian 2/7th Battalion nor the Marines, both of which had priority over Layforce, had then reached the beach. However both these units arrived at the entrance to the small beach before Laycock issued his orders to withdraw, only to find their way blocked by a combination of violent rabble and overzealous Movement Control officers. The time can be fixed because one of them recalled hearing General Weston’s Sunderland take off soon after they got there.83 Most of Layforce’s troops found their way similarly blocked in the narrow sunken path to the beach. The few commandos who did manage to get away had hurried from the far western perimeter and made it onto the beach via a far less crowded side lane. The first 120 of them clambered aboard the last landing craft to leave, at 2.30 a.m.84
The fact that around 550-higher priority Australians and Marines failed to get away despite having reached the shore at around the same time owed far more to the complete breakdown in organisation than any supposed queue-barging by Layforce’s commandos. The total taken off that night was 1,000 fewer than the planned 5,000 and numerous testimonies tell how the last landing craft were loaded with any soldiers to hand, including a great many who were not designated fighting troops. By all these accounts it seems most likely that, had the commandos not boarded when they did, their places would have been taken by lower-priority troops. Had there been better organisation many more fighting troops would have got off, including the Australians and the Marines, however that was hardly Bob Laycock or Evelyn Waugh’s fault.
Freddy Graham later
told Michael Davie that Evelyn had never so much as hinted that he thought Laycock should have stayed behind on Crete ‘perhaps because he [Evelyn] had a personal horror of being captured!’.85 Evelyn’s strong aversion to the idea of being taken prisoner was also attested to by Laycock, who recalled Evelyn telling him that he was ‘determined not to suffer the ignominy of capture’ and wanted to ask a padre whether it would be considered suicide if he drowned in an attempt to swim back to Egypt.86 Their evacuation removed the necessity for this drastic action, however Evelyn was evidently not entirely happy as they embarked on the last ship to leave the island, as Laycock recalled: ‘By the look on his face at the time I gathered that Evelyn believed this to be a dishonourable thing to do though it made sense to me for, at least, we lived to fight another day.’87
But given time for reflection, the moral rightness of their departure became less clear to Bob Laycock too:
Was I right in using arguments which influenced Weston to countermand his original orders? Should I, personally, have embarked that night knowing that nearly three-quarters of my command was still ashore? Probably not. There is much to be said in support of the principle that the Captain is the last to leave the sinking ship. At the time, however, my motive seemed reasonable enough and I am confident that my Brigade Staff, with the possible exception of Evelyn, heartily agreed with my contention that we would be more use to our country by returning with the remnants of Nos. 7, 50 and 52 Commandos to rejoin Nos. 8 and 11 in Egypt than by spending the rest of the war in a prisoner of war camp. Once the order to surrender was given I maintained that every able-bodied man who succeeded in getting back to Egypt had done the right thing. ‘Qui s’excuse s’accuse.’ I have never been happy about leaving Young and his gallant men behind.88
Evelyn’s violent response to Ann Fleming and the apparently incriminating reference in his diary to ‘this cruel fact’ was possibly his way of acknowledging that the discreditable flight of Ivor Claire did in some way embody his remembered sense of moral unease and uncertainty during their evacuation from Crete. At the same time he still hero-worshipped Bob Laycock as the commander par excellence, besides being a steadfast friend and supporter. Evelyn was doubtless therefore genuinely appalled that a notorious gossip such as Ann Fleming might start putting it about that Laycock’s evacuation from Crete was equivalent to that of Claire, who had deserted his men and contrived to get himself evacuated contrary to orders to fight until the last man and then surrender.
In Officers and Gentlemen, the character most like Laycock is Tommy Blackhouse, who falls down a companionway on the way out to Crete and is thus saved him any responsibility for the ensuing debacle. Ivor Claire, meanwhile, contained elements of several members of 8 Commando’s ‘White’s Club gang’, none of whom were with them on Crete. According to Laycock, Claire’s numerous apparent models included Eddie Fitzclarence, Bones Sudeley, Peter Beatty, Randolph Churchill, Philip Dunne and Peter Milton.89
If Evelyn later felt ashamed over what he called ‘my bunk from Crete’, there was doubtless also an element of guilt about the fact that so many – including most of Layforce’s commandos – had been left behind to surrender. Others who got away felt much the same way. There was also a feeling that he had taken part in a military disgrace, and a deep sense of disillusionment at the way the Allies as a whole had capitulated so tamely when the island could and should have been held. As Beevor himself neatly summarised it: ‘The loss of Crete was the most unnecessary defeat in that initial period of Allied humiliation at the hands of Hitler’s Wehrmacht.’90
Christopher Sykes remembers Evelyn telling him shortly afterwards that he ‘had never seen anything so degrading as the cowardice that infected the spirit of the army; said that Crete had been surrendered without need; that officers and men had been hypnotised into surrender by dive bombing’. Tanner, too, told Beevor that ‘it struck me that everyone was being cowardly, no-one was moving as a military unit, everybody was out for himself’.
Antony Beevor is an outstanding and very readable military historian, however his case against Bob Laycock and Evelyn Waugh is highly dependent on supposition, much of which is refuted by evidence that has come to light since he wrote his book. In any event, for whatever reason, it appears from the transcript of his interview with Evelyn’s batman Ralph Tanner that he had already made up his mind about the queue-jumping before he spoke to the witness who, one would think, was reasonably well placed to tell him what happened. ‘There’s no question that Laycock was a very brave man,’ Beevor said to Tanner during the conversation, ‘but there’s no doubt about it, he tried to get out before they were supposed to, and tried to get as many of Layforce off as he could, but they were very much jumping the queue, in front of the Australians and the Marines.’91
It is perhaps telling that in her own fine biography, Selina Hastings mistook this quote as having come from Tanner and cited it in support of Laycock and Evelyn’s supposed misdeeds. The shorthand typist had begun transcribing the theory advanced by Beevor during his conversation with Tanner with a capital ‘T’, short for ‘The’ (‘The controversial area is …’) as opposed to ‘Tanner’ as Selina Hastings presumably thought. The slip is understandable given that Tanner said nothing in the whole interview to imply that Laycock and Waugh had acted in any way improperly or irresponsibly. In answer to the suggestion that Evelyn falsified the Layforce diary, Tanner said: ‘As far as I knew, all Evelyn Waugh’s comments in his diary were accurate.’92
Neither was there any accusation of wrongdoing from the Layforce officers who were left behind, Colonel Young saying he was ‘strongly of the opinion’ that Laycock going was ‘justified’ and ‘required’. The official British ‘Narrator’ of the campaign, Colonel E. E. Rich, recorded that ‘Layforce was ordered late in the evening to embark’ and regretted the failure of them all to ‘reach the boats’.93 The Narrator’s report is especially significant as it was submitted to all senior officers for their comments. The Inter-Service Committee report under Brigadier Guy Salisbury-Jones said much the same, amid some very blunt criticisms of senior officers. It is also hard to believe that Laycock would have gone on to the plum wartime jobs that he did had there been any suspicion regarding his actions on Crete hanging over him.
* After their first encounter, in 1931, staying with the Brownlows at Belton, Evelyn whimsically told Maimie Lygon that ‘there was a pretty auburn-haired girl called Brendan Bracken dressed up as a man’ and that he could not resist sleeping with her (Christopher Sykes, Evelyn Waugh, pp. 113–14). However much Evelyn subsequently owed to Bracken as a fixer, he always thought him a preposterous fraud and, later feeling let down, used him as the basis for the obnoxious Rex Mottram in Brideshead Revisited.
* Heir to an estimated £45 million, including England’s largest country house, Wentworth Woodhouse, Viscount Milton was later romantically linked to the widowed Marchioness of Hartington, the former ‘Kick’ Kennedy, sister of the future President J. F. Kennedy. In 1948 they were both killed when the plane in which they were travelling crashed in France.
* Although she lived for barely twenty-four hours, Mary had the distinction of being the only one of Laura’s children who was breastfed, the doctor having said that that was her only hope. Perhaps because of the trauma of losing her, Laura later remembered that her daughter had lived for a week, but Evelyn’s diary appears to refute that.
18
Head Unbloodied but Bowed
With so many of Layforce taken prisoner on Crete, the unit was soon disbanded and at his own request Evelyn rejoined the Royal Marines. His route back to England avoiding U-boats again took him via Cape Town, then across the Atlantic to Trinidad, up the American coast and across to Iceland before finally reaching Liverpool in early September 1941. He put the two-month trip to use writing Put Out More Flags, a riotous satire chronicling Basil Seal’s non-military adventures during the Phoney War which seemed to capture the zeitgeist better than any of his books since Vile Bodies in 1930, albeit whi
le suffering from similar defects of disjointedness. Although Evelyn dismissed it in a letter to his father as ‘a minor work dashed off to occupy a tedious voyage’, it promptly sold 18,000 copies early the next year, despite wartime paper restrictions.
Less than a month after Evelyn got back to London, his brother Alec left for Syria on a two-year posting as publicity agent to General Spears which, as Evelyn told Laura, ‘is sad for my parents & for me as it means I now have them on my conscience’.1 At the age of seventy-five and in frail health, Arthur Waugh felt particularly forlorn at the prospective departure of his favourite son, fearing that he might never see him again. In this rare instance he was relieved when Evelyn rang to invite himself to lunch on the day Alec left, recording in his diary that ‘as it turned out it was a very good move, as he was amiable and cheerful and helped to stave off the anxiety of Alec’s departure. He and Evelyn left us at 4 p.m. It was a ghastly wrench to say goodbye, especially as he was so kind and gentle. But his taxi vanished through the drive and we were left sorrowing.’2
Alec caught a sleeper to Glasgow that evening after a small leaving party in his flat, with champagne and sandwiches made by his mother. Evelyn initially declined his brother’s invitation as he had just been given clearance from Brendan Bracken to do his piece about the Bardia commando raid for Life magazine and wanted to get it done before he rejoined the Marines. He was still struggling with it late the next evening and wrote to Laura that ‘everything I try to write comes out in clichés’.3 The finished article certainly has its Boy’s Own moments, however a greater difficulty for Evelyn was that Peters had syndicated it to the London Evening Standard without telling him and a melodramatic report by Beverley Nichols subsequently appeared in the Sunday Chronicle describing Evelyn as a ‘hard-bitten, sun-scorched Commando, with the dust of the desert in his eyes, and a rifle in his hand … The ex-dilettante, writing exquisite froth between cocktails, has proved one of the toughest of the lot … Few of us in the old days could have imagined Evelyn crawling up the escarpment at Bardia in the dead of night …’4